Resilience can help us get through and overcome hardship. But resilience is not something we’re born with. It’s built over time as the experiences we have interact with our unique, individual genetic makeup. That’s why our individual responses to stress and adversity — like those from the COVID pandemic — can differ tremendously.

Hardships can be terrifying when you’re running away from them, and it can be so easy (almost natural) to feel ungrounded, fearful, or even paralyzed in the face of difficult emotions and life circumstances. But have you ever noticed that, the more you turn and face those fears, the more they lose their power? It’s like going on a camping trip and being terrified of the dark and the noises in the woods. The moment you shine a torch and look again, you realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.

The Mountain Meditation is a mindful visualization that is designed to cultivate stillness and calm, and to connect with our inner strength and stability in the face of internal and external challenges. It encourages us to seek inner stillness and peace in the face of everyday life and its challenges.

When it comes to meditation, mountains have a lot to teach. They have archetypal significance in all cultures: they are sacred places… they embody the contradictions of dread and harmony, harshness and majesty… they are the wombs of visions and revelations, where people have always sought spiritual guidance and renewal.

In this meditation practice, we borrow these wonderful archetypal qualities of mountains and use them to bolster our intentionality and resolve, to hold the moment with an elemental purity and simplicity. The mountain image, held in the mind's eye and in the body, can freshen up our memory of why we are sitting in the first place, and of what it truly means, each time we take our seat, to dwell in the realm of “pure being” and “non-doing.”

Navigating grief is hard, even without a global pandemic, and it’s certainly that much harder with it. Grief is a normal response to loss during or after a disaster or other traumatic event. It can happen in response to loss of life, as well as to drastic changes to daily routines and ways of life that usually bring us comfort and a feeling of stability.

Grieving the loss of a loved one while coping with the fear and anxiety related to the COVID-19 pandemic can be especially overwhelming. The pandemic is forcing many of us to change the way we go about our daily lives. With those changes, some of us are experiencing a wave of losses: economic, social, physical and emotional. For some, these losses may build up and lead to feelings of grief.

During the pandemic, the family and close friends of a person who died of COVID-19 may experience stigma, such as social avoidance or rejection. Stigma hurts everyone by creating fear or anger towards other people. Some people may avoid contacting you, your family members, and friends when they would normally reach out to you.

Dina will explain the stages of grief and share a nourishing meditation practice to tap into your healing wisdom, find courage in the face of suffering, and uncover inner resources to deal with grief.

It’s easy to fall into the winter blues when temperatures plummet and it’s dark and dreary outside. You might find that you start feeling lethargic, and it might become harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning.

These are all symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, a seasonal form of depression triggered by the lack of sunshine in the wintertime. The source of the problem comes from a disturbance in your body’s circadian rhythm that changes your body’s levels of serotonin and melatonin.

Yoga practice is a great way to combat SAD by tapping into the mind-body connection. It is an incredible tool to reset the nervous system and help release tension and stress by increasing your serotonin levels. If you have a case of the winter blues, this Fire It Up Flow might be just what the doctor ordered.

Reignite your power with this fiery, all-systems-activated Vinyasa yoga flow. This class gets moving rapidly to clear energy and stoke the internal fire. Expect strong abdominal work, plenty of chair poses, and some swift Vinyasa. It’s a perfect opportunity to fire your winter blues away and kick lethargy in the a$$!

We are living amid the first global mass trauma event in several decades. It's arguably the first of its kind since World War Two, and almost certainly the first of such severity in your lifetime.

Trauma is a far subtler concept than many of us realize. It isn't just a word for something extremely stressful. It doesn't always come from short, sharp shocks like car accidents, terrorist attacks, or firefights. And, trauma isn't the same thing as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

What trauma is about is events and their effect on the mind. But what separates it from something merely stressful is how we relate to these events on a deep level of belief.

Trauma can be understood as a rupture in "meaning-making," where the way you see yourself, the way you see the world, and the way you see other people, are all shocked and overturned by an event. Stress accumulates and the nervous system is forced on high-alert.

While yoga isn’t the first-line treatment for trauma, it definitely helps people to acquire a better habit of self-regulation and calm. Yoga has been proven time and again to have a positive impact on a variety of psychological and physiological conditions. It cultivates mindfulness through breathing exercises, intentional relaxation, and body movement.

In addition to helping certain medical conditions and somatic dissociation, yoga has also been shown to alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and eating disorders.

The Heal Yourself Flow is a gentle and comprehensive practice, in which we will utilize Yogic intentional breathing exercises to help gain control of emotional regulation, calm the sympathetic nervous system, trigger other biochemical and physiological relaxation mechanisms in the body, and improve our self-concept and coping skills.