Rose the Wild Woman

Rose the Wild Woman

The past two days in New York and along the Jersey coast have been sweltering and most of my immediate friends and colleagues have claimed extra heat in their body, unexpected outbreaks of rashes or inflamed skin, sleepless nights and general irritability. Having an impromtu Goddess gathering in the Central Park on a glorious ‘feels like summer’ day, two of my very best friends and Goddess colleagues, yoga teacher Lisa Kazmer, and birth doula / Tantra coach Cindy Neder and I hiked through a very warm and crowded park on a Tuesday afternoon to camp under a shady oasis below Sheep’s Meadow and celebrate some sacred sister time.

Cindy had recently received in the mail a pair of rabbit fur mitts that she would be incorporating into her Tantric session work. We took the mitts out and took turns stroking down each others bodies and massaging each others faces with the soft velvet of the rabbit skin and thinking of all the many ways we could incorporate this wonderful nourishment into our lives. I thought wildly, “Why not a Savasana assist at the end of a yoga class with the fur mitts??!”

“I don’t think the vegan yogis would go for that” Lisa commented. Well, that’s the difference between a Buddhist and a Goddess, I suppose.

I rubbed the mitts over my face and on working on our bodies, realized each of us had some sort of skin heat imbalance going on. On a whim, I had brought a jar of rose infusion with me to the park. Each woman swigged thirstily and we ended up sprinkling rose water on the inflamed skin areas around the body. I had been making rose infusion for the past few days since the temperature rapidly spike across the coast. Rose is one of those fragrant flowering powerhouse plants that is as wild as she is beautiful. She holds core wild woman energy. Her brambles warn that she commands absolute attention and presence in her company but her scent will stop even the most unpresent person in their tracks reminding them to breath deeply and become aware of their surroundings. Rose has for centuries been used as a tonic for the uterus that supports regulating women’s menstrual cycles and relieving uterine congestions and heavy periods. She is also a cooling herb that lowers body temperature, soothes the intestinal track and nourishes skin. In breakouts of prickly heat, skin inflammation, and eczema rose to the rescue! On hot days try misting yourself with bursts of rose water, especially over itchy skin areas. For digestive distress or feverish tendencies, imbibe a quart of rose infusion a day to bring down heat in the body.

After each of us were massaged with rabbit mitts we drank and sprinkled rose infusion on our body’s and gifted ourselves with her sweet fragrant and wild essence. True to her wild nature, rose accompanied us as we each drew a card from Lisa’s tarot deck and received our messages from Source. We closed our time together as Lisa read to us the Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot. We cackled, embraced and parted ways, the wild ‘rosaceae’ woman awake within us all.

The roses petals we used (Rosa Centifolia) for our infusion were certified organic (lots of garden roses have been chemically treated.)

Places where you can purchase bulk edible rose petals in the city

Flower Power http://www.flowerpower.net/

McNultys http://www.mcnultys.com/

Online

Mountain Rose Herbs http://www.mountainroseherbs.com/

Divine Mother of 2012

My first two guest teaching opportunities of 2012 at Bija Yoga and Yoga Sole have been prenatal focused and I can't help but think the universe is giving me a spiritual nudge in some way ;)

Here is a guest blog that I wanted to share with you that has a beautiful Divine Feminine core and that celebrates the universal mother energy within us all. It was written by a colleague and friend, Lloyd. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Wishing all a very Happy and Love-Filled New Year!

Love,

ISIS

Over the holidays I stumbled upon a four-year-long discussion of an article on Naked Yoga blogged on the Internet in 2007 (http://www.fitsugar.com/Naked-Yoga-Photos-113570). The author dismissed it as “too racy” for her. She asked her readers whether they would try such a thing. The almost one hundred responses over four years were fascinating.
First, the responses were universally – and often virulently – negative. They were also made by people who, like the author, had never experienced nude yoga in a group. Cries of disgust gushed: screaming capitals, barking multiple exclamation points, long strings of drawn out “EEEEWWWW” and “YUCK!!!!!”


