Spring is the time of the year when your body naturally wants to cleanse itself. So it is a good time to allow your body to let go of all the stuff that it doesn’t want including toxins, bad habits and old aches and pains. It is a good time to allow the body to cleanse by eliminating toxins including dairy, sugar, bread, fats and oils, alcohol, coffee, tea and other stimulants including spices. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Liver and Gall Bladder meridians are most prominent at this time of the year. The best foods to support the Liver and Gall Bladder are leafy greens and lightly cooked foods (steaming, light frying and par-boiling). Here’s some Spring side dishes from Linden Brooks.

Creating a personal ‘sacred’ space is an integral part of establishing an effective meditation practice. Most children inherently claim some space in their world and make it their own. Whether it is their bedroom, a cubby-house or under a bush, it belongs to them. It’s where they go when they want to think and make sense of life. As adults, most of have lost the ability to find a physical or emotional space to regroup. But if you are looking to support your meditation practice, reclaiming your space is essential.

British philosopher, historian, mathematician and Nobel Prize winner, Bertrand Russell, once said that an essential part of being happy is not having all the things you want. So what is happiness? What do we really want? And how do we get it? The relentless quest for happiness has plagued us mere mortals since the dawn of time and is at the core of philosophical, psychological, spiritual and even scientific questioning. In recent years there has been an explosion of books, studies, academic research, conferences, workshops and even stickpins about the art of happiness.

When I moved from Sydney to Cape Town in South Africa it took me a while to work out that I was energetically out of kilter. Initially I thought it was just good old-fashioned culture shock. I was used to the feverish buzz of Sydney but Cape Town had a different beat. It wasn’t until a friend told me that Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain had a strong energetic relationship to the planetary Chakras* that the penny dropped. The city’s vibrational energy was different to where I’d come from – I’d moved to a different part of the earth’s ‘body’ and I realised I had to shift gears to adapt. That experience of the earthly charkas also helped me understand the concept of chakras within the human physical body…

Yoga in the Park is on Saturday mornings in Rushcutters Bay Park. I teach Japanese/ Ryoho Yoga Therapy which combines traditional Indian Hatha Yoga with the meridian-based healing arts and Five Element Theory of China and Japan.
Beginners welcome. Bring a yoga mat or towel. Classes are only $10 per class.