With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, a cluster of cases being found in the more northern region of the Northern Beaches, the Government has put into place restrictions about what residents can and can’t do. Much to many people’s disappointment, this hasn’t come at the best of times, over the Christmas, New Year and the summer holiday period. However we have an understanding as to the reasoning for why these restrictions have been put in place – in order to contain the number of cases and to keep people safe.

Most people readily accept this, however what I would like to discuss in this article is what can happen when we are put into lockdown and our movements are being restricted and some simple tools to support you to not feel oppressed or restricted.

From discussions with people on the Northern Beaches and getting a feel as to where people are at, it is understandable that many are feeling frustrated and hoping that this pandemic will just go away or that a vaccine will be available soon.

I taught an online yoga class this morning and I shared with the participants of that class how I have been working with the current restrictions to not allow them to affect me. Having open discussions with people, it seems as though many are affected, with some more open to talking about it, and others not, going about their day-to-day life coping as best they can.

So this is what I shared with the class this morning. Restrictions can be put in place and we can be told where we can go and where we can’t. We don’t have much control over this, but what we do have control over is how we move within the restrictions.

As an example, if you walk around feeling frustrated, upset or annoyed that these restrictions are in place and you can’t do what you want, you may spend the whole time in lockdown feeling this way. This isn’t going to be or feel good in your body. – we  can all relate to the damaging and unsettling effect of emotions, attachments or desires in our body.

Perhaps you then go to behaviours to try and dull down these feelings and you end up spending more time eating, watching TV/Netflix and not truly dealing with what actually is there in your body and the tension continues to build.

What I worked with in the first round of lockdown earlier this year and doing again this time around, is using the space to focus on owning my movements. What I mean by this is rather than let my movements be governed by a feeling that may arise due to a reaction brought about by the restrictions, I am focussing on making all of my movements of my body be gentle, nurturing, flowing and in a quality of connection.

When I move in this way, I own my movements and the more I move with and in these qualities, it feels lovely inside. Therefore, it doesn’t matter so much what I am told I can and can’t do as how I move and feel isn’t based on external factors but rather is based upon the feelings that I nurture from the inside. Afterall it is what is on the inside that counts.

The more I focus on this way of being and living within the lockdown, the simpler and expansive become all the things that I go about in my daily life – going for a walk, cooking, shopping, working, calling a friend can all be done in a quality that nourishes and contributes to how I feel moment to moment.

If we don’t consciously and deliberately own our movements, then our movements can easily be owned by our reactions.

Use this time during lockdown to deepen your connection to and with your body. It is worth the effort and the benefits are tangible and invaluable.

Donna Nolan is a Yoga Teacher, Remedial Massage and Bodywork Therapist who lives on the Northern Beaches and works at her clinic in Balgowlah.  She has a deep love of supporting people to reconnect with their body and being. 

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In part 1 which we recently published “Our thoughts – how to change them”  we discussed how behind every thought there is an energy first and as such every thought we have comes with a specific quality and affect on our body, health and wellbeing. From there we also revisited how to change the quality of our thoughts or thinking – ultimately we need to change the quality of our movements.

At the core of being able to have a quality of harmony with our thoughts is a deep level of care for our body and an ongoing developing or deepening of love for ourselves. This includes an attentiveness, an honouring and a forever growing sense of responsibility brought to the following key pillars of health: our quality of sleep, food, exercise, relating with others, commitment to life and the management of our emotions and reactions.

In this article, we are sharing our other top tips to support true mental health.

Observe your thoughts 

As you develop conscious presence in your body, you will become increasingly aware of your every thought and their specific affect on your body. This new awareness can feel a bit intense and overwhelming at the beginning, but as you learn to simply observe your thoughts and not get identified with them, a clarity and freedom is experienced.

Change your movements – Gentleness, Delicacy, Presence

If a thought erodes, disturbs or distracts you in any way, don’t try to talk or rational yourself out of it, it does not work. Change your movements – reconnect to your body, move gently, delicately, bring your full presence to what is in front of you, check your posture, feel the tone of your voice, reconnect to purpose …

“Not true, I am not listening” 

A simple practice we use and share with our clients is to “call out” any thought that does not hold harmony, love, stillness or truth in it. Telling yourself from a place of connection with your body “not true – I am not listening” can be an effective way to develop an absoluteness with not entertaining any dis-harmonious thought.

Re-connect to Stillness

Our nature is love and stillness. Any thought holding a stimulating, distracting, disturbing or checking out quality is ultimately taking us away from our presence, our essence – or in other words sabotaging our connection with Stillness. Esoteric Yoga, also called The Yoga of Stillness, is one of our favourite ways to reconnect to the stillness within and learn how to live in day-to day life with and from stillness.