The article and the responses, at least the early ones, were rife with sexual innuendo. Naked yoga is all about sex – especially gay sex – practiced by perverts and leads to sexual abuse and dangerous things. Yoga is pure and spiritual and shouldn’t be sullied with something so base as nudity. Adoration of and pleasure in the human body has no place in yoga. We must hide ourselves (in form-fitting, expensive clothing) so as not to distract others. Especially men, who couldn’t possibly do yoga for any other reason than as a substitute for pornography.


The theme of Downward-facing Dog recurred (sometimes with nauseating detail), and all from people who practice yoga clothed, never nude. Maybe I learned wrong, but isn’t your gaze supposed to be turned toward your center in Down Dog? In my experience with crowded classes, even clothed participants shift politely to avoid face-ass proximity.


So what we have here is a pretext contrived to mask personal phobia. Where does the absurd aversion we as a species have to our own flesh come from? Children are not born with it. Other societies live in comfort with nudity. This phenomenon must come from our culture.

It isn’t hard to see what anchors our exaggerated disgust for ourselves – our ancient sky religion. And Christianity doesn’t hold the monopoly. The Islamic world, if anything, exceeds us in body hatred. (This would be a tempting place to digress about the parallel development of animal husbandry, slavery and marriage as a contract between two men to buy a daughter. And about fear of all things feminine. I know the fear of rape and the drive to attract a mate affect women in ways they don’t affect men, but we men also suffer the consequences. I’m hurt when a woman behaves in such a way as to indicate she thinks me dangerous or shallow.)

I found myself wondering about why grown adults feel obligated to display disgust for all things pelvic? And fear the imagined judgment of others? And neurotically resort to buying expensive, sexy clothing to both hide and entice at the same time.

As often happens in life, insight came through a small child. During breaks from my laptop, I did a few asanas, Downward-facing Dog among them. My almost-two-year-old grandson, running about diaper-free, attempted an imitation to the delight of my wife and three adult daughters. He had no qualms about pointing his bare bottom up in the air. None of us found it disgusting in the least. But at some point, that child with his cute little butt in the air will become the image that disgusts so many self-admitted devotees to yoga. He will not only become disgusting to others, he will develop an arresting self-consciousness and desperately cover himself. When does that happen? At ten? Fifteen? Certainly before adulthood.

When do we stop being the Child? When do we stop seeing the Child?

Long before I entered the practice of medicine, I was a massage therapist. One client changed my outlook forever. He was an old man, brought in by his elderly wife. I’d say they were in their eighties. He had a slow, shuffling gate, fixed gaze, and expressionless face which I took for early Parkinsonism. Most strikingly, his body was covered with lesions of at least five distinct kinds. He hadn’t been washed properly in days, maybe weeks.

I was apprenticing in the practice of a kindly old Norwegian therapist, Connie Haldorson. She was getting on in years and needed someone to help. I did most of the massage while she sat at the feet of her clients doing reflexology. Connie was also an herbalist.

She had prepared special lotion just for this man. (I wish I had paid more attention, but I remember it had comfrey and aloe vera in it.) I massaged the goo into his tough, leathery skin from head to toe and rubbed it off with a rough towel. Several towels, actually. Dead layers of skin and crusty lesions came off in scoops. What emerged was pink, new, clean skin – still tough, but softer. When he got off the table, he felt renewed. Most importantly, he no longer felt filthy and disgusting. We dressed him in clean clothes. He came out of the room to greet his wife with a little hop and a “Come on, Ma! Let’s go dancin’!” I had to excuse myself to weep.

I have never looked at a person the same way since. Underneath all that disgusts us – the hair, the fat, the sweat, the filth – lies that child, that cute little kid with his bottom in the air.

Herbs can do wonders in knowledgeable hands. But the miracle that day was due to nothing more than Connie’s motherly compassion for a child. An eighty-year-old child. (Excuse me. Did I just modify the most powerful force in the universe – motherly love – with the words “nothing more than?”)

If naked yoga means anything to me, it means motherly love – that compassionate protection of the child in each of us. It means seeing each other the way mothers view children. And wouldn’t that be a nice change from seeing people as objects of lust or disgust.

