When I first started taking yoga classes, I noticed an immediate impact on my mental state. I thought often about how I wished I had the tools I was learning as a child. What a gift it is to have gone through yoga teacher training and to be able to pass on the wisdom of the age old practice of yoga to my children and the children in my community. There are certainly many more benefits to yoga than I have listed below but here are some of my top 5.

How often do we tell our kids, “you need to calm down”? Do they actually know what it means to be calm? Do they actually know how to calm their body and mind?

i’m focusing today on finding calm no matter what's happening in your life. Each of us has a story, and on any given day, some sort of "chaos" that we're dealing with. On our yoga mat, we can focus on finding our center and noticing what our body feels like when it's calm. We work on how to find this calm even in those noisy, hard, troublesome moments.

Cancel and Bless is about forgiving ourselves and others. Cancel and Bless is a mantra to try when our first thought after an interaction is not positive or charitable. When you feel a mean thought creep in or your mind going to a dark place, instead cancel the thought and send a blessing- cancel and bless. This works on ourselves too. When you leave an interaction second guessing yourself, employ cancel and bless. Let it go and move on!

In yoga philosophy there are 5 niyamas. Niyamas are tools to cultivate happiness and self-confidence. The first niyama, Saucha, literally means "cleanliness" or "purity". This is more than just keeping our yoga mat clean. When we think about cleanliness in our practice, it isn't about having the perfect alignment in a pose, but rather that our movement is intentional. In order to move cleanly, to not move in a routine way; we have to pay attention.

Santosha is the second of the Niyamas, the yoga philosophy we began to look at last week. Santosha literally means contentment.

On our mat we work to accept and celebrate our limitations. We ask ourselves, "What would contentment look like in this pose?"

“We set boundaries and sometimes we hit the mark and other times we miss and then we need to re-evaluate and set new boundaries.” Wise words from my husband last night during a conversation about how to set the appropriate screen time boundaries with our kids- both the time limit and what they are consuming.

Flexing our gratitude muscle. I’ll be using this theme for both my adult and kid’s classes. I’ve noticed how true it is that once you start a gratitude practice, you find even more things to be grateful for. In our yoga practice we’ll have the chance to flex some other muscles as well but we’ll also focus our awareness on being thankful for our breath, the stretch, and to ourselves for carving time out for yoga.

As my family and I gathered last night for our regular Sunday dinner, I talked with some of my family members about my aunt who was recently diagnosed with ALS and her journey ahead. We talked about the difficulties she is facing but also the strength and courage she has. We talked of the many accounts of others facing ALS who have found joy throughout such a devastating diagnosis.

I got this idea of being outranking doing from The Yoga Way to Radiance. This book is all about using a yoga mindset with our children. It has so many great ideas and tools for working with children but I also found many great tools for myself. Shakta Khalsa says, “We have mental habits of constantly busying ourselves. Our brains are like computers with too many tabs open.”

Today, I remember my grandma, Granny, (who her family affectionately called “The Beautiful Queen”). She was one of, if not THE, most amazing woman I have ever known. She made friends wherever she went and was always up for a good laugh. She was a great mother, wonderful grandmother, and excellent friend.

At this busy time of year, it is often so easy to get caught up in our haste to fit it all in and get it all done. This week I challenge to you find a time to embrace your inner child. Maybe through watching a child themselves as they encounter a holiday experience?

As we begin a new year and make new promises and resolutions, let's look at how we can do so with self-compassion. I've heard from many friends lately about anxiety- how it's impacting them and their children.

As we're still early in a new year and new decade many of us may be working towards building new habits. In yoga, habits are also known as samskaras. Our samskaras are our mental and emotional patterns that we resort back to over our lives. The way we move on our mat is a reflection of how we move throughout our lives.

I often notice how after a great yoga class I feel much more connected both to myself and to those around me. We'll explore that this week on the mat through breath work, meditation, and poses.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s life embodied yoga in many ways. Here are a few ways:

Oprah says, "Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you!"

As we think about passion, often questions arise like, How do we live in our passion? How do we cultivate passion in our lives? Or even, how do we know what we're passionate about?

This's weeks theme is all about noticing that there can be a space between stimulus and response and widening and embracing that space. Rather than floating through life, responding without thinking, this is a call to find some steadiness. Yoga gives us the capacity to recognize and be present to this space, and to understand that it is our way to a more content fulfilled life.

Loving kindness meditation, also known as Metta. asks us to send the following thoughts to ourselves and others in our lives.

May you be happy.

May you be healthy.

May you live with ease.

This week my message will be short and sweet. When we have tough days, it can often be tough to know what to write or to say. For this week, as I’m home dealing with sick kids, I’m just repeating the mantra in my head:

It’s All Temporary

I love the quote, "we can't breath deep and be anxious at the same time." This week, I'm working on noticing what my breath is like and working to slow the breath down as a way to calm the mind.