happy Fall!
I am on my third week of my first ever “No Fear Yoga” session, which has confirmed my belief that beginners are definitely the most fun and most rewarding to teach. They are easily impressed, willing to try, and notice improvement almost immediately.
I have 13 people in my class (12 women, 1 men), ages ranging from early 20s to early 60s. About half of the class is friends/coworkers and half strangers who found me through the Parks and Rec catalogue. We do a lot of slow flow, gentle stretching, nothing too strenuous. My goal each time is to get them feeling good so they’ll come back. So far it’s working and I have two ladies in particular who stayed after class last time to ask me when my next session begins. : )
Private one-on-one lessons with K are going quite well. Two sessions ago we did headstands, last week we worked on shoulderstand. It’s lovely working with her!
Andy and I attended a community education class at the local community college on Saturday: “Massage Therapy for Friends and Family”. It was taught by a massage therapist/yoga instructor whose wife owns the fancy yoga studio in town (theirs is the 200 RYT I would be doing if you didn’t have to pay the thousands of dollars upfront!). For the first hour of class we discussed the background of massage and the instructor did a demonstration of his massage approach. Then we spent an hour giving and an hour receiving massage, playing around with approaches and techniques. It was really fun and relaxing.
There is so much overlap between massage and yoga. I’m sure Suburban Yogini could tell us more about it! His language and the overall principles he taught (breath deeply, move slowly, relax into every movement, follow your intuition) sounded awfully familiar.
Other than that we are keeping busy painting our bedroom, planning a Halloween party, and enjoying fall. : )
my view on a recent dog walk
Namaste,
Jamie
On the Mat 
wow… you’re in illinois, yes? that last picture… i didnt know the colors could get like that!
yep, central Illinois. the whole month of October is gorgeous here.
Think connective tissue and you’ve got your yoga massage link! My journey into massage therapy is changing my teaching for sure – i’m even more about anatomy and connective tissue release and less and less about the whole working up a sweat on your mat approach! Connective tissue is where we hold our emotions after all :)
The massage class sounds wonderful. So nice of the hubs to go with you!
“No Fear Yoga”, I love it! Happy to read it’s going well.
This massage class sounds great, I would love to know more about massage therapy and yoga, but yeah, Rachel is the expert here ;-)