One week a year the sun burns slow, long and hard, climaxing in orgasmic radiance as it grazes the skin of earth in the northern hemisphere.

Celebrate this week as holy.

Body rolling is not only a pleasure packed health boost but a meditative pathway to presence, kindness, self knowledge, intuition and self love. Combing through stagnated tangles in muscle fibers can unblock not only the physical but the energetic channels of the body.

One sanskrit word for speech is matrika shakti, fascinatingly translated as the "little mothers." The implication is that our words are powerful, they birth our reality.

What if all of your words came from a space of deep truth, ultimate authority and inner connection?

In other words, what if your speech emanated directly from the source of all life- the Earth?

Spring awakens our inner creatrix from slumber, cracking open possibility. Our literal or metaphoric womb stirs with fertility. Clearing cobwebs of winter stagnation, lightening your load of burdensome patterns, pulling back the veil. This season invites us to rejoin the gorgeously choreographed ballet of nature, letting light return to nocturnal, shadow parts of ourselves with the innocent curiosity and audacity of youth.

Can we reframe the “savior” discourse around climate justice by turning towards our planet for answers of how we can return to balance?

The psychedelic forests of Costa Rica are an ever unfolding exotic flower in bloom. After returning from retreat in Nosara, I’m awestruck by the pace of my daily urban life, the ubiquity of concrete and the color gray.

The earth always returns to equilibrium and harmony. As yogis, we’re invited to step outside the cultural typhoon and call on this omnipotent harmonious force of the great mother to bring a sense of balance to our physical, emotional, mental and energetic bodies. Our bodies are the mountains, the soil, the rivers and the oceans.

While each practice has the potential to be a cauldron of transformation, not all yoga classrooms are created equal. There are those teachers who make time stop, who remind us of what we didn’t know we’d forgotten. Those who change our practice with a simple cue that wakes us up from a long unconscious slumber, those whose palpable inner stillness calls us back to ourselves or whose generous touch, applied with the skill of a surgeon yet the softness of a mother, brings out tears that are long overdo.

Yogis, stop duct-taping your body! Redefine "the core" & shift your movement patterns to address the root of back pain and collapsed posture. Stretching and crunching is a bit like duct tape. Instead of getting to the root of the problem, which in the physical body is unhealthy movement patterns, spinal weakness and the muscular tension and asymmetry they cause, we “just put some duct tape on it!”

In the midst of my sister’s fairy tale wedding in Prague I realize that we are all children of the Great Divorce between Mother Earth and Father Sky. The legacy of this divorce is the myth of separation of body & mind that permeates every layer of our culture from the induvidual to the collective.

Most of us take backbeding poses in the place it’s the easiest- exactly where we shouldn’t! When we practice unskillful backbends we reinforce old patterns of instability and imbalance both physically and emotionally.