Oct 25, 2023 | Sedona Yoga Retreat
The Root Board® is a bamboo platform designed for yogis practicing on uneven surfaces, like carpet or outdoors. Co-founded by Kathy McCarthy and husband Brian McCarthy, The Root Board was created to be a simple solution for yoga in all places, and a game-changer in your practice and path to well-being.
Origins
It was during the Covid-19 quarantine that Kathy and Brian, like countless others during that challenging period, found themselves jolted out of their daily routines, and yet armed with newfound time and a heightened sense of motivation to introspect and chart the course of their lives. With the yoga studios closed it was a particularly trying period for Kathy, who struggled with the feeling that her yoga practice was slipping away. The distractions of being at home, coupled with the instability of practicing on a carpeted surface, had disrupted the familiar physical and mental release she had come to depend on.
Yoga is a discipline that hinges on calming the mind, honing focus, mastering one’s breath, and striving for peak poses. What Kathy soon came to realize was that practicing asana on carpet was a source of frustration, causing joint soreness and depriving her of the inner peace and radiant energy that the physical practice of yoga imparts.
In a concerted effort to enhance her yoga space, Kathy and Brian embarked on a mission to find tranquility in their compact living space, adorned with wall-to-wall carpet. Through diligent experimentation, Brian ingeniously conceived and crafted a bamboo yoga platform that wonderfully replicated the tactile experience of a professional studio. The impact on Kathy’s practice was immediate and profound, providing the stability she desperately needed to delve deeper, find serenity, and attain her full potential. Introducing: The Root Board®. It’s a simple complement to your at-home practice space that brings a sensation of grounding and stability no matter where you set up. It, quite simply, works!
The Challenges of Practicing Yoga on an Uneven Surface
Stability is paramount in yoga, both in a physical and mental sense. The foundation you practice on plays an integral role in achieving this equilibrium. When you step onto your yoga mat, you rightfully expect a stable and reliable surface to support your practice. Unfortunately, yogis practicing on carpet at home find themselves falling short of this expectation. This instability can manifest as wobbling during standing balances or discomfort during seated positions, disrupting the flow of your practice and eroding your confidence. This struggle can be mentally taxing and physically draining, detracting from the serenity that yoga aims to deliver.
Practicing on carpet often invites gripping, which contradicts the principles of creating space and releasing tension. It also places undue stress on wrists and ankles, potentially leading to soreness and injuries, especially in poses that require bearing weight on your hands, knees, or elbows, such as plank, tabletop, or camel pose.
The soft carpeting robs practitioners of the subtle sensations necessary for challenging poses, like inversions. For instance, when inverted, the feedback your hand receives is pivotal for maintaining balance, but this feedback is absent when your hand rests on a soft surface, significantly increasing the difficulty of the pose and inviting wrist injuries.
The Root Board®: A Simple Solution
The Root Board® is a simple yet elegantly designed solution to these challenges. It consists of two bamboo pieces linked together with a jigsaw pattern, complete with ergonomic handholds that make it portable and easy to store.
Kathy and Brian chose MOSO Bamboo for several compelling reasons. Unlike wood or plastic, bamboo has a minimal environmental impact, aligning with the core values of the yoga community. It is eco-friendly and sustainable, as bamboo is a rapidly growing grass that requires fewer resources to cultivate. Bamboo also aids in protecting against soil degradation and erosion, and absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than trees. Furthermore, bamboo is biodegradable and emits fewer carbon emissions during production compared to plastic.
They also selected bamboo for its tactile qualities. It strikes a balance between being pliable enough to feel comfortable under your head, knees, or hands and rigid enough to provide a secure, stable surface for balancing poses. The porous nature of bamboo makes it relatively lightweight compared to materials like oak.
But Don’t Take It From Us — Here’s What Folks Are Saying!
Perfect for practicing on carpet!
“I was on this site looking for the heaviest mat possible to prevent sliding and buckling on my carpet when I discovered The Root Board. It’s exactly what I needed. This platform provides a solid surface for my mat, and now it feels like I’m back to practicing on hardwood. It’s sturdy, well-made, and conveniently slides under my sofa when I’m done!” – Sandra P
The best invention for Yogi’s to date!!!
“The best invention for Yogi’s ever!!! It’s easy to put together, portable, and a wrist lifesaver!!! It’s like having a studio on the go! I highly, repeat HIGHLY recommend this board for any and all Yogi’s needing a sturdy base to practice on. Two puzzle pieces that hook together, and it’s the size of a normal yoga mat. That’s as simple and safe as it sounds!!!” – LauraLeigh W
Find The Root Board® at the Sedona Yoga Festival This March!