There comes a point in life where everything in you does not want to settle for less anymore in terms of quality of thought, thinking and mental space. When you reach that point of healing, a new level of awareness and responsibility is felt in regards to the type of thoughts one allows and entertains in their head.

Ultimately, again, as our energetic awareness develops, we come to realise that it is the quality of our movements that determines the quality of our thoughts.

At Yoga & Healing we offer the services of Remedial Massage, Esoteric Healing, Esoteric Massage, Connective Tissue Therapy, Yoga, Exercise and Meditation. We offer live classes and online yoga and exercise classes. We are in the business of offering support for true health and wellbeing. Contact Us.

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We have heard many times over in sessions people sharing how there is a busyness in their mind and that they are not enjoying the types of thoughts that they are having.These thoughts are often repeated ones around the past, the future and in the form of concerns around work, family, relationships or health issues.

Typically those thoughts develop into anxiousness, emotional upset, lack of confidence, uncertainty, doubt and/or worry. Ultimately the feeling is that these types of thoughts erode us, affect how we feel and have a direct impact on our body, health and wellbeing.

We have also heard people share how they “need” or try to “think positive”, change their thought patterns to be ones that are uplifting rather than the negative ones that can so often haunt us in the form of judgment, criticism or comments such as “I’m not good enough”, “I feel ashamed”, “I feel guilty”, “I feel not worthy” etc.

With much discipline, we may try to change our thoughts from negative to positive ones, but does this really work? We may be able to squash and silence the negativity, the erosion for a while, but those thoughts usually creep back in and it can become a battle within to try and push them away yet again.

What if there is another way to work with negative thoughts rather than battling them with another set of thought constructs supposedly more positive?

There is another way. 

We have discussed over the years how everything is energy and as a result how everything is because of energy. Well, a thought is an energetic expression. As such if we don’t like, feel affected by our thoughts and want to change their quality or not be impacted by them, we need to look at, consider and discern the energy behind them – first of all.

We have also shared over the years how everything comes back to or down to our movements, the quality of our movements and the way we actually live. As such the quality of our movements, the way we live in all aspects of our life generate the quality of our mental activity. Therefore to change our thoughts, ultimately requires us to change our movements.

As an example, try sitting in a chair and slump down into it, – taking a “depressive posture”-  rolling your hips backward, rounding your back and slouching. Notice how this makes you feel. It won’t take long for you to actually feel a bit low in mood. Then try sitting up straight with an elongated, open and lengthened posture and now notice how you feel. Alive again, right?

The first posture described above doesn’t feel so good whereas the second more upright posture allows for more of an openness to be felt in the body. In other words, both postures (movements) affect the body very differently and generate a different quality of thoughts or mental wellbeing.

We can start to change our thoughts by learning to be present with our body in all of our movements, being gentle, nurturing and caring and by committing to life (ie, not checking out) and bringing purpose to all that we do.

Next month, we will delve further into the topic of our thoughts, looking at how to develop and maintain our mental health and harmony with our thoughts.

At Yoga & Healing, we love to work with people and support them to develop a nurturing relationship with their body and their being, all in turn empowering them to have a more nourishing quality of thoughts.

To this effect, we regularly offer 4 week online Exercise Program (focussing on developing our physical fitness) and a 6 week online Esoteric Yoga course (focussing more on developing our physiological fitness, our relationship and connection with our being).

At Yoga & Healing we offer the services of Remedial Massage, Esoteric Healing, Esoteric Massage, Connective Tissue Therapy, Yoga, Exercise and Meditation. We offer live classes and online yoga and exercise classes. We are in the business of offering support for true health and wellbeing. Contact Us.

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The practice of Esoteric Yoga, The Yoga of Stillness was unlike any other yoga class that I had attended and I must say it was a game changer for me in that I experienced everything that I had always been looking for in yoga, but had not yet found up until that point.

The practice was far simpler than anything else I had ever done in any other yoga class before. The practitioner instructed me to be with my body and to connect with my being. What was offered was an enormous amount of space for me to do this with gentle reminders to come back to my body. The focus in Esoteric Yoga is for the mind to settle into being with the body (conscious presence) and it is through this settlement that we become aware of the being that resides within the body.

A large component of the practice is about being still, that is no movement and deepening into the body through the feeling sense. It involves only a few simple movements, such as sitting up from a lying position, lying back down, a bending of the knee and opening and closing the eyes. These movements are divinely designed and follow a particular order to support the body to the return to its innate state of being, that is stillness – the union of our body and our being.

