Category: Writings

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Weight Lifting With Healthy Alignment

Thursday, November 14, 3-4:30 PM PST

Location: Zoom

Cost: $25-$45 Sliding Scale.  No one turned away for lack of funds. Pay what you can.

Register:  tracy@fulllifeyogastudio.com

Description:

In this 1.5 hour workshop we will explore the latest research about the importance of weight bearing for bone health.   We will discuss the importance of considering alignment for the long-term health of your joints and soft tissue.  We can apply our new understanding of bio-tensegrity to how we lift weight, bear weight on our arms and legs in yoga, Pilates, weight lifting, foam roller work and other gym workouts.

During this workshop we will look at how to create stability and how to create space while lifting or bearing weight.  This will be an active workshop with some screen share imagery and discussion to better understand the body while we lift and bear weight.

If you have 1, 3, 5, 8 or 10 pound hand weights and strap on ankle weights or a weight bar at home, have those handy during the workshop.  If you do not have a weight bar, have a broom handle or long dowel to work on alignment you can later take to the gym.

 

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Expanding the Heart’s Horizons: Appreciation as a Key Practice to Awaken our Hearts

with Miyu Tamamura & Tracy Lease

Sunday, November 24, 1-4 PM

Mountain Stream Meditation Center

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

Melody Beattie

As a conscious preparation for Thanksgiving and the holidays, the focus of our retreat is to awaken our hearts through the practice of appreciation. As we practice noticing all the gifts of our lives, we will invite our heart-mind to linger in appreciation and joy. Through practice, we can cultivate our abilities to notice the good, the beauty, the kindness all around us. We can then practice gratitude and appreciation for our opportunities, life lessons and joys.

Our practices will be woven together with a nourishing blend of qigong, restorative yoga, breath work, heart-opening poems, meditation and the soothing and expansive sounds of crystal singing bowls. We will practice held by our half-day circle and the beautiful Mountain Stream Meditation Center.

All levels welcome!
*Pre-registration is required
*20 person limit
Suggested Dana or Donation:  $85 to $115 per person
This Dana is greatly appreciated and shared equally between Miyu, Tracy & Mountain Stream Meditation Center.

To Register email tracy@fulllifeyogastudio.com

 

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Listening into the Thundering Silence to Heal

Dear Full Life Friends,

Home. I love it here, especially in the spring time.  The Sierra Foothills take my breath away.  The beautiful dogwoods, like young women, standing quietly in spring kimonos, blooming pink and white in the forest.

The humming bird visiting the wisteria and then coming eye-to-eye with me, “Isn’t this day sweet and beautiful?!”  The turtle crawling out of the pond onto a warm pile of ponderosa pine needles– “ahhh, the sun, the sun!”

And then another cold day of rain and I am again sitting by a wood fire, writing.

I still carry Japan with me in my heart.  The reverence, the quiet, clean space, the generosity of kind people, the new tastes, beautiful gardens and cherry trees.  And I am enjoying home– sleeping cuddled up next to Izzy, the beautiful new green of the oaks, the cozy familiarity.  I enjoy my routine of teaching, planning, emailing retreat participants and students, inventing, dreaming, practicing, working in my yard, planning the next workshop.

And after time in community, I had a week to feel into the quiet when alone.  The deep quiet of the woods at night.  The stillness of early morning.

Sometimes I fill the quiet– with music, phone calls, busy thoughts, a full schedule.  And this week I found Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Silence by my bed and started reading.

“Mindfulness gives you the inner space and quietness that allow you to look deeply, to find out who you are and what you want to do with your life.”  With Thich Nhat Hanh’s words in my mind, I made the choice not to make certain phone calls.  I practiced yoga in silence.  I meditated.  And I felt my nervous system quiet.  I walked Izzy without my phone.  I took a nap with my phone far away– in the car in the garage.  I invited quiet.

Thich Nhat Hanh says there is a sound to no sound– the thundering silence. He says when you establish this silence, “you begin to hear the deepest kind of calling from within yourself.  Your heart is calling out to you.  Your heart is trying to tell you something…”

I instinctively believe he is right.  My mind often gets cluttered.  And when arriving home from travels, that is one possibility… catching up with emails, with chores, with friends, with worries… Could I feel into the thundering silence?

And inside that silence, I feel the hum that sang inside my heart in Japan, still vibrating.  And inside that hum is a moss garden with many people walking through in silence. Inside that hum stands Kannon, the Goddess of compassion. Inside that hum are moments:  I feel my laughter, inside the silence, as Karen and I receive our sixth of nine courses at dinner, I see her bright eyes and smile above her beautiful Yukata gown, hear our shared laugh of joy.  Inside my own thundering silence, memories and emotions flow, and they carry me back into this current moment, sitting on my yoga block meditating, staring out at the trees blowing in the storm.

