Wild + Free Collective
O'Brien Grande Prairie, AB, Canada

When it comes to taking care of my mental health, what has made the biggest impact is a consistent meditation/yoga nidra practice. This has been a stressful year for a lot of people and that stress has done a number on our nervous systems, activating our sympathetic (fight/flight) nervous system more often than we’d like. Do yourself a favor this week and take care of your parasympathetic (rest/digest) nervous system by spending a few moments in meditation. Taking this time ...out for yourself will help give you the energy + clarity you need to keep moving forward. If you have a 1/2hr, I’ve recorded a guided mediation/yoga nidra session for you on YouTube. hr of yoga nidra = 2 hours of deep sleep. Have an amazing Tuesday Everyone! Stacie https://youtu.be/9LWsN2hICyo

Mental Health Monday I think we can all agree that our mental health has been tested this year. It’s been heavy, so what can we do to lighten up? What I can offer you is a yogic perspective. Yoga deepens our understanding of the connection between the state of our mind and our body, and vice versa. When you take care of one, it has a direct effect on the other. ... So say something stressful happens in the world (like a pandemic) and you immediately think of future scenarios that cause a fear response in your body. These fearful future scenarios aren’t necessarily true, but the body feels it as if they are. The mind has a direct effect on the body. What happens in the body? The heart will rise, your energy will constrict and tension will be created Now if you aren’t doing anything on a regular basis to relieve this tension, it will start to compound and there will be what feels like heaviness in the body. What will that do to the mind? Well, since the body is stressed, the mind will be too. In yoga, our body’s chemistry changes. We open areas where we hold tension, breathe into these areas and encourage the prana/life energy to flow freely again. This helps us feel good in our bodies which helps our minds relax and we can enjoy the moment more Fear is contagious. Calm is contagious too. Notice during the day when you are grounded and centered in the present moment vs lost in the fear of future scenarios. And then from your heart, can you make a choice for yourself to release the tension so you can open more to the light?

Come step into a new adventure with us! Our next 200Hr Yoga Teacher Training for March-June 2021 is now open for registration! If you sign up before December 31st, 2020 you will receive $222 off of the training. To learn more, book an in person/zoom meet and greet or go to www.wildandfreecollective.ca/yoga-training

SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITY!!! We believe that EVERYONE should have the opportunity to be part of the kind of personal growth a yoga teacher training can provide. That’s why we’ve decided to give someone in our community a FULL SCHOLARSHIP to the 2021 Yoga Teacher Training + the cost of books. This is a $3500 value!! To enter all you got to do is email your answers to these 3 questions + your name and phone number to [email protected] by November 30, 2020. The sc...holarship will be granted on December 4, 2020. 1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey so far. 2. Why do you want to be part of a Yoga Teacher Training? 3. How do you plan to share what you learn or If your goal is to become a yoga teacher, how do you plan on sharing yoga with your community? Please SHARE with anyone you believe would benefit from this opportunity!

With all that’s going on in the world, life can feel a little heavy right now. As our world is going through this time of darkness it can be scary. There are a lot of unknowns with no easy answers. Our usual go to’s for figuring out what to do, how to do it, aren’t there for us like they were before. It’s like we are left in the dark, and its hard to see clearly on how to get out. From what I’ve learned in my own life, sometimes it takes being in the darkness to truly apprec...iate the light when it comes in. Knowing it will. This too shall pass. Even though we can’t see the light right now, doesn’t mean it’s not there. When you look into deep space, yes, it is so very dark, there’s a lot of unknowns of what’s even up there! Yet, what else do we have? We have the stars, so many of them shining their brilliant light upon us. We have the sun, that rises every morning, bringing with it the strength we need to keep rising up too. We are nature, and nature is us. I know for myself, when I take time to contemplate this, I trust the process of life more and it brings me comfort. I hope it does the same for you! As Sarah Williams says in one of her poems, Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light: I have loved the stars too fondly, to be fearful of the night. @ Derek Culver

1st Mental Health Monday post and I’m going to make it simple, yet incredibly effective. Here’s your daily reminder to... B R E A T H E D E E P L Y. ... There may be events that happen in our life that we have little control over that over time can affect our mental/emotional wellbeing. Every mental/emotional state we experience has a corresponding breathing pattern associated with it. Even the rhythm of our heartbeat is intimately connected to the action of our lungs. We breath in one pattern when we’re happy , another when we are another when we are depressed and so on. This gives us an amazing opportunity to develop a better relationship to our breath to help shift our moods. The best time to work with your breath is in the morning so you can carry this way of breathing with you throughout your day. The 3 Part Breath is one of the most calming, grounding breathing techniques you can do. Simple, yet incredibly effective... Inhale into the lower abdomen, then middle chest (feel your ribcage expand), and upper chest. Exhale, upper chest, middle ribcage, lower abdomen. Keep breathing this way until you feel a sense of peace within your body and mind. Hope you have an amazing Monday! Heather Bonker