New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
My grandmothers never called it a wellness practice. It was just how to live. They kept positive attitudes, grew veggies and herbs. Sat with sick neighbors and prayed over them. Walked daily and sang and prayed alot. They knew, without any clinical language for it, that the body and the soul were not separate and that healing was never meant to happen alone. One grandmother lived to 92, the other lived to 105 years old. But somewhere between their generation and mine, something was severed. Black women in America entered a healthcare system that was not built to honor us, one that has consistently dismissed our pain, undertreated our symptoms, and left us to navigate chronic illness, ...
Why Set up a Home Yoga Practice?Developing a home yoga practice can be a lifeline. For many people, group yoga classes are not viable for reasons like cost, time, availability of childcare, and transportation. Unfortunately, disabled people are still rarely considered by mainstream studios, and racism and transphobia are as prevalent in the yoga industry as they are in wider society. Even for people who do feel comfortable in group yoga classes, setting up a home practice can bring the tools of yoga to life in a totally new way. If yoga is medicine, then our home practice is how we prescribe our own healing. Yoga can become a transformative part of our everyday lives, rather than ...
The fear of death is not a flaw in the human system; it is part of our design. A healthy awareness of mortality keeps us cautious. It prevents reckless behavior. It encourages us to look both ways before crossing the street and to step back from the edge of cliffs. In that sense, this fear is protective—it helps keep us alive. Most of us carry this awareness quietly. It may surface after the loss of someone we love, during an illness, or in the stillness of the night when life feels especially fragile. These moments can be sobering and uncomfortable, but they usually pass. The fear rises, reminds us that life is precious, and then recedes again. In my years of working as a ...
When you think of darkness, or the dark within us, what comes to mind? Does it bring up uncomfortable memories, difficult emotions, or the idea of being taken over by something outside of yourself? In my experience as a therapist and coach, darkness isn't something to fear or fix, although we may believe that it is. Darkness, or shadow, is often more about what we've put there than about who we are at our core. Pulling from Carl Jung's conception of the shadow, this inner darkness is not just our anger, jealousy, or shame that cause us to act in ways that may lead to disconnection, but also our disowned talents and hidden desires that have been cast aside. Darkness can be just as much ...
