With January and February well behind, winter has blasted its cool, damp, heavy, dark tones loud and clear. Rather than submitting to its icy forces, yoga techniques can support us in generating our own heat this winter!

Do you shut things out? Are the matters you most enjoy masking the ones you perceive as negative? The ones you’re scared others will perceive as negative? If so, we have a lot in common. It reminds me of the childhood nursery rhyme: “rain, rain, go away, come again another day.” The course of nature has proven that rain will most definitely come another day and so too will anxieties and emotions if we bury them.

Do you often change time zones for work? Have a big trip planned for the near future? Yoga and stretching could change your globetrotting life (and Lebert’s compact stretch straps are seriously the perfect accompaniments!).

Roughly quoted from my journal, June 27, 2012: “Beauty starts on the inside – Westerners have it all wrong with the attention they pay to hair, makeup and artificial things. When your internal systems are happy, it will give you a glow on the outside to make you truly beautiful”. – Yogi Charu

||“Meditation untangles what is tangled” – Buddha||This Eastern-rooted centering technique brings clarity, a gentle calm, energy, connectedness, focus and relaxation. In the West, it’s a powerful healing tool for one of our culture’s biggest pandemics: stress. And what’s best is we can do it anytime, anywhere with the power of our own bodies- no temples, monasteries or gurus required!

The scientific discoveries of mind, body and emotional benefits to meditation have been countless - from increased disease prevention to stress and anxiety reduction; sleep improvement to increased productivity. But despite these revelations, meditation is still a spooky word for many people. From a distance, it can be easy to assume it’s too left field for one’s interests or impossible to quiet incessant mind chatter, but notions like this have complicated a beautiful thing.

“Chaos is easy – that’s why we’re drawn to it”. With my legs shaking and body on the verge of collapse, the yoga teacher’s sentence reverberates in my mind. It all makes perfect sense - how often do we get pulled unconsciously to negative reactions? And not just when we’re blindly ruled by the struggle in our physical limits as I was in my yoga class, but out there in the real world, too.

“One reason will bring you to the mat, but a million more will keep you there”. I found myself saying this the other day to someone who’d never tried yoga. It just sounded so clichéd I had to laugh and say, “I swear, I’ve never said or heard that before!” Giggles aside, this statement has been so purely true for me, and many others I’ve met along the path of yoga. Whether we’re called to the mat as our primary means for physical fitness, to complement a rigorous weight or running regime, to become flexible, achieve elegant postures, or simply to calm nerves, it’s safe to say that as time evolves (and time is key), our reasons for stepping on the mat will, too.