All the wonders of life are already here. They’re calling to you.

As I write to you, I feel the warmth of the woodstove.  I am comforted by Izzy curled in a ball beside me, the sounds of my mother getting ready for bed in another room.  I think of all my friendships.  I feel them inside the silence too.

I think of the upcoming Big Springs retreat and the emails I exchanged with participants the last few days.  Four days of mindfulness, together, in the mountains in July.  We will practice this silence– we will have time to listen like Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Deep Listening.  We can listen for the five sounds that can heal the world.  There are still a few spots left if you would like to join us as we listen to these sounds:

The first is the Wonderful Sound, the sound of the wonders of life that are calling you.  This is the sound of the birds, of the rain…

The second is the Sound of the One Who Observes the World.  The sound of listening, of silence.

The third is the sound of om, of aum, the Brahma Sound.

The fourth is the Sound of the Rising Tide.  The sounds of the Buddha’s teachings, which can help to clear away misunderstanding.

The fifth is the Sound that Transcends All Sounds of the World.  The sound of impermanence.

I want to take more time during my days for silence.  In the silence I know I feel my mind, body and heart settle. And in the silence I feel gratitude for Miyu, our friendship and co-creations, for the wonderful communities we are sharing.  I feel grateful for Tom and Nadine lending me their truck last week, and feeding me delicious soup and sending me home with roses that smell divine.  I am thankful for my friend Carol, and her book, The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done, and her willingness to read excerpts and share the ongoing story after a potluck at my home this coming Saturday from 5 to 8 PM. You are all invited.  Respond to this email, if interested.

I want to listen– to the sounds of the birds and the rain… I don’t want them to just be background noise.  I want to really listen, just to them.  I want to listen into my own listening.  I want to listen to the lessons that come my way– through yoga, Qigong, mindfulness.  I want to hear, and better understand, the sound of impermanence.

My mom and I sat on the couch today, talking and sharing.  We are here, together, now.  And there is someone missing.  My dad isn’t here.  We are both learning to live without him.  This is part of impermanence.  And so today, I took my mom to dance.  In the past, Dad wouldn’t have wanted to go, and Mom would have stayed with him.  Today she came– and she danced a little, and watched all the beautiful moving bodies, and met friends.  Afterwards, smiling, she told me, “It is so nice to see where you go– you have been talking about dance for years.  And now I know where you swim too.  I’ll be able to picture it.”  And we get to know each other better.  Perhaps this is all part of the sound of impermanence– a stretching and opening movement into constant change.  I feel it all a little differently when I spend some of my time in silence.

With much love,

Tracy

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Move Slowly & Fluidly To Better Feel Compassion, Kindness & Generosity. We Are All One

Dear Full Life Friends,

I sit with Jan  in the cafe of the Ana Crowne Hotel, Kyoto after saying goodbye to the rest of our group.  She and I will leave tomorrow– a train to Osaka, a plane to San Francisco– we will travel 12 hours back through time and lose 4 hours somewhere along the way.

Time, what a strange ever-shifting concept.  Our 12 days feel like their own lifetime, full and rich with new tastes, textures and moments. We visited temples, gardens, museums, shops.  We learned about Kannon, the goddess of compassion and mercy– and were awed by her statues in temples– with her thousand and one arms and eleven faces, all offering compassion to those in need, in every direction.

We met Miyu’s eccentric, kimono-artist father in his studio where Jan modeled his beautiful, hand-crafted silk kimonos. She looked radiant in the array of colors and shades of silk and we imagined these as her wedding dress.  Afterwards, a cat lover, Miyu’s father showed us his cat tail windshield wiper on his car and we all laughed.

On our final day at Myoshin-ji, the Temple of the Enlightened Mind, we practiced Qigong, and then deeply rested in the middle of things to the vibrations of Miyu’s singing bowls, absorbing our last moments in the Big Heart Zendo.  We ate our final breakfast, shipped our big suitcases to the final hotel, gave thank you gifts to the staff of our inn, and then, toting our small bags, headed by train to the Ryokan Inn at Konosaki Hotsprings.

We settled into the pleasure of soaking in mineral waters that have been enjoyed by people for 1,300 years.  And after our nine course dinners of amazing delicacies of fish and steak and tofu and miso and a lovely variety of vegetables, including burdock, bamboo shoots and lotus root, we walked outside in our Yukata robes and Geta sandals (or our own shoes) to digest and enjoy the evening air before going to bed in our traditional rooms overlooking the beautiful gardens in the moonlight. The final night, we felt like royalty as young women came to help us dress in fancy Yukata gowns.  Then we fed the coy fish, laughed and took photos, reveling in the beauty and generosity of Japan.