What is emphasised in these classes is that stillness isn’t about ceasing movement and just being physically still. We learn that we can walk this feeling of stillness and take it into our daily movements. The simplicity of not much movement in the class allows one to reconnect to this quality and then it is about expanding that quality and bringing it into our daily life in all that we do. Esoteric Yoga provides the pathway to reconnecting to this feeling of stillness, it certainly isn’t about leaving it on the mat.

The word esoteric means connecting with our inner-most and the practice of Esoteric Yoga, The Yoga of Stillness is about returning to this place, that part of us which is innate and deep within us all. This part of us is within the inner-heart and is never tarnished or scarred, no matter what we do and we always have a choice to return to it if we so choose.

At the end of that first class I had experienced something different within my body and my being that was somewhat familiar to me, yet it felt like it had been a very long time since I had experienced this, perhaps lifetimes. I had read and heard it described many times in a yoga class or a course, yet had never actually felt it before. It was a deep settlement, a feeling of returning home.

The practice itself was challenging, not due to anything being hard on a physical level, but because of the level of connection to my body that I was being called to as guided by the instructor. There were no postures or breathing practices that I could escape into. The cues were always asking me to be with my body, for the body and being to be at one.

What I experienced was that the more I chose for my mind to rest with my body, to accept what it was that I was feeling and to not try and escape what was there, the more there came an unwinding of the momentum that I had been living in until I felt a settlement and the being and the body uniting as one.

This was what I had always thought and read yoga to be about and I was surprised that I finally experienced this with such a simple practice. I had always thought that the pathway to feeling this union needed to be much more complex.

This class gave me a marker in my body as to what it feels like when I choose to reconnect to me. As I got up and went back out into my day to day living, I wasn’t able to hold that connection like I had felt it in the class, but I had a reference point as to what I now knew was possible to live.

Union, described as the practice of yoga, was no longer something that seemed unachievable or foreign, it was something that was very tangible.

In this class I had felt it in my body and I knew it was only a matter of time before I could live more of this in my day to day life. This ultimately is the goal of yoga, to not just leave the practice on the mat but to bring it into our daily lives, otherwise the practice is something that we use for relief, to make us feel better, rather than a practice that supports us to reconnect with our soul.

Donna Nolan teaches Yoga, Exercise & Massage and is a Bodywork Therapist. She has a love of supporting people to connect to their body and being, in stillness and in movement. Contact Us

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At Yoga & Healing we regularly offer yoga classes (in Sydney – Northern Beaches and Balmain) live and exercise programs online.

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6 – 10 January 2020

7am– 8am | Monday – Friday | with Donna Nolan (nee Gianniotis)

Join Donna for 5 morning classes that will support you in your reconnection with your body and being leaving you feeling rejuvenated and ready to embrace the year ahead. Donna’s classes are deeply supportive and include stretching, strengthening, breathing and meditation.  This intensive is open to the complete beginner to the more experienced student. The word ‘intensive’ here simply means 5 classes in 5 days.

These classes will include

• Body Awareness meditation
• Gentle stretching and strengthening exercises
• Gentle breathing
• Deep connection with your body

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Yet when we truly practice yoga, we learn to develop a relationship with our body, where we listen to what it is telling us and respond and move in a way that is deeply honouring. After all, yoga means union and how can we be in union if there is not a true respect for the body.

This means no pushing, no hardness, no pain.

With this, there is much to actually gain.

Pain is the body’s feedback mechanism to say stop what you are doing. Our mind can often override this signal, but at what cost to the body? When pain is felt the body responds by causing the muscles to harden up around the injured site for protection to avoid further injury.

So what happens when we actively go into a movement that stretches the body to an extent where there is pain? The connective tissue (or commonly known as fascia) also hardens up in order to protect the body.

Connective Tissue is a system of tissues that runs throughout all the muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, nerves, blood vessels and organ overlapping and enveloping soft tissue structures like cling film.

So if our aim is to loosen and open the body, to have more fluidity, then why would we induce pain and cause more tension? It just doesn’t make sense.

So if we apply this in the true practice of yoga, then it only makes sense to apply this across the board with all bodywork therapies including massage.

As a yoga teacher, connective tissue therapist and massage therapist, I have come to understand that the best way of releasing tension in the body is through the quality of connection – not force. A stronger stretch in yoga or a harder stroke in massage may offer temporary relief, but does it solve the underlying problem in the long term? I would beg to differ.

For long term healing, the approach that I take as a bodywork therapist is to respect and respond to the connective tissue by working with the body in a connected and gentle way.

As an example, in massage, rather than forcefully working into a trigger point (a point of tension held in the muscle) to access the deep tissue and muscles, the body requires lots of repetitive strokes to first of all warm up the outer layer of muscles allowing access to the next and deeper level of muscles (hence the name deep tissue).

