Alaria Ritchie
271 Spring Street K9A 3K3 Cobourg, ON, Canada

I often refer to people's spines and that we want our spines to be mobile like bicycle chains, this is so cool!

Nature dancing! I love these little twigs They do remind me of my yoga pose sketches

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing. It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no ...longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution. It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day. A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure. True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do. It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t. It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening. If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with treating yourself and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness. It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to fix yourself and start trying to take care of yourself and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place. It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people. It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life not escape from it. -Brianna Wiest [Illustration: Yaoyao Ma Van As Art ]

Fancy a break from the usual Tuesday evening? Join me for Yoga for Stress Reduction ONLINE at 7pm! It is definitely one of my favourite classes of my week as I am at home and so are you! Stress levels are through the roof lately and I want to keep shouting it out, that there a variety of tools that can help you to instantly receive relief. Let me help! PM to join me for some gentle Yoga tonight!

Join us, Living Well Movement Centre in partnership with The Kimberley Fund for a virtual Yoga class supporting the YWCM Durham. Next Saturday, tickets are $15.and can be purchased through the Eventbrite link within the event listing. Thanks so much for considering, I hope to see you Zoom!

Building your body intelligence is worth the effort. Breathe better, sleep better, move better. Movement can bring you joy, calm you, invigorate you; with Hanna Somatic Education, you WILL move more freely, with confidence and control. Private sessions are available, Online and in person. PM me to learn more.... This is a great article, check it out!

I worked with a client yesterday whom has been suffering with terrible Vertigo for months, she has seen specialists in the past and the issue had recurred more recently but she did not want to go to the city to see her previous Dr. due to COVID. She found this video online and together we gave it a try! The client did not want to do it by herself as with vertigo it can be very difficult to pay attention to what you are doing if your head is swirling so I guided her through t...he process. We did it 3 times with 15 minutes between each repetition (we did some gentle movement practice in between) and she walked out beaming as she felt 95% better, we will repeat again next week! Here's the video we used as a reference. I have observed the Epley Maneuver in person, and have worked with Physio's that specialize in Vertigo. I always recommend seeing a vertigo specialist, if this is your first time experiencing this. Let me know what you think! https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=1VWyPgfMuvM

May gravity keep you grounded xo