We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with The Root Board® for the 11th Sedona Yoga Festival, happening March 14–17, 2024 (get your ticket here!) Don’t miss your chance to learn more about The Root Board®, meet Kathy and Brian, try a Root Board® for yourself, learn about wholesale or social partnership opportunities, and be entered to win a Root Board® and Root Bag Tote® (Valued at $284 Whether you are an online instructor, creator, partner, or a passionate yogi, you won’t want to miss the chance to connect with The Root Board® at their booth.
Yoga possesses the incredible power to transform individuals into kinder, calmer beings, and The Root Board® mission is to empower the yoga community so that, together, we can contribute to making the world a better place.
SPECIAL OFFER! SYF attendees will get $20 off using a code found on The Root Board® website. Visit this link to learn more.
Oct 4, 2023 | Sedona Yoga
The biggest question of our time just might be “What does Unity look like?” Spanning in-person connection, video connection, text connection, and phone connection, there are plenty of ways for us to come together and explore what it means to be in a shared or unified space. And yet while technology has brought us closer together across the globe, we are still facing so much division internationally, intra-nationally, and societally. The theme for SYF2024, All Together Now, asks us to ruminate on this: Despite being more “connected” than ever, our world is still largely defined by what separates us. How does Yoga help?
Yoga, of course, is a practice of unity, an exploration of what it means to link body and breath, thoughts and movements, stillness and evolution. It can be a deeply personal and private endeavor, but is one most effectively explored with the support and guidance of experienced teachers and community. So what happens when we come together in intention and consciousness?
There’s no shortage of studies on the power of togetherness, and as we all continue to emerge into a post-pandemic lockdown reality, there are no shortage of personal anecdotes on the importance of face-to-face togetherness, either. As writer Gretchen Kelly eloquently puts it for The Good Men Project:
There’s something special that happens when people come together. There’s a humanity in showing up to share an experience. There’s connection with people who are otherwise strangers. It gives me hope every time I go to a show. Hope because there is power in people. There is energy and strength in being united and finding a common purpose. Hope because for all of our differences, there are times when we can come together and make something incredible happen. Hope because we are all broken, flawed, beautiful people just trying to make it in this world.
As you explore what All Together Now means personally for you, we invite you to consider the following:
- How do we hold each other in community as we walk our unique paths?
- What tools and practices and networks support us in evolution of the collective consciousness as well as our own?
- How do the two interplay and are in fact one and the same?
- How do we together build the future and how do our collective and individual actions in the now serve to co-create that future?
- What does yoga have to offer us to support the will and energy required to build a just and abundant world joyfully while navigating the many crises we face together as one human family in the company and respect of our plant and animal neighbors?
Never has it been more compelling for us to proactively create — in our unique way — toward the collective goal of peace, equanimity, and compassion. The Sedona Yoga Festival is an opportunity to co-create the future you want to see, and that begins with togetherness. We can’t wait to be together with you in March!
The 11th Annual Sedona Yoga Festival is March 14–17, 2024, in Sedona. Tickets on sale now!
Lead image by Ty Dobbs.
Sep 20, 2023 | Sedona Yoga
by Lisette Cheresson, SYF Communications Director
photo by Ty Dobbs
The autumnal equinox is upon us — the moment of equal parts light and dark, night and day; the moment when the world is in a state of balance, at least on its axis. It ushers in the changing of the seasons, a moment of transition from the levity and playfulness of summer to the beginning of a more introspective season brought on by those shorter days and nights.
Yoga is many things, of course, but can be at its foundation viewed as a practice of balance; both physical and metaphysical, in mind and in body, in philosophy and in practice.
The idea of balance is touted often in asana classes: classes are sometimes constructed entirely upon sequences that build to a peak balance pose. Instructors will often use postures such as Tree Pose to illustrate that the sense of inner calm necessary to hold the pose can be illustrative in other moments or challenges in life. The resiliency required by balancing asanas can be viewed in other contexts as lessons for living a more balanced life.
The more general teachings of yoga are also pertinent as we explore the idea of balance in practice. We seek the balance of integrated movement and breath. We aim to live a life in pursuit of service to others and in the knowing of our interconnectedness. When living in integrity of our dharma, we seek balance of personal goals with those of our human family as a whole. We are called to explore the balance of light and dark in our lives, and strive for living in the light even while acknowledging the shadow of our darkness.
Sutra 2.46, “sthira sukham asanam,” can be interpreted as a philosophical call to balance. It translates to an instruction that postures need be both steady and easeful; that when we come to practice meditation or asana, we are seeking that balance of effort and ease. We open our minds and hearts to meditation when we are able to sink into our breath, and be fully in the present, without being aware of pain or unease in our physical bodies. We are in the most expressive version of asana when we are steady and still in our expression — not when we hit the most “advanced-looking” version. The balance of ease and effort defines the way that we integrate our yoga into our selves, and informs the way these lessons show up in our everyday lives.
