Hi Mindful Yogis,
I thought I would just take a moment and introduce you to my husband Bruce, who plays his beautiful acoustic guitar while I do yoga in my livestream meetup classes. We have been teaching together since 2006/2007 (and he has also played at a few of the community centres/homeless shelters I used to work in). Make no mistake he is an incredible musician, and his guitar is never far from his hands.
Bruce and I met at a dog park in 2007. He was a skinny hippy with a bad back (and a naughty puppy) and I was (at the time) a qualified masseuse and a newly qualified Yoga Teacher. (It was a serious no brainer). We had pets, did yoga, took long walks and got married. Well eloped really....heaven!
Bruce's music is never far from my ears. I feel incredibly blessed that our home is filled with music. When he's playing so sensitively and I am practicing yoga I am experiencing complete bliss and he's in a kind of mindful, creative state. 'It's like everything I love being in one room' I told one of my best friends. So I feel blessed to be able to teach yoga to his music.
Yoga and music has a long and beautiful history. Perhaps the defining moment the West embraced the culture and spiritual diversity of India was when the Beatles studied Maharishi Mahesh’s Transcendental Meditation (TM). And suddenly it became very cool to meditate and do yoga.
'Combining music and yoga respects the amount of time it takes for some minds to find stillness.' Australian Yoga Journal (2020). And I completely agree. For some of us we can use the music that is played in a class to be the vibe we ride during the class to enter a deeper meditative state.
Deepak Chopra says that “music is one of the few modes of incoming information that effects the whole brain and helps it to hum at a coherent frequency, similar to meditation. Music is also used in therapy to create new memories based on positive associations.” So for instance yoga + live music is wonderful for the symptoms of trauma, anxiety and mood stabilising.
Research shows the benefits of music therapy for various mental health conditions, including depression, trauma, and schizophrenia (to name a few). Music acts as a medium for processing emotions, trauma, and grief—but music can also be utilized as a regulating or calming agent for anxiety or for mood dysregulation.' (2016 NAMI)
So Bruce will be playing for us on Saturday 28th Nov, at 10am on our meetup livestream classes as we build them up (and as many classes as I he can play for)...Not just because I love it but because it's really good for our mental health....namaste
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