Holy Body Worship ~ Why 'Clothing Optional'

Holy Body Worship is a clothing optional worship service led by Rev. Goddess Charmaine and Isis Phoenix each month. Having recently abbreviated our name to 'Naked Church' we are taking this time to redefine that this continues to be a 'clothing optional' event.

Holy Body Worship is an Interfaith spiritual service that celebrates the intimacy and uniqueness of the body and soul relationship through honoring and acknowledging the body as a temple and recognizing it as the vessel our soul chose for incarnation. The option of being naked or skyclad during Service is used to further the expression of reverence and celebration of our body soul relationship to Source. Our bodies are miracles, beauty, complex ecosystems, walking art - each unique, holy and a piece of God/Goddess/Source. The ‘clothing optional’ is simply that – optional. You are never required to be nude during service. It is a matter of choice and truth in the present moment based on how your body feels and wishes to express itself. In service, we view nudity as a form of transparency and intimacy. We bare our soul’s and the places that have been hiding or living inauthentically and bring ourselves back to authenticity, transparency and one-ness. If we feel guarded when we remove our clothes it’s not a form of celebration and we’ve actually moved our relationship to body/soul/source out union or one-ness and into fragmentation and inauthenticity. However, if you have felt guarded your entire life, perhaps this is the moment to experience your union and one-ness through exploring nudity, through moving through fear and embracing yourself ‘holy’ and completely in this moment. In Holy Body Worship, we choose to be nude or to celebrate with others who are nude to explore a deeper level of intimacy with our bodies, our souls, each other, the divine. To remove that which keeps us separate – and to bring us back into right relationship with body, soul, Source. Whole-y Body Worship celebrates and takes a stand for the right to choose to worship your body naked or clothed or in any state of disrobe that feels appropriate to you in the present moment and also acknowledges that that decision may change from moment to moment. We invite you to ask yourself what makes you feel powerful, holy, wild, sensual, free, and totally you and to celebrate your body soul union from that place.

Among Ducks, Geese and Crane

Among Ducks, Geese and Crane

The mallards were sleeping when I arrived armed with half a bag of wheat bread for them and an oatstraw infusion for myself to help combat the heat as temperatures rose towards the upper nineties mingling with New York City pollution creating both a sweltering and suffocating day. I squatted in a shady spot below a tree and simply watched. A green headed mallard opened one eye in my direction and floated about a foot away from me towards his mate. Four adult Canadain geese and another group of Mallards roosted on the other side of the pond about thirty feet away. The babies were missing this morning. After sitting in silence for about ten minutes, I pulled out my oatstraw infusion took a large swallow to rehydrate and then pulled out my bag of bread. A mallard twitched its tail as if suddenly sensing the food human relationship. I removed a piece and inconspicuously began to crumble it and slid it down the rocks towards the mallard couple closest to me. The male mallard stood watch as if to say ‘Honey you go first,’ while the female had her share. Seeing her eat well and recognizing there was abundance available, the male finally joined in. Two other male mallards caught on that there was a free food frenzy going down on the west bank and began paddling their way over, only to have the male of the mallard couple chase them off with some angry quacks and bill jabs into their sides. The mallard couple feasted happily for a few minutes until their ecstasy of being fed overtook them and their sounds of rapturous eating rose into cacophonous quacks alerting the other ducks and then the geese to the free buffet. After a moment two other adult Canadian geese appeared followed by four preteen grayish goslings. All the winged life made a hasty run/swim across the muddy pond in my direction. Inspired by the family unit of the geese and their quadruplets, I doted most of the bread on the young goslings and some on the parents – hey being parents is hard work – especially goose parents in Central Park in New York City. The preteens crawled up the rocks enthusiastic enough to walk on my legs and eat out of my hand and then snatch the bread all together. I laughed and snapped some candid photos of the youngster, astonished at their boldness. The parents of these young awkward preteens were fierce and did not take their parenting lightly. They wanted only the best for their children and worked very much in scarcity consciousness – ‘come too close to my children or their food and you’ll leave minus a few feathers’ sort of consciousness. Mama goose was a fierce force. During my previous visits, after I fed my feathered friends all of my offerings, mother goose would walk right up to me, hiss at me in a warning as if to say “Bring more next time and off with you now!” It was awe-inspiring to witness this power couple in the park. During some choice duck and geese feedings, if mallards swam too close to the young geese, a goose parent would chase them not just to run them off but actually to latch onto the offending mallard’s tail and pull out their hind feathers. I saw on several occasions this remarkable event where a daring mallard began taking more then his fair share of the bread and a goose parent lunged for him, it’s beak clamping onto the mallard’s tail and pulled back a full bill full of plumage. Later I would see little tufted balls of duck feathers floating away with the current and puddling up on the banks of the pond.

