Move into Happiness
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51:55Pump Up Your Prana
Get up and get moving with this soul sweat extravaganza! Stretch your body and clear your mind with these prana (life-force) filled moves that are made to awaken your energy! This is an exhilarating yoga class and dance experience, called Shakti Dance, which enhances coordination, increases your dynamic flow of energy, and awakens your creative spirit! A perfect relief from a hectic workday or an intense week. Open to all levels, this class will move you to flow into your body bringing regeneration, enhancing coordination, increasing stamina, and giving you a whole new repertoire of movement. Follow step by step dance movements that target the shoulders, hips, back, and other tight areas that may hold stress. The class is taught in 8 phases which gradually add layers to connect with your dynamic flow of energy and self-expression. Finishing with a supreme relaxation and balancing movement meditation to develop inner peace and harmony. Dance experience not necessary. Hit 'play' on this playlist
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55:35Buddha's Teachings: Yoga for Equanimity
This gently flowing yoga and Qi Gong class explores the fourth of the brahmavihārās, or boundless states, known as upekkha, or equanimity. This fourth abode is often the most misunderstood, as equanimity can easily be written off as indifference and not caring. The Buddha’s teachings suggest this is far from the truth. His description of upekkha is that it is a perfect, unshakable balance of heart and mind, rooted in insight. When we cultivate equanimity, we cultivate a state of being even minded and calm. In this state, we learn to trust, meet and respond to life in ways that let us care deeply and fully about what truly matters. We make room for joy, pain, sorrow and challenges. We learn to meet life in ways that neither opposes nor demands more from it, and can remain steady, trusting and open to whatever grim corners we may turn in life.
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45:04Slow Flow for Patience
This mindfully-paced all-around vinyasa flow yoga class practice helps us to work with the concept of patience to be able to sit with restlessness and emotional reactivity in your body and mind both on and off the mat. Expect to practice in a slower way than you might be used to, to slow down your practice to physically connect to your breath by first opening up space in the side body and then developing the pause between inhalation and exhalation as we move in rhythm. How can you learn to press the pause button? How do you create a space to pause between action and reaction, so that we can act with greater wisdom and patience with one another as well as with ourselves?
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55:05Buddha's Teachings: Yoga for Sympathetic Joy
This yoga class focuses on the third aspect of the Buddha's teachings to awaken the heart, Mudita. Mudita means finding joy in the happiness and success of others. It is the third of four boundless states, or brahmavihārās. This well-rounded class has a particular focus on the hips and the hamstrings, two areas where many of us are tight due to either a sedantary lifestyle, or strengthening workouts. Being happy for others when they are happy are we are not, or they achieve things that we haven’t not the easiest practice. Indeed, ours is a world where comparison, judgement, envy and aggression are rife. Learning to be happy for someone when they are truly happy and shining usually requires a deliberate effort. When we can summon sympathetic joy, the rewards are magnificent and freeing. Through a cultivation of mudita, we can pull out the weeds of pettiness, envy and comparison. We become less selfish and self-centred, and grow into more tolerant, generous and compassionate individuals. Our actions can then create a chain-reaction, where a joyful and charitable heart ripples out into the world. You will just need a mat.
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38:24Slow Flow for Discipline
This all-around vinyasa flow yoga class will help you work with the concept of discipline that is 'not too tight/not too loose' that you can use to compassionately guide the intensity with which you practice. Expect to physically connect to backbends, standing balances, and leg flexibility while regulating energy and effort. How hard should you practise? How much should you push and when should you back off? Interesting questions to explore in this class and in all your yoga classes.
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01:02:04Buddha's Teachings: Yoga for Compassion
This yoga class focuses on cultivating a strong and resilient heart that awakens karuna, or compassion. It is the second of four boundless states, or brahmavihārās. Compassion means to be with another’s suffering. It is the opposite of cruelty. It can be conflated with pity, which it is not. Compassion is born out of a selfless desire to stand in solidarity with those who experience misfortune. Misfortune does not have to be starvation, physical pain and loss; it can be as simple as wanting something to be other than it is, which the Buddha described as creating clinging as well as a pushing away of experience. When we begin to cultivate compassion, we start with extending compassion towards ourselves. By forging self-compassion, we create a springboard for extending compassion towards others and all beings in the world. This well-rounded yoga class focuses on heart opening and brings in qigong movements.
