Forrest Yoga helps you connect to your core – getting strong and centered. It uses heat, deep breathing (pranayama) and vigorous sequences to sweat out toxins. The long holds in the pose progressions help you flush, oxygenate and rejuvenate every cell as well as refine your relationship to it. For beginners to Forrest Yoga, you learn to connect your breath to intention and connection to feeling in your body. Learning to work honestly at your edges, you develop effective tools to deal with fear and struggle. As your connection to core deepens you awaken the body’s inherent wisdom of self-knowing. This makes it possible for integrity, self awareness & playful curiosity to become part of your daily life.

Forrest Yoga does not require strength or flexibility; it only requires that you bring a willingness to learn how to feel authentically and respond honestly. People with injuries or limitations are encouraged to attend. As you advance in Forrest Yoga, step by step, you learn to intelligently ride your breath into the exhilarating advanced poses. You learn to exercise your emotional body through the full spectrum of feeling.

Angela and Jill have trained with Ana Forrest, the creator of Forrest Yoga since 2004. They have assisted Ana at teacher trainings and workshops, nationally and internationally.

Come to class in comfortable clothing and with an empty stomach. All yoga props are provided. We highly recommend bringing a water bottle and having your own mat.

Basics/Gentle:
This class is suitable for anyone who would like a gentle, slower paced, stress reducing yoga class. Individuals with physical injuries or limitations, such as arthritis, diabetes, mental stress, postnatal, overweight and other issues, will find this class not just helpful, but enjoyable too! The yoga poses will be gentle and restorative; mostly floor and wall work with yoga props for comfort. Deep breathing will be taught. This type of yoga helps to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system also known as the PNS. Stimulating the PNS helps to lower heart rate, blood pressure, stimulates the immune system and much, much more. Room is heated to 75 degrees.

All Levels:
All Levels means that there are beginners, intermediate and advanced students in the class, and we give safe, compassionate instructions and options to suit everyone in the room. All level classes explore healing sequences to modify your practice. Each class focuses on an overall theme. All classes include warming up before the hot part of class, then warming down before cooling down and savasana (final resting pose). Room is heated to 85 degrees.

Some individual class themes are:

• backbends
• twists
• inversions
• arm balances
• hips & hamstrings
• standing pose series

Intermediate / Advanced:
This class deepens one's awareness of the connections available to take their practice deeper. There is no expectation to achieve any pose, but a willingness and open mind to explore their personal edge with a lighthearted approach. Inversions, Gravity Surfing, Wheel Variations, & Arm Balances are just a few ways you can expect to celebrate your practice in this sweat lodge ceremony!

Forrest Yoga Infused
Forrest Yoga Infused is a blend of Forrest Yoga and other ancient yogic practices.

Meditation as a technique for calming the disturbances of the mind has been a part of human life since the time of the earliest civilizations. Many teachers, past and present, from a myriad of cultural and religious beliefs, from the Buddha (563-486 BCE ) to Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s emerging Mindfulness Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, have sought to control the “monkey mind” to gain insight and inner peace. As master teacher Joseph Goldstein has suggested “Mediation has to do with opening what is closed in us, balancing what is reactive, and exploring what is hidden.”

Most of us go about our daily lives with our mind chattering away. To exist without all that mental noise seems to suggest we have lost all control. Yet, we are only in control when we are aware of our thinking and able to stop thinking when we want to. It is this aspect of letting go that troubles most practitioners, posing a real challenge to our habitual behaviors, feelings and thoughts. Scientific findings like Kabat- Zinn’s prove how meditation can significantly change addictions, heal the body, decrease, sometimes alleviate, physical and mental pain, eliminate stress and anxiety, augment our concentration, improve our ability to handle deadlines, increase a sense of well-being, and bring about a profound acceptance of the challenges and hardships of everyday life.

Meditation brings remarkable changes in one’s daily life practices and deepens an awareness as to what one’s reality truly is. It is the constant escaping from reality and seeking of instant gratification, common to 21st century culture that masks our true feelings, debilitates us, and poisons our body, mind and spirit. The Dalai Lama stresses the importance of a basic mindfulness practice to change the human condition, teaching that one’s ability to literally “sit” with what is at hand, without any conceptual padding, allowed our neuroses to come to the surface and therefore be resolved. He states “meditation is the means for human beings to be free of suffering.”

Meditation asks us to mindfully observe the fluctuation’s of the mind and to learn how to lessen our anxieties with breath exercises and thoughtful observation. Through practicing the techniques of meditation the chaos of everyday life is lessened, the agitation of the mind is brought to stillness; Insight and understanding of one’s deeper feelings and responses is cultivated, ultimately bringing greater ability to focus, control, and change our experiences.

Make time for yourself to simply sit and reflect – what Pema Chodron calls “calm abiding” so that one’s innate wisdom can rise and guide you to greater contentment and inner peace.

Learn to cultivate this skillful awareness and receive the long term benefits of a meditation practice!

Meditation classes are guided:
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:15 - 8:45am with Gianna Carotenuto, and
Fridays, 8:15 - 8:45am with Jitavrata Jacobs

By Donation.