by Mei Lai Swan | Jan 5, 2016 | Uncategorized
Happy new year beautiful people!
After an inspiring 12 days assisting Tara Judelle on the second Embodied Flow™ 200hr yoga teacher training in beautiful Bali, I’m so excited to bring all that inspiration and love home and give you my first offering for 2016. Compassion. Love. Yoga. You got it.
with love,
Mei Lai xo
Cultivating Compassion – an Embodied Flow™ Yoga workshop
Saturday 16 January 2016, 12-2.30pm
Gertrude Street Yoga Studio, 202 Gertrude St, Fitzroy
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama XIV
This 2.5 hour Embodied Flow™ workshop offers a rich exploration of the heart of compassion through science, philosophy, meditation, backbends and arm balances.Unlock your curiosity. Discover your own magnificent heart. Understand the difference between compassion, empathy and sympathy. Learn essential tools for the practice of compassion on and off the mat – for your own peace and support, and for the love of all.
The essential way to begin a new year… with love and compassion.
$35 (20% discount for Gertrude Street Yoga Studio members)
Bookings required.
Please go to www.gertrudestreetyoga.com.au to book your place
About Embodied Flow™ Yoga
Combining hatha yoga, tantric philosophy and somatic movement exploration, the practice of Embodied Flow™ shines the light of awareness into the layers of our being, providing a deep sense of ease, strength and connectivity in the human form. This in turn, empowers you, the practitioner, to be your own greatest teacher as you expand, integrate and facilitate awareness in your entire body-mind.
by Mei Lai Swan | Sep 14, 2015 | Uncategorized
This is a straight from the hips offering for those who love yoga, who want to know more, and who sense that it is a path of endless discovery. Because it is.
This A to Z of Yoga is hardly definitive. It is an invitation. I hope you will be delighted and inspired to dive deeper into your own journey of yoga as a fearless adventurer, a pioneer into the frontier of the incredibly unique and unfolding experience that is you.
B is for Body, but…
But what? It’s kind of obvious in our body-conscious society that yoga is about the body, right. It’s now one of the most popular forms of exercise in the West. It’s a great way to build strength, flexibility and vitality, which also improves our mental and emotional wellbeing; and even better, it has the extra perks of ‘spiritual fitness’.
But… it runs so much deeper than that. The body really is the vehicle for awakening. This is the radical teaching of Tantra, that emerged in India only around the 5th century (remember that ‘classical’ yoga was birthed from around 500-200BC).
Departing from the dual split between matter and spirit that was the hallmark of the ancient Vedic traditions, Tantra offered a radical acknowledgement of the body, this human form, as an aspect or an expression of the divine. In Tantra, there is no separation between matter and spirit, mundane or divine. So this human body – that is both clumsy and agile, that feels aches and ecstasy, that we worship when it is slim and toned and curse when it is overweight or misshapen – is the divine form we have for experiencing and discovering life, and for awakening into all that we can possibly be.
In the words of Eckhart Tolle, “You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while.”
To fully awaken into this realization starts right here, in your human form, in your body. The body is the vehicle for awakening.
This is what my pioneering teachers Tara Judelle and Scott Lyons see as the underlying principle of a genuine modern yoga practice focused on awakening (check out Embodied Flow Yoga).
It is an invitation to become ‘somanauts’ – explorers into the inner world of our very own body-mind, deep into our own experience. To not only move the outer form of the body, but to really feel and sense inside the body with the fullness of our awareness, to discover its sensations and bring alive the consciousness of our tissues, our organs, our bones, our very cells.
Why? To discover life, to discover self, to understand and experience more of this awe-inspiring reality, to become awake, literally, in all the cells and fibres of our being.
Fortunately for us, we not only have the ancient and evolving tools of yoga, but also the incredible discoveries of science (see the video link below, for example), and new forms of movement and somatic exploration such as Body Mind Centering to add to our toolbox of practices of awakening – our practice of Yoga.
Hungry for more and ready to be awed?
And, here are a few more B-words to add to your yoga lexicon. Let these words take you down the rabbit hole of your own research, exploration, and contemplation.
B is for: breath, bhakti, Body Mind Centering (BMC), bandha, Bhagavad Gita, buddhi.
by Mei Lai Swan | May 28, 2015 | Uncategorized
Dear friends,
Greetings from beautiful Bali!
…where I am in the second week of a month-long intensive Embodied Flow™ yoga training with my incredible teachers Tara Judelle and Scott Lyons. While intensives often conjure up the image of physical and mental exhaustion, and whilst our days are certainly long and full, the work is so rich, so deep, so authentic and so playful, that each day is a pure joy. Each morning starts with contemplation, journalling, meditation, and an asana practice exploring different systems/tissues of the body-mind – we dive into the felt sense of the organs, the glands, the bones, the cells, and allow movement and the poses to be guided by that felt sense. It is a practice that is at once exciting, challenging, confounding, and revelatory. The mid-morning and afternoon sessions of this ‘Mind’ module are spent exploring somatic psychology – individually, in pairs, small groups, and the larger group. We have been delving into embryology, developmental and childhood patterns, the role and nature of ‘stories’ or narrative, understanding and working with emotions from a somatic perspective, and so much more… needless to say, I am as happy as a pig in mud!