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54:05Buddha's Teachings: Yoga for Loving Kindness
This is a practice centred around metta, which means goodwill, care, or loving-kindness. It is the first of four boundless states, known as the brahmavihārās. The brahmavihārās are the Buddha’s primary teachings on how we cultivate an awakened heart. In this yoga class, we’ll do some heart-focused practices and gentle movements (including some inspired by Qi Gong) to explore metta, which is the wish for true happiness that you can direct to yourself and towards others. In Buddhist teachings, metta is the foundations to our heart’s love and strength as it is what guided the Buddha along his path to care for a world that was in so much pain. As we learn to cultivate metta, we can learn to support our capacity to extend care to ourselves and the world, and send wishes for true happiness to all.
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38:56Slow Flow for Generosity
A beautiful all-round vinyasa flow yoga class to help you work with the concept of generosity, ensuring the benefits you receive from yoga are shared off the mat by those who are in need. Expect to physically connect with a feel-good practice for the back of your heart and shoulders, which we will feel as the muscles of embrace. Who do you practise for (beyond yourself)? How can you bring this intention into your embodied practice?
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44:25Slow Flow for Wisdom
A simple but beautiful slow vinyasa yoga flow. This all-around flow practice will help you work with the concept of wisdom and how it can lead you to decrease your suffering and connect you with your belief in basic goodness. Expect to physically connect with your heart while practising variations of the warrior poses reconceived to embody bravery, strength, and vulnerability. This is the first class in the Brave Yogi challenge series - this class addressing: Why do you practise? Why do you want to awaken? How can you embody that? Bring your whole heart and a block.
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51:03Kundalini Yoga to Elevate the Spirit
A Kundalini yoga class full of strong, repetitive movements to really get the body moving. A very energising, cardio-led yoga workout which will elevate your spirit; bringing feelings of happiness. You'll feel energised and ready for the day! The class ends with a long relaxation with a gong for extra relaxation.
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32:46Explore Your Power
Ready to advance your power vinyasa yoga? A more intermediate/advanced level yoga class focusing on balances, where you get to explore your power! You'll explore arm balances and firefly along with some lovely back bending. You'll need two bricks and possibly a strap.
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37:29Re-Bound
This well rounded, gentle flow yoga class brings in the joy, a perfect class to uplift if you're feeling a little low. We will, with care, bring some joy and feeling back into the body and this present moment as best as we can through opening up to breath and back-bending postures along with a few other energising surprises. You will need a blanket, and a brick or something like it, and a playful light attitude.
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15:23Positive Psychology Series (5): Creativity
In the final yoga class of the Positive Psychology Series, the sequence focuses on creativity. This is a beautifully creative and fiesty vinyasa yoga sequence with plenty of variations and dance-like movements to cultivate creativity. You will need a strap.
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09:54Positive Psychology Series (4): Gratitude
A short, easy to follow meditation class focusing on curating more gratitude for what we have versus longing for what we don’t, a very important characteristic to help cultivate positivity in our lives.
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30:16Positive Psychology Series (3): Resilience
A fun, fast, feisty vinyasa yoga class where we learn to build grit; the ability to get back up when you fall. Expect new and creative ways of dynamic sequencing, arm balances and inversions infused into this power flow. A great class to try something new and challenging! You're not looking to achieve perfect poses here, but to try to do what your body is able to do, and build resilience in the process. Do listen to your body though! If class is too fast-moving and feisty, and goes to poses which aren't suitable for you, take rest pose or listen to your body and modify the pose to bespoke the practice for your own body and capabilities.
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35:49Positive Psychology Series (2): Patience
Patience is one of the six character traits to focus on in positive psychology. This yoga class class features long hip opening holds interfused with some creative vinyasa and balance. A perfect class for those of us who are sedentary.
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28:57Positive Psychology Yoga (1): Zest
This is the first of Mercedes' Positive Psychology infused vinyasa yoga sequences! Zest is a way of approaching life - it's an energy but also a way of cultivating a positive approach to problems. This fiesty, fast and fun vinyasa flow is not for attaining each pose, but about keeping a positive outlook even through challenge. This yoga class leads to advanced arm balance s- perfect for a well-rounded, energy-filled start to the day. But do be careful and only practice within your body's limitations. Remember that this class is about working on your an approach to poses and building courage rather than achievement!
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30:41Yoga For Happiness (4): Kindness
In this gentle vinyasa yoga class, the focus is on ahimsa (non violence). In the body, we can work with soft negotiation rather than force or brutality. In the mind, we can be aware of the tone with which we speak to ourselves. Pay attention to what you ask of your body in today's practice; notice when you are forcing it to do something it doesn't want to do / ignoring or overriding body wisdom. Pay attention to the internal dialogue and notice the tone of internal dialogue. Make a note of any recurring thoughts. Finally, write a mantra, something supportive and loving, that you can repeat to yourself (e.g. you are perfect as you are).