Today as the heat bore down, both geese and ducks were overly enthusiastic to not have to work very hard for the lunch. The sun bore down hard and I put aside the bread and leaned against the tree to sip oatsraw infusion I’d brought with me. As the ducks and geese pecked at a few crumbs left, a sudden stillness seemed to settle on the pond. A hush came over the wildlife and everything seemed to pause, a white kite cut the air and descended slowly, black pencil legs with large and delicate branch like feet unfolded effortlessly and descended on the mud patch in the middle of the pond. The white kite-like bird landed without a ripple in the water and stood perfectly still with a soft statuesque presence. The crane had arrived. Her long neck lengthened for a moment as she surveyed her surroundings and the other inhabitants of the pond. After taking in her new landscape, her neck slowly returned to a large S curve as she gently lowered her long sharp orange beak to lightly fluff her plumage. A duck gave an uncomfortable low quack and shuffled aside, as if among a peasants gathering royalty had just entered the room and made itself known. Hopeful for engagement, I tossed some of the wheat crust with a pitchers throw towards the crane who was standing in the very middle of the pond on a mud bank. The crust landed a few feet away. The crane stood statuesque with a sense of regalness permeating her being. Deigning not to even flick her head in the arching movement of the crust nor where it landed, a few low squatting ducks waddled over to take up the scraps. I tried again and the crane merely turned its head as if to magnify the beauty of its profile and to let me know that something so beautiful would never stoop for mere crumbs. She was majestic. Passerbys stopped in their tracks to pause at her beauty. Slowly, the impulse for movement rippling down her neck and spine and finally towards her feet, she began to stride across the mud island picking up her branch like feet and placing them down with such lightness that the water beneath them showed not a ripple. The hierarchy was clear. Ducks, Geese, … Crane. I watcher her coronation walk until she disappeared through the tunnel of a stone bridge, off to impress the other wild-life and urban life near-by. After a few breathless moments where time and my body simply stood still from witnessing such beauty, I came back to a baby goose nibbling on my sandal. I snapped back, laughed and gave the ganders the rest of my offerings and stood to brush myself off.

Witnessing the inner intelligence and workings in nature brought a silent wisdom into my body. The chivalry of a mallard fending for it’s mate, the geese raising their family with ferociously aggressive survival instincts, and the crane, a glimpse of wildlife royalty. A deep satisfying quiet settled over my being understanding in this moment that at times I was all of these birds in all of these relationships, a chivalrous partner, a ferocious and protective mother, a Queen. Deep and present I gather my belongings and left the park, a little more wise and a tad more integrated than when I entered it.

Sensual Shamanic Yoga

Sensual Shamanic Yoga -

(image by Susan Seddon Boulet)

It was an intimate gathering this past Monday evening, the final class in Sensual Shamanic Yoga. Five of us gathered and held space for ourselves and the practice. I had been getting the hit for a week now to move deeper into animal spirit energy with the class. We began our class by heightening our five senses and moving deeper into scent, taste, skin sensation, sight without eyes and acute awareness to the subtle frequencies of sound.

