Workshops & Retreats
What you seek is seeking you - Rumi
Workshops are excellent opportunities to refine your knowledge. Through one time offerings and series, you get to enhance your understanding of the material and further explore the details and subtleties of a practice.
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Retreats are the opportunity to stop, listen, slow down and re-unite to yourself and the life around you; to reflect on our life choices . Turn off electronics, distractions, and attachments, to offer yourself the gift of contemplation. Our very busy lives consumes us; we move fast, survive, get through each day, to do it all over again. Let yourself recalibrate and have the space to know what is important and what is not; to have the clarity of mind to recognize your choices. Come participate with like minded individuals, as we build community and share the importance of coming home to our authentic selves by nurturing your inner home with the practices of yoga through body, mind and heart, pranayama and meditation.
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Transitioning into Spring: A Katonah Yoga Workshop
Abhaya Yoga, DUMBO
Sunday, March 29th | 12 - 2pm
Nevine Michaan describes the Katonah method as using “classical Hatha yoga with Taoist theory, geometry, magic, mythology, metaphor, and imagination — in a practical framework designed to potentiate personal and communal well-being.”
The goal in this workshop is to create a better way of orienting and organizing our bodies as we encounter changes in the seasons. As we approach Spring, it is time to flush out any residual winter energy. We will work with backbends to help open our thighs, liver, lungs and eyes so we can see better into the future.
In Chinese medicine, Spring is correlated with the element of wood which governs the liver. The wood element refers to our roots and connections. By orienting our yoga postures through Katonah measure and metaphor, your practice will become more grounded and expansive.
Expect a physical asana practice filled with energizing movement, backbends, theory, and breath work fueled by your imagination. There will be lots of hands-on adjustments.
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We’ll explore:
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Breath work
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Katonah Yoga Shapes and Theory
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Detailed breakdown of backbends (active + supportive)
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Hands on Adjustments and Partner work
This workshop is bankable towards your 200-hour Katonah Yoga® certification
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Cost: $55 | $65 at door
Location: Abhaya yoga | Dumbo - 32 Pearl St. 718-682.3271
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The body as the Abode by Nevine Michaan/illustrated by Susan Fierro
The Magic Square Workshop - Your Body as Your Abode
at Yogi's and Yoginis
Sunday, April 26 | 2:15-4:45
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The Magic Square has its roots in 3000 BCE China when Emperor Fu-xi was meditating by the Lo-Shu river. A pattern he saw in nature, on the back of a turtle, eventually became the foundation for the ancient Chinese divinatory practice called the I-Ching. In her Katonah Yoga practice, Nevine Michaan placed this pattern, the Magic Square, as a map on the front of the human body. The sequence of numbers within the Magic Square become a route, a mapping system, to reorient our physical bodies and minds. The magic square is the foundational theory for Katonah Yoga.
In this workshop we will explore the practical uses of the Magic Square and how we can apply it to any part of the body to reorient and reorganize our bodies and minds. We will begin with a lecture and discussion, then move on to yoga postures so that you will experience and learn how to use the magic square in your practice. We will end with breath-work, the elixir of life force energy, qi, prana.
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We will cover:
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Theory and Lecture
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Pranayanma | breath exercises
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Traveling through a variety of poses
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Feet and Hand mapping
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Cost: $55 | $65 day of
Yogi's and Yoginis 432 6th Ave | Trains: F/N/G 7th AVe stop or 9th st.
718-965-2380
The Lo Shu Magic Square
Moving into Stillness
A Hatha yoga, Pranayama + Meditation Workshop.
Yogi and Yoginis
Coming soon!
The systems of Hatha yoga and breath work have been documented and practiced for thousands of years. In traditional yoga, asana is meant to prepare the body for pranyama and pranyama prepares for meditation. In this workshop, expect a rigorous Katonah asana practice and Kundalini breath work that will help ease gracefully into mediation.
Yoga and breath exercises help to slow us down and observe our patterns. With meditation we watch our habitual thoughts, some of them that cause suffering. As we observe the thoughts coming and going, we can find peace and tranquility.
Why meditate? To meditate is to come back home to a place where there is no resistance, where we hear the subtleties and nuances of our highest truths. Some people have described these moments also as the “void,” “a liberated state of being,” or “a state of transcendence.
What we will cover:
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Readings from Patajanli’s 8 limbs of yoga and the Tao which speaks of “the way.”
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A Katonah yoga practice
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Kundalini Pranayama techniques (breath exercises)
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Guided Meditation
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Cost: $50 | $60 day of
Yogi's and Yoginis 432 6th Ave | Trains: F/N/G 7th AVe stop or 9th st.
718-965-2380
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BEGINNER SERIES PLUS
Fridays, Feb, 7, 21, 28 March 6 | 4 - 5:15 pm
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No matter where we are in life, it is essential to cultivate habits and skills that allow us in live as our best selves. This 4 week series is dedicated to introducing tools and techniques that provide support & guidance, structure and strength, competence & imagination, leaving you empowered and joyful.
We will practice through Katonah yoga's lens, where one of the principle metaphors is "our body is our house": how we live in it, mess it up and clean it is reflected in our every day life. We will orient and organize ourselves by setting up conditions through measure, maps, recipes, and geometry to get a clearer view of our habits and patterns.
Please join me in a safe supportive environment that builds fluency, stability and wholesomeness.
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Located at Spoke the Hub: 748 Union St. between 5/6th ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn
Cost: 4 week series | $140
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RAISE YOUR CHI
A Katonah Yoga workshop
coming soon!
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Chi in Chinese philosophy is your life force, your energy flow, and breath. Our yoga practices can be exuberant when our life force flows effortlessly.
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Sometimes we don’t realize that we are working too hard, at yoga, at home or in the office. And when we work too hard, we often over extend ourselves and become resentful or exhausted. Yoga postures give us an opportunity to work intensely while experiencing and observing our thoughts and feelings in action, and in stillness. It’s not about how far one gets into a pose or how perfect the pose is.
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Through transforming our yoga practice, we raise our chi and become more in touch with our emotional and physical experiences. Practicing intelligently and joyfully will support a life of longevity and grace.
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In this workshop, you will learn how:
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to use your imagination to experience your body differently—using metaphoric recipes, maps and geometry.
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Breath techniques to facilitate dimension and capaciousness
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Props such as blocks, straps, and blankets are used for renovation to make structure formal in order to release personal effort and unconscious habits, so that you’re able to access your chi effortlessly
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to achieve more effortless balance during and after the practice
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Hands on adjustments take you out of your personal habits. When you are adjusted. you release unneeded effort. Adjustments provide feedback and can shift your perspective and even invite an organ or gland to reboot and free itself so that you can move more freely.
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