If you try to access the deeper muscles via force and without truly understanding the role of the connective tissue in the body, the outer muscles harden and go into protection going against what we are trying to achieve, which is to relax the muscles. Once the outer muscles have been warmed up, then we can access the deeper tissue in a gentle manner, with no force and without inflicting pain.

With the modality of Esoteric Connective Tissue Therapy we work with gentle hands-on healing techniques performed with slow rhythmic motion on various parts of the body. The therapy works directly with both the physical structures of the body (muscles, joints etc) and the energy that flows through the connective tissue system and in turn releases tension and tightness in the muscles.

By listening to the body and treating it with absolute care and gentleness it leads the body towards it own natural state of healing with no pain inflicted.

Donna Nolan offers Remedial Massage, Esoteric Massage, Esoteric Connective Tissue Therapy, Esoteric Healing and Chakra Puncture. For bookings please call Donna 0408 7838187 or email donna@yogaandhealing.com.au

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The more we focus on deepening our inner quality of being the more we are equipped to handle what comes our way in work, relationships and friendships. We can foster the deepening of our inner connection in every moment through our quality of movement.

So what have we been up to personally…

Donna has been super busy taking on a new role of teaching massage with Evolve College both in Newcastle and Sydney which is involving a bit of travel. She is now also offering Massage at the North Sydney clinic along with Esoteric Healing, Connective Tissue Therapy, Cancer support and Yoga Therapy.

Alex is currently completing further studies in Chakra-puncture with Evolve College. As an existing Chakra-puncturist, she has been amazed by the high level of standards of training offered by this college. She has been refining her way, settling in a new family rhythm with also taking a support role at the North Sydney clinic and resuming school activities with her daughter starting year 2.

Donna and Alex have recently both been up to Lismore to complete their first level training in Esoteric Yoga. Esoteric Yoga is a profound healing modality that we hold very dear and look forward to sharing with you all in the near future.

Although there may be some times in our lives when we have a lot going on it is important to keep a balance of work and play, recognising that every part of our life has equal value. There is a saying we often refer to “One life, One quality”.

When we truly nurture all aspects of our expression we are less likely to feel stress, resentment or frustration. Bringing balance into our lives is a key to true health.

We hope that you enjoyed the free yoga audio that we offered in our last newsletter. Many have expressed how much they have been finding both the sample class and the body awareness audios supportive in their day to day – so we decided to offer another free yoga audio which includes 16 minutes of standing exercises.

If you are enjoying these audios and find it difficult to get to one of our yoga group classes, you may like to consider joining our online yoga classes. An audio recording is available for those who can not attend the class live or who may miss a class.

Alexandra Plane and Donna Nolan offer Yoga/Yoga Therapy, Meditation, Esoteric Healing and Massage at their clinic in Balmain and Cammeray. Contact them for enquiries or bookings.

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December can be a tricky time for many, school finishing, work being busy as we try to get it all done by the end of the year, festivities with Christmas parties, catching up with friends and family, the extra spending, perhaps later nights than usual, eating and drinking more.

What we are emphasising with our clients this month is the importance of honouring yourself throughout December. It is easy to get lost in the busyness of December, the fun activities and the social gatherings, but unless we hold our connection with ourselves, continue to listen to our body and honour what it is that we feel, we can easily get affected or exhausted by it all and then we miss the enjoyment of what December has to offer.

Take stock and remember that the choices we make today are going to have a direct impact on how we feel the next day and the next day. True health and wellbeing is being aware of how we are with ourselves all of the time – including December. Don’t drop the ball, just because it’s December. Have fun but without losing your connection to you.

Some tips to take with you throughout December

• Try not to do too much in any given week or weekend. Space out your social gatherings so that you are not having too many late nights.
• Watch and discern what you eat at parties and social gatherings. We can easily overeat at this time of year.
• Drink plenty of water, keep hydrated.
• Socialising is fun, but still give yourself time just for you.
• Don’t try and fit it all in by the end of the year. Nothing is going anywhere and it will all still be there next year.
• Be aware of what momentum you are in, if a raciness or busyness sneaks in, stop, pause and breathe gently. Come back to your body.
• Don’t drop those things that support you such as exercise, Gentle Breath Meditation, a good rhythm with sleep, eating well.

We wish you a joy-filled December and festive season and look forward to catching up with you in 2017. With love, Donna and Alexandra

Alexandra Plane and Donna Nolan offer Yoga/Yoga Therapy, Meditation, Esoteric Healing, Connective Tissue Therapy and Massage at their clinics in Balmain and Cammeray. Contact them for enquiries or bookings.

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