We then journeyed to receive the animal that was most useful to merge with during the first part of class. Mother Spider appeared to me. We bowed and acknowledged each other and then merged into each other making the connection, linking our nervous systems. My legs spun inwards and energy surged up through my eight limbs and deep into the spindles of my belly. My hands were delicate but strong and four additional etheric legs spun out of my body giving me supreme balance held up by an octahedron of energy and many eyes. The animal body is confident and aware of the totality of her presence at all times. She never ceases to exist in any part of herself. There is never a removed sense of consciousness from any part of the body, she and the body have become one. Nature demands this unwavering presence for survival – to merge fully with the body, to align the body / spirit relationship with nature because the elements and the food chain demand existing in a constant state of oneness. The animal kingdom exists in constant meditation, fully in every present moment and hyper-aware of everything around it. It does not forget how to find food or build nests or migrate to warmer climates. It remembers; it opens to its truest state of being.

Shamanic Yoga Journey:

Getting in touch with the animal body ~

Tools, eye coverings, yoga mat, blanket

Lie down on your yoga mat in an area of your home you consider sacred and that allows for movement. Feel your body against the Earth. Begin to deepen your breath and settle into the body. Once you have settled begin to visualize yourself in place you feel to be sacred. This could be the room your are currently in, a place from your childhood, a place in nature or a magical place you’ve just created. Feel yourself in this new surrounding. Once you feel in a calm space in your new sacred surrounding, put out a call to your animal spirit, holding the intention that the animal spirit most appropriate for this embodiment journey will appear to you. Be open to receive whatever animal spirit shows up without judgment. Acknowledge each other with a bow and ask permission to merge with your animal spirit. When permission is granted feel yourself inside its body, its legs, its eyes, its heartbeat, its energy. Once the connection has been made, slowly begin to rise up off your reclining positioning on your yoga mat and move to your hands and knees maintaining the connection with you animal spirit. Begin to allow the freedom of movement and the merging of your energy inside the animal blueprint of energy to influence how you move.

If you have a yoga practice try two rounds of Sun Salutes in the energy of this animal to give your movement structure and be open to how the animal’s energy influences your yoga routine. After the Sun Salutes return to a gentle movement meditation on your mat in your animal body. Allow any new or intuited yoga poses of this animal spirit to rise up form within you and express themselves through movement and sound on your mat. When that feels complete, come to a resting pose and release the connection with your animal spirit. Ask your animal spirit if it has anymore information that is useful to share with you at this time. Acknowledge your animal spirit with a bow or other gesture of gratitude and journey back fully to your human body. Move through two rounds of Sun Salutes on your mat intending your human body and human energy. Close your practice with Savasana or seated meditation.

Wisdom from a Weather Witch

“A little bit of salt just makes ice mad” my father said in the blizzard conditions of Tulsa over the Christmas holiday when he and my mother had been housebound for almost a week due to poor weather conditions and a city with not enough snow ploughs. My father is a weather witch, or more conventionally he runs an HVAC business but I've seen him in our backyard when I was young tracking electrical lines with dowsing rods and lets just say, being part Cherokee, his tribal roots and daily meditation practice often spurred moments of spiritual insight to move through him in the guise of weather metaphors.

So why were these same words echoing through my head this week during an Iyengar yoga class where I was strapped into Supta Virasana. This was the third excruciating Supta Virasana in three days. Why? Because I only do this a little bit. In fact, on general principle I tended towards ignoring the pose completely until my Iyengar yoga teacher decided he’d begin every class for a week with this pose. This was the third class of Supta Virasana in three days and my body was PISSED!

“A little bit of salt just makes ice mad,” my father’s voice echoed in my head again and I almost snorted trying to hold in my laughter. I saw clearly my child-like behavior around not wanting to eat my yogic brussell sprouts because they tasted bad. If I continued to just do this pose a little, it would always piss me off because I wasn’t getting to the core issue of what was underlying all this pain and anger in my knees. I would continue to avoid the pose all together like being permanently home-bound in an ice storm or I would do it half-hearted and just get pissed and slip on the ice anyway. This week my Iyengar teacher encouraged us to do this pose everyday with the support of sitting on a phone book until our sit bones could come to the floor. “It takes dedication to the practice,” he said. “Each day you do this pose, take a page out of the phone book.” Today I got my phone book. Thanks Dad.

Meditation:

What do you ignore routinely because it’s painful or uncomfortable even though it’s useful?

