Finding Our Way to Healing with The Breath

"Happy New Year" seems an inadequate phrase for what lays ahead in 2024. In our post-pandemic, war-torn world, “Happy” and “New” feel a bit unattainable. With the dramatic increase in rates of anxiety and depression ─ especially for women and young people ─ where do we find happiness? With old conflicts and ethnic hatreds erupting for homelands and resources, where do we look for new resolutions? In our singular experience of being, how do we contribute to bringing in the New Year with any kind of joy?

Yoga’s practices provide us a map for doing exactly that. And like a treasure map, we need to study it and re-examine it regularly to see what we may have missed in our potentially overly cursory approach.

In the second half of 2023, we rethought our posture and dove into embodiment, focusing on what Yoga TuneUp® founder Jill Miller calls “the feels.” Staying with and allowing sensations in our bodies can be both pleasant and disconcerting, but it provides us with real data so we can examine and explore our patterns of being.

The week of January 8th, we’ll begin a series based on the breath – the foundation of not only our yoga practice, but of our life. We can exist for three days without water and three weeks without food, but just three minutes without air.

Resources for this exploration include Jill Miller’s new book Body by Breath: The Science and Practice of Physical and Emotional Resilience and A Life Worth Breathing: A Yoga Master’s Handbook of Strength, Grace, and Healing by Max Strom. Watch Max Strom’s compelling TEDx Talk Breathe to Heal here:

I hope you’ll join me on our collective, continued journey towards a truly happy New Year filled with the newness of deep healing.

​Peace,
Anne