It was so nice to spend time in a small town in the mountains, walking and riding a tram up to a temple whose care has been handed down through one family for three or four generations. A monk chanted for us and we each got to pinch some incense into the coals and make a prayer.  It was so heart-warming to watch each member of our group move up to the altar, pause for prayer, to see the incense lift skyward with the monk’s deep, resonant voice– both carrying our prayers. And then the matron of the temple served us a delicious cake and tea, so happy to see us enjoy her food, so happy to see her friend Miyu again.  Only later did we learn that she had baked us each a bag of several different treats and given us a calendar from the temple.  Generosity in Japan seems to know no bounds.

I am still not sure all the ways I have grown and changed on this trip.  I do know that I did awaken a little more each day.  I did grow and expand as I tried my hand at calligraphy with Miyu coaching– “It’s like Qigong, move slowly, fluidly.”  We painted the characters for peace and joy over and over again– our new friends coaching us and clapping at successes we couldn’t recognize.  To us our creations looked wobbly and off-kilter.  We had to be humble, kindergarteners all over again.  “Feel the peace before you start, feel the joy,”  Miyu instructed.  Calligraphy as meditation.

Each step of the way our hearts seemed to open more– to the experiences, to the people who so graciously helped and served us, to the beauty all around us.  We felt the presence of the Jizos, the stone statues of guardian spirits, of bodhisattvas, enlightened beings, who return to guide people on the path to enlightenment.  These small statues particularly protect children and travelers.  People tie little bibs around their necks to ask for their protection. When the bibs are red, like they are in Jori’s beautiful photo above, they offer their protection to unborn babies and children. People also leave the Jizos sweets, coins and flowers as they ask for protection for family members.  As travelers, we also felt thankful for these spirits who were along roadways and trails, and in small shrines throughout town, thankful they were watching out for us as we traveled through the mountains of Japan, closer to our plane trips home.

Our final night together, transitioning us back towards the west, Miyu took us to a lovely Japanese- Italian restaurant in Kyoto where again we enjoyed the beauty and tastiness of each elegant dish. And after dinner we wandered through this new neighborhood and into a Shinto Shrine lit by many lanterns.  We saw wooden hearts full of prayers and small rabbit figures. Nature and animals honored.  So much honoring. So many prayers.  So much compassion and gratitude.

My dear friend Miyu, “Arigato Goziamas,” thank you so much.  Bow, deep, low, full bow for all you have given us in this experience.

Kannon and the Shinto Shrines, the Jizos and the members of our group swirl together inside me, melding with the Qi and prana moving through us all– through the crane, the bear, the dragon and tiger, through the deer and the beautiful trees that help us to root and ground. Through one qigong form and then another. Through the ink of the calligraphy brush into joy and peace and each other. Through the cherry blossoms, the moss garden. Through writer and reader and all our loved ones.

As we end this trip, because of this loving group of humans, and the kind people we met in Japan, I feel hope for humanity.  We are one, we have the capacity to honor each other, we all felt it– and expressed it in our closing circle.

We are one across cultures and oceans.  And even as we face frightening conflicts around the globe– I believe we have the capacity to remember.

Denel Kessler, author of the Kyoto poem above, has been here.  In his poem the speaker feels it too.  We have the capacity to remember, to honor, to love.

We are one.

See you in class Tuesday, or at a future retreat or private session. And thank you once again for being a part of this growing Full Life community.

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You Are Invited to a Family Reunion– Get to Know Your Inner Core Muscles

How do I entice you into a workshop that reintroduces you to your inner core?  How do I express the importance, the deep meditation and awakening that can occur and will help keep you safe, balanced and moving with ease across our small, beautiful planet?

We are continually learning more about how the body moves, stabilizes, rests, activates, faces challenges, relaxes, sends messages through pain, handles injury, bounces back, heals, strengthens, speaks, dances, cartwheels, hikes up mountains, skis down snow-covered slopes~ to swim and snorkel in the ocean.  How this body laughs, breathes, lives fully.

More awakening can happen each day inside this beautiful inner landscape and the inner core is the molten center that holds it all together.