Embodied Flow™ is an approach to yoga developed collaboratively by Tara and Scott, through their personal journeys and extensive experiences with yoga, tantric philosophy and practices of awakening, Body-Mind Centering, somatic psychology, and a wide array of other spiritual and therapeutic practices. First and foremost, it is an approach to the art of genuine, authentic self-inquiry – which is really the essence of Yoga. It invites us into the rich landscape of ‘unknowing’, unites scientific and spiritual inquiry, and offers a direct path into some of the most esoteric practices and philosophies of true tantra, which offers a non-dual understanding of life and consciousness.
We start here, at the highest teaching of the Shiva Sutras: “Caitanyam atma” – the independent state of supreme consciousness is the nature of everything… and then we dive in deep.
Asana is there, to be sure, but it takes its rightful place as one amongst the myriad of practices that are available to us in the path of awakening – yet it also flowers through the expansion of rich somatic explorations, or what might be called “embodied anatomy”. The ultimate aim is the knowing of self, of awakening, and of true freedom.
And I am so excited to be exploring and sharing these teachings with you: I will be dipping back into Melbourne briefly in June, and offering a 5-hour Embodied Flow™ workshop at Gertrude Street Yoga on Sunday June 21st (yes, a winter solstice special!). If your curiosity has been ignited, I’d be thrilled to have you come and play, explore, and discover together…
Please visit here for full workshop details.
In the meantime, wishing you warmth, joy, and blissful discoveries in your yoga journey.
With love,
Mei Lai xo
by Mei Lai Swan | Jan 26, 2015 | Uncategorized
I recently returned to Melbourne from 4 intensive weeks of advanced yoga teacher training in Bali with the formidable team of Tara Judelle and Scott Lyons. Dubbed “The Embodied Science of Yoga”, the training was Tara and Scott’s first official offering of Embodied Flow – call it a style, a school, a practice, a method… it’s a term that captures a means of inquiry using the art of yoga, practices of embodiment (the felt sense of experience and anatomy, drawing on Body-Mind Centering and somatic psychotherapy), and science.
As we discovered together on the training, it is an offering of awakening practices that draws on both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. And to me, it felt like home: a weaving together of all the things I love, a freedom to ask and to explore all the questions I have (did someone say ‘infinite’?), and to perhaps even experience something that feels like an answer… But mostly just learning how to swim in the unknown and the unknowing, and learning how to have fun whilst doing it…
Acknowledging the importance of tried-and-tested tradition (ie. the lineages of yoga or other spiritual traditions), what I really awakened into on this training was an understanding of the constant evolution and expansion of consciousness, of knowledge, of awareness.
As universal and timeless as the teachings and practices of the traditions seem, what if what we knew then, and how we knew it, is not the be-all and end-all? What if our capacity to awaken is even greater now than it previously was? Or what if we can find new ways for awakening that are more accessible and more attainable for those of us living in the 21st century. After all, isn’t that what the Buddha did, for his own time?
So amidst all the practices, the explorations, the sensing of glands and organs, the dancing from bones, the videos of breathing lungs and glistening fascia, the discussions on evolution, the brain gym exercises, the creative expression, the expansive meditation and the effortless asana that emerges from being embodied, my one true gift from these four weeks was this simple question, emerging from deep wonder and reverence: What does this make possible?
My sense is that this is what today’s lycra-tight yoga really needs: a practice of genuine inquiry that engages the entirety of our body-mind-heart-soul, and calls upon us to be fearless in the asking of questions, in the discovery of our own experiences, and the diving into the challenge and freedom of not-knowing. And we need a physical practice of yoga that emerges from within, from a deeply felt sense of being and connecting and experiencing, rather than an exercise routine that makes us look good and think we are better.
So it is with a deep sense of honour and gratitude that I have been invited by Tara and Scott to officially offer Embodied Flow. For those of you who already know me, it does not look so different from my “regular” teachings. But as teaching emerges from experience, well, I can say that I have experienced and discovered so very very much over the last month or so, and I have been gifted additional tools with which to offer these experiences.
Scott demonstrating the ligaments of the spine
So if you are a curious and fearless inquirer, I invite you to come explore, play and discover with me. While all of my classes will continue with this flavour and experience, my Friday 5.30pm class at Gertrude Street Yoga Studio is now my official Embodied Flow class, starting in the first week of February. Woven into your asana practice you will find embodied anatomy, some developmental embryology and movement patterns, partner work, and plenty of questions for you to ask and experience. There will be time to break it down, explore, play and yes… maybe even dance. Because really, what is yoga?
With love and curiosity,
Mei Lai xo
FYI – Here is the official Embodied FlowTM description from Tara and Scott:
Embodied Flow™ is a continuum of movement and expression that draws from the discoveries of various hatha, tantric and somatic movement systems in order to experience yoga as a living art form. Embodied Flow™ provides the technology for a deep sense of ease, strength and connectivity in the human form. This in turn, empowers the practitioner to be their own greatest teacher as they expand, integrate and facilitate awareness in their entire body-mind.
For more information check out Tara’s website: www.tarajudelle.com
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