And so, on this autumnal equinox, may you find both comfort and inspiration in your practice, and in the natural world as we tip the scales toward winter. Happy fall!
Apr 18, 2023 | Programming Spotlights, Sedona Yoga Festival Teacher Feature
By Donna Schnoor, E-RYT500/YACEP owner of Yoga4Ullc
Lead image by Arin Pitcher
As yoga practitioners, most of us have heard the term sthira sukham asanam. It is one of the most often quoted aphorisms in Patangali’s Yoga Sutras, (2.46). In general translation it stands for steadiness and ease in your seat. So what does all this have to do with the term “hugging to midline”?
The “midline” is the imaginary vertical axis that bisects the whole body, from the crown of the head all the way down to the foundation. If you’re familiar with construction, think of it like a plumb line. In Yoga think of it as the Sushumna, the vertical axis or channel in the subtle body where your pranic energy flows. The midline is the foundation in which each posture is built.
Physically drawing or (hugging) into the midline will help make your practice stronger and more stable. Instead of using the outermost muscles to support the pose, we learn to engage the deep inner muscles, so the pose starts from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
On an emotional and spiritual level, finding your midline helps us to find that inner strength and stability to cultivate balance in our lives. This balance between action and stillness, or steady and comfortable. This balance supports you from the inside, just as the physical action of muscles hugging to midline supports our bodies in practice.
Eckart Tolle speaks of “feeling the inner body as a way of connecting to the present moment”.
When we come to our first seat of practice, we find our own physical space, we turn inwards to access something deeper within ourselves in which to build our practice.
As we start to move, we begin to learn to ‘hug-in’, to firm the muscles around the bone, to create a strong and stable foundation in our practice.
Learning to ‘hold our center’ gives us the support we need when being pulled off balance with life’s experiences, whether they be physical, emotional, or mental.
When we reach Savasana, our opportunity for relaxation and integration, we find our center once again, both physically and mentally, and from this center we can experience a sense of letting go.
Explore your midline and the foundation for functional asana with Donna at SYF2023, April 27–30! Passes are available here.
Apr 18, 2023 | Programming Spotlights, Sedona Yoga Festival Teacher Feature
by Nilanjana Banerjee, RDM Studio
Lead image by The Dreamy Pomgrn8
Odissi is a 2000-year-old dance from Eastern India. This dance is rooted in yoga, bhakti and spirituality. It connects the human spirit to the divine and was performed for centuries inside the temples by female dancers. These women were the equivalent of the priestesses in the temples using powerful Sanskrit mantras and dance movements to worship and invoke the Gods and Goddesses.
Dance movement is another somatic modality like yoga, breathwork, meditation and sound bath to open up your chakras, and create more space specially in your ribcage, and hips. These are areas in the body that are most stuck in todays modern world.There are senescent cells that form when someone undergoes trauma that holds onto the memories within their cells. It’s like they are frozen in time.
Odissi dance movements are unique in the sense that there is a significant movement of the neck, rib cage and opening of the hips. According to Dr Mima, who specializes in mind body connection,
“As a woman in modern day life, you spend very little time on these areas and in fact sitting at desks, driving cars actually keeps the hips and ribs closed. Over time this constricts proper airflow and the energy within the sacral chakra. By opening the hips and ribs in this dance you increase blood flow to your sacrum and oxygenation to your lungs and chest organs. Dancing barefoot also connects the body with earth’s energy. The earth carries an electromagnetic field and when we connect barefoot with the earth we literally ground our energy and rebalance ourselves. This relieves anxiety and stress and also helps rebalance the adrenal and endocrine glands in the body.”
Both masculine (shiva) and feminine (shakthi) energies are addressed in this dance. Once the strong masculine moves and softer feminine moves are mastered, the dancer begins to internalize the moves and their meaning. This is very similar to meditation. In dance you not only connect with yourself in flow, but you are also connecting with the divine. There is deep healing when this occurs.
Nilanjana says, “working with numerous adult students, over a period of time I realized the power of my dance, how I was not only teaching them an ancient art but also healing them with my energy, giving them the power and confidence of a Devi. Be it physical injuries or deep emotional trauma, most of their traumas came to the surface during the course of my regular teaching. There was an emotional release and sometimes continuing the practice helped many deal with traumatic life situations, empowering them to find and embody the strength of the Gods/Goddesses and even transform their outcomes to a point of reaching bliss. Of course this takes time, dedication and practice. But it’s the discipline and commitment that makes all the difference.”
It is believed that one can access the Anandmaya kosha by regularly practicing this dance and being immersed in this sadhana.
Please join Nilanjana and RDM Studio for Trauma Workshop 8.00 am on Friday April 28th and an upcoming dance performance at SYF2023. Passes are available here!
Perfect for practicing on carpet!