In yoga the core of the body has been addressed through the bandhas, the breath, balancing energy.  In Pilates we learn to lengthen the sleeve of muscles around the spine and articulate each bead in the necklace, feel a square of strength, move from the powerhouse.  In Qigong we learn the importance of breath, flow, space, stillness. The lower dantian draws our awareness into the red field of vibration.  From this battery our energy pulses outward again.  In all practices, we learn better how to listen inward to messages from our body.  We learn to feel the center, centered, grounded, rooted. We too grow upward from our roots like the daffodils and tulips. We recognize energy radiates outward from our core like our own pulsing sun.

Many of my longtime students continue to revel as they meet new muscles, new communities of tissue inside themselves.

“I finally feel that inner hug you have been talking about.”

“I didn’t know I had a back!”

“I have been doing this practice for years and have never felt the banks of my river before.”

“I didn’t know the muscles of the neck mattered, now I feel them and how they lengthen my spine.”

The inner core muscles are meant to activate support before the outer core muscles move you through space– lifting, twisting, pressing, pushing.  These muscles have the important job of stabilizing you for everyday movement.  But what happens if some of them don’t turn on?  What happens if postural imbalances tighten or over-activate one side or one muscle group and others turn off?  How do we bring balance back and awaken the full circumference, the whole family of the inner core? Let’s address these questions in this week’s workshop.

You are invited to the family reunion.

We will meet the transverse abdominis, the pelvic floor, the diaphragm, the front neck flexors, the multifidi.  We will say hello to them, feel for them, see them.  We will learn breathing and movement exercises to help activate this family of muscles.  And then we will move, tuning in to see if we can feel them turn on.  We will learn to be more subtle- so we don’t over-ride the inner core with the rectus abdominis, the obliques, the psoas, the erector spinae.  We will feel for, and get to know, these muscles too, their roles in the family.

Yes, we will breathe three-dimensionally and breathe out through the straw… and in this workshop we will take some time with these practices so we can really test if we are changing the shape of our spines when we activate the core this way.  We will work to activate the inner core and keep the outer core from over-riding the stabilizers.  This takes deep concentration– and with practice can help us to protect the spine as we move, lift, twist– enjoy our active bodies.

What we do consciously becomes unconscious.

Recognizing these muscles, feeling into the myofascial web, is empowering.  We learn more about this amazing logic puzzle of our own bodies.  And like Archibald Lampan found the grief and joy in the Voices of Earth, we can feel into the mysteries in the many voices inside our own bodies– and follow the paths of previous explorers into the stability created by the yoga bandhas, the power generated in the Pilates powerhouse, the grounded and spacious flow of Qigong rooted in a centered lower dantian.

Stability helps us to create balance, harmony.  Balance and harmony help us to create ease of movement, flow, grace.  Ease of movement helps us to experience joy.  I believe you can simultaneously feel the rooted cedar and the red tailed hawk gliding on air waves.  You can be both mountain and sky.  You can be the river water and the bedrock.

A strong balanced core makes stable strength and fluid grace possible.

I know it is hard to leave this beautiful  weather for an indoor Zoom workshop on a spring afternoon.  If you cannot join us, feel free to purchase the video of the workshop so you have the visuals, the explanations and the exercises to practice on a rainy day.  This work will help you to support a healthy spine, hips, shoulders and will contribute to balance and ease.

Hope you can join me this Wednesday, March 20th 3-4PM PST

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Honor the Changing Seasons with Body, Heart & Mind With Adam Stonebraker & Tracy Lease

 Join us in celebrating summer through qigong, sitting /walking meditation, and gentle yoga stretching. These practices all help us to cultivate joy and happiness. Join us for three hours to tend to the beautiful garden of your consciousness near summer solstice.

June 23rd,  1-4 PM
Mountain Stream Meditation Center
710 Zion Street
Nevada City, CA

No one is turned away for lack of funds.
Requested donation is sliding scale: $30-$100
This Dana is greatly appreciated and will be shared equally between Mountain Stream, Adam & Tracy.

We will practice inside and outside as weather permits.

To Register Contact juanita@mtstream.org

I would love to see you for this live celebration of summer and life!

 

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Half-Day Retreat Welcoming in the New Year

Relaxed & Awake: Welcoming In The New Year

Expanding Our Heart capacity through The Five Invitations

With Tracy Lease & Miyu Tamamura

Mountain Stream Meditation Center                                           

710 Zion St.   Nevada City, CA

January 14,  1-4 PM

*Pre-registration is required. Please register first before sending dana. Thank you!

20 person limit
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Suggested donation (dana): $75 – $115
(Dana is greatly appreciated and shared equally amongst MS, Tracy and Miyu).