Balancing Dualities: Iyengar Erotica

My body and my spiritual temperament have always been watery, mutable, sensual, earthy. I am a flow Goddess with water as my medicine. I wash away sharp edges and lubricate parched places in the soul. The Vinyasa Yoga practice, from the very beginning, came to me quickly and easily. My Piscean, naturally flexible, Kapha energy flowed in its element through the different asanas with ease and grace. Moving like a dolphin, cutting the water, leaping from one dive into another, my body surged through the yoga practice, swimming, twisting, balancing, bending, ebbing and flowing, a natural match. For months and then years, I practiced this practice, my body’s practice, until one day I was on my mat and realized I wasn’t feeling anything. Warrior poses felt no different than pigeon pose, Scorpion no different than Handstand. With all of this watery energy, I had lost the container of my body. My practice had no bones, no container, no foundation, it was just water sloshing about. This watery energy was also washing over into my orgasmic life affecting the overall quality of prana in my body. It was showing up in my orgasms, or lack there-of - unattainable, watered-down, wishy-washy. Getting into the poses didn’t mean anything to me, they were simply shapes my body was copying from memory or a visual reference. I felt nothing from the inside of the pose. I was, quite literally, flopping around in my practice like a fish. Water energy had overtaken my being and I was somehow lost in the element searching for some sort of sensation in my body and finding none.

Frustrated, I spent some time off the mat, began lifting weights, trying to fire up my bogged down energy. And then one day, as fate would have it, on a whim, I stumbled into a yoga studio in midtown and signed up for an Iyengar class. I’d had my beef with Iyengar in the past - pretentious, too masculine, drab practice. I reluctantly rolled out my mat, looking at the stodgy teacher student regalia, this was yoga for nerds class. The teachers were quite asexual with a practicality about the body that speaks more to mathematics than artistry. Like most classes, Iyengar has its own fashion statements and I’m afraid its fallen on hard times, as its probably about as cool as the pocket protector and horn-rimmed glasses of yoga. Students and teachers wear plain crew neck teachers and tight form fitting balloon-leg boxer briefs and I assume at some point in their lives were acquainted with Dungeons and Dragons. Lets just say, the Iyengar outfit will never make the shelf of Lululemon. But all those judgments were soon to be released and a new reality was to take shape in my body that day. The Iyengar practice is thorough, precise, articulate, intelligent, clean. Everything Vinyasa wasn’t. Iyengar teachers move through the body dissecting the anatomy and putting it back together in bite size ways for the body, mind and spirit to integrate. It is a wooden practice, a masculine practice, a disciplined practice that uses intelligence, repetition and discernment. It is also a bondage practice with rope walls, meticulously placed straps, and absurd suspension poses which, coincidently was the exact practice my body needed to rebalance itself. In this fate-guided yoga class that I walked in on, even in the first pose, something shifted in my practice. There was a core energy that became activated in my body. It was Earth and metal and air and fire. Standing in Tadasasna became one of the most orgasmic experiences of my life. I felt the entirety of the inner landscape of my body in a simple opening pose. While my feminine flow Goddess bemoaned this practice from a distance, once she entered in, a rapture unfolded in my body that it had not previously known. The structure and inner architecture of the practice created the container that my flowy, sensuous disposition had been missing. I spontaneously burst into light body orgasms in class, trembling, trying to conceal my ecstatic state. Something about the offerings of these asexual yoga teachers flooded my body with renewed passion and sought after ecstasy. My Yin Flow Goddess in her second wave feminist movement had on a subconscious level rejected the yang, her polarity, as inferior, most likely from the inner state of wounded feminine that all our creative flow Goddesses have suffered from the violence and oppression of the patriarchy. Lucky for me and my flow, we stumbled into just the right practice to balance the inner polarities and dualities of my watery Goddess nature with the architecture and form I had been missing. Dualities heighten our awareness and understanding of the universe both inner and outer. I’ve always been a naturally sensual and orgasmic person. There have also been times where my watery flow and sensual nature have also been thrown out of balance with an over excess of like energy. Here in the Iyengar yoga practice was the balance my body needed. My inner flow Goddess arrived even more powerfully complimented by her counterpart Purusha to Prakrati, masculine to feminine, form to formless, bondage to liberation. In the extremes of our polarities comes balance and liberation.

