June Bloom
Welcome / Bienvenue / Bem-vindo a Voilà Yoga
This is the first newsletter for Voilà Yoga’s community, so welcome everyone! I plan on sending out a letter once a month with news about the studio along with educational content about Yoga philosophy, a short personal essay and a few things I loved lately.
NEWS FROM THE STUDIO
🎉 I now teach 2 classes every week in Lisbon, in 2 different studios, both in Campo de Ourique.
🧘♂️ Mindful Flow
🗓️ Every Friday - 12.30pm at Yoga No Bairro
🤱🤰 Baby & Me - Prenatal & Postnatal
🗓️ Every Wednesday - 11am at Studio Organic Flow
You can now book your next class online. Find more details on each class here.
Also, I’m working on opening a third weekly class soon. It will be called Alignment and geared towards Beginners. Stay tuned!
✨ The bright and airy Yoga no Bairro studio ✨
EASY-TO-DIGEST YOGA PHILOSOPHY
The layers of Yoga
No, Yoga is not only Asana (the poses).
First and foremost, Yoga is a spiritual discipline, that originated over 5,000 years ago, in India. In the West, the way most of us first discover Yoga is through the physical practice of postures, but this is only the outer part of it.
I find the following analogy, from The deeper dimension of Yoga by Georg Feuerstein, helpful to illustrate its different layers:
The postures are only the skin of Yoga… Mental techniques and breath control, the flesh & blood…. The moral practices, the skeleton…. The concentration and meditation, the circulatory and nervous systems.
Access to the deepest layers requires regular, dedicated and consistent practice: it is a lifetime pursuit, and what keeps Yoga so interesting.
In Yoga philosophy, we often talk about the 8 limbs of Yoga, with Asana (postures) being one of them, or only one eighth of it!
More on those eight limbs next time 🤓
LIFE IN LISBON
Almost half a year into it
June 1st will mark the beginning of my sixth month in Lisbon. The past 150 days have been a rollercoaster of events and emotions.
Every time we move to a different place (may it be a new city, country or continent), our bodies need a few months to adapt to their new environment: new air, new water, new weather, new scents, new tastes, new noises. Even though I feel like I have now physically adjusted to my new home base, my mind still wanders back to California at times.
To find my feet here, I’ve been using my yoga practice to ground myself a little deeper in this new land: we did a lot of standing poses in May! Now that our legs are stable & strong, we can try to loosen up a very tight area of the body: the hip joint. Our theme for June will be hip opening poses: expect lunges, asymmetrical shapes and squats!
Lastly, here are a few things I loved this month: this song, this article, this book, this soup. And a quote, why not.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” - Anaïs Nin
🌸 The incredible jacaranda and bougainvillea in the streets of Lapa 🌸
FROM LISBON, WITH LIGHT ✨