To register and if you have any questions about the retreat, contact Tracy at: tracy@fulllifeyogastudio.com

Please send Dana to complete the registration:
By Credit Card:

Click Here to Use Credit Card with Square

 

By Check mail to:
Mountain Stream Meditation Center
Attn: R&A 1/14/24
PO Box 2510, Nevada City, CA 95959

When we bring our whole self forward, we include our brokenness. We make room for the blemishes as well as purity, strength as well as vulnerability, success as well as screwups.  Judgment focuses on what’s wrong; it feeds an “either/or” mentality.  Embracing wholeness is a loving act of reclamation, a “both/and” way of meeting life.”    Frank Ostaseski
We invite you to bring your whole-self to this retreat and, in doing so, to expand your heart’s capacity. Together we will greet the New Year, drop into our hearts, align with our intentions, and invite the gifts of the New Year to emerge from the inside and out.
This retreat was inspired by Frank Ostaseski’s book, “The Five Invitations: Discovering what death can teach us about living fully.”  The cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, Frank has paused on the precipice of death with more than a thousand people. From these experiences he learned what many, in those vulnerable moments, valued most in life. From these experiences Frank offers us five Zen-influenced invitations to help us live fully.
We will practice these “Five Invitations” in community, through the flow of Qigong and breath, various meditations, contemplations, and restorative yoga. These hours will be deeply supported by the therapeutic vibrations of crystal singing bowls and moments of silence.
No prerequisite is necessary to attend this retreat. You are welcome to read the book to deepen your experience. Or, perhaps the retreat will inspire you to read the book later. Regardless, everyone and all levels are welcome!
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Spine, Shoulders & Neck– Building Postural Awareness to Avoid or Relieve Back Pain

Wednesday, January  17, 3-4:00 PM PST

Location: Zoom

Cost: $25

Register:  tracy@fulllifeyogastudio.com

Description:

In this one hour course we will continue to relieve pain along the spine from the pelvis up into the neck.  We will evaluate postures, feeling  for shifts in our pelvis, spine, shoulder girdle and neck.  We will learn exercises that will help us stabilize the pelvis and balance strengthening long, weak muscles with stretching short, tight muscles so our bodies feel balanced and open.

We will play with the relationship between hips, shoulders and neck finding our tight places and our weak lengthened areas.  Then we will try on various exercises to help us build balance.  We will feel into what activation and release we can concentrate on in yoga poses, Qigong and Pilates exercises to bring harmony to the physical body.

We will learn to see how a postural shift in the hips can impact the thoracic spine of the rib cage and the cervical spine of the neck. We will learn cues that can help students place pelvis thoughtfully- helping them to align the diamond of the pelvic floor, and  postural awareness rings.

This will build on our last workshop while also standing independently.

Hope you can join me!

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Cool Yourself Off on a Hot Day with Sitali Breath Practice

Though the hottest part of summer may be over, the sun is still strong. If you are not able to dive into the ocean, or the mountain lakes that still contain snow islands, and you find yourself overheating during the day, you can always stop for a cool breath.

Yes, you read that right.  While it is important to hydrate, a cool breath can help relieve the heat in your body.  Try this, Sitali Breath:

Take a seat in the shade.  Make sure your body is comfortably upright and you have a natural lumbar curve.

If you can curl your tongue into a tube, do so, and with the end of this tongue-tube protruding slightly over your lower lip, take in a breath.

If you cannot curl your tongue, then simply place the tip of your tongue on the back of your top teeth and gums at the roof of your mouth. Take a breath, inviting the air in over the surface of your tongue.

Your mouth functions like a swamp cooler~ as the air blows over the moist surface of your tongue, it cools.  That cool air is drawn into the body.

After your first cooling breath, exhale slowly through your nostrils, inviting yourself to relax. Then, take another slow, cooling breath and another slow exhale through your nostrils.  Keep going for a few minutes.  Invite the cool air deep into the body to refresh and relax you. Then enjoy a cool glass of water or some delicious fruit.  Tune into the tastes, sounds and other sensations and enjoy these moments of self-care.

Yoga practice can be incorporated into moments of our day.  The root of the word yoga means to yoke together, unify.  We learn skills and then we begin to invite the practices to infuse our daily lives until all of our moments are the practice.

When we awaken to present moments: pause to hear the birds in the trees, feel the air, slow our breath, we live truly, in the here and now.  This present-moment living can help us to regulate our nervous and endocrine systems because we let go of the shadows of the past and the anxiety that may come with the unknowns of the future.

I have found myself adding little practices to my life lately.  I have felt busier than usual with workshop and retreat opportunities arising, and the planning that comes with this.  Something new! And while this is all very exciting, I can feel anxious about doing well.  But if I stop, sit down, breathe, and feel the moment, I can shed some of this anxious energy.  It’s like a breath of lemonade on a hot day…