I began the Iyengar practice about two years ago to compliment my own flow practice and it has been a staple in my life ever since. When I drift away from it, I feel the side-effects not just in my physical body, but also in my creative projects, my relationships, my communication with people, even in my spirit. Things become sloppier, less focused. But when I maintain a balance of my Yin Flow Goddess with the discipline and intelligence of the masculine Iyengar practice, my creativity heightens and my inner Goddess roars forth with even more power and creative orgasmic energy. I have a tremendous amount of gratitude for the discipline and commitment it takes to teach an Iyengar practice, undergoing a minimum two year training and then mentoring for years with senior teachers. It is a true practice of discipline and one that assists me in bringing a greater source of integrity and awareness to my creative and my orgasmic life. And let this be known, I have a crush on everyone of my Iyengar teachers.

A Love Letter to Naked Yoga & it's Community

I’ve been perusing my computer today, moving through old photo shoots of when I first began Naked Yoga and dared to bare my asana on high-rise buildings, on Sandy-Hook Beach, on a third story roof in the meat-packing district, all in the name of freedom, celebration and love. As I sifted through over three years of old photos, I was shocked at my very visceral response to them. Some, quite literally took my breath away. I remember at one time, being afraid to look at the photos of me doing yoga naked, hiding them deep in the belly of the hard drive on my computer. But today, something made me look and when I did, I saw such unmistakable beauty present in this practice that I had been previously unavailable to fully witness.

Naked yoga has been one of the most beautiful and self-sustaining practices of my life. As a woman holding space for this practice, naked yoga, more than anything else, has assisted me in moving through the body-image bullshit that has accumulated throughout my life. This practice drops me into one-ness with my body, releasing the bully of the mind the and the judgment of the ego. The naked yoga practice has been a constant in my life for the past three and a half years, a flowering perennial that continues to bloom, sustain and resurrect itself each year. Of course when I brought my movement to NYC, I was sure I was the first to trail blaze this movement. But sadly, I’m reminded there is no original work, there were already a few naked yoga circles going in NYC. One was a men’s group Hot Nude Yoga in Chelsea caterings to primarily gay and bisexual men, another was in Brooklyn, male run and male attended but allowed women and then there was a group already led by a woman Britt McMurray who had taken over naked yoga classes from a woman named Wendy Tremaine. I collaborated with Britt for a short time until she left the practice entirely and shortly after that I birthed Phoenix Temple to hold ongoing classes for Naked Yoga.

Not only has this practice helped heal my own shame I’ve felt over my body, but it’s made me more at ease in the world. I find there are so many more layers I have to work through when I attend a clothed yoga class – not just layers of clothing but also of karma keeping me both separate from the experience, the group and the yoga.

This practice has been so dear to me and the press has been forth coming and also, surprisingly filled with grace. I am amazed at how this practice transforms lives. Over the past three and a half years, there has been a shocking lack of ill-intentioned people showing up in my Temple Space and to the practice. Most are earnest, nervous, with a desire and longing to continue to unravel their own societal shame conditioning, reaching for a moment of stillness and freedom in the galloping pace of New York City. Each time, I feel myself go into contraction around a pose in class; ‘ oh my god, my ass is in the air, and I think I have a hemorrhoid from this cleanse I’ve been doing’ I Breathe, Release and Surrenders. Ahhh. This practice has been my lifeblood. It is always expanding, changing, growing and I love it.

Gratitude and love to the community who has shown up to this practice, from those who have made up the core of our community, to those teaching it in other communities and those who have previously taught and have passed on the torch to the next generation, to the women who dare to come to class or dare to think about coming to class, to those who simply practice in their living rooms and to those who google naked yoga wanting to see naked chicks in exotic poses and who find this and are transformed, Thank you. Thank you for daring, for loving, for being.

ISIS Phoenix – Founder Naked Yoga NYC

www.nakedyoganyc.com