At Sadhana, we’re dedicated to all aspects of yoga
asana
Bringing asana (postures), chanting, meditation, and breath awareness together offers a clear path for enhancing health, well-being, and spiritual growth. Sadhana Yoga Hudson shares the rich history, philosophy, and teachings of the yoga tradition to students and teachers alike.
Focus of the Month
Gaia/Earth
Grounding
The earth is our home, our only home. The beauty, the terror, the mystery surrounding the earth and our lives right now is palpable. Many people feel a great need to take part in social movements focused on environmental awareness and action. Many are looking to find a sense of personal safety and stability. Both of which depend greatly on so many factors, including who we are, our privilege or lack of, what power we have access to, plus the reality that we have limits. This month, we’ll experience practices that connect us to ourselves and to the earth, sensing and feeling our relationship to our bodies and the body of the earth, including physical postures and eco-somatic explorations.
What do you need to feel grounded? What makes you feel safe and stable? What do you need in order to show up and do the work you need to do?
Yoga is a valuable container for body, breath, and our nervous system to swim around in and come out more balanced and present. By coming together to practice, we also use community as a container for tolerance. In yoga, we are on the ground; sitting, standing and lying down. We use the intelligence of our body to decide if we need to be more intense or gentle in the postures. Yoga integrates effort and rest. The felt sense of our breath becomes our music and offers a way into deep listening. By feeling, we learn the language of movement.
Other complementary modalities that we can call upon to help us enter into the healing web of life include the work of Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine) and Eco-Somatics (Rachael Alaia), plus The Work that Reconnects (Joanna Macy). All these practices “outsource” to the earth, to meet our need for stability, and also encourage our internal resourcing by guiding us to identify inner sensations of safety and comfort and then teach us how to restore stasis, no matter the circumstances. They can enliven and motivate us to create a sustainable path and imagine our civilization in new ways, better ways, in order to live in accordance with ourselves, each other, and our planet.
“If we operate under the belief that our thoughts and emotions are grounded in our physical body—the endocrine & immune system, the nervous system, the soft tissue, etc.—then changing our physical self (a.k.a. the body) can change the way we experience our thoughts and emotions. As we experiment with both our patterns of attention and movement, we not only improve our ability to move but also the way we think and feel.” –Buffy Owens
“When we expand our ability to move, think and feel, we can name what brings us internal and external support and stability, and we can show up for the work that we need to do—for ourselves, for each other, and for the planet.” –Sondra Loring
