About Cultivating Your Awareness

At Cultivating Your Awareness my mission is to offer you tools to add to the toolbox for your journey of health and wellness. Learn practices that engage holistic methods to help you manage stress and cultivate personal awareness through meditation, movement, and breathing techniques gathered from traditional yoga therapy and other positive health practices whether you are retired, an athlete, a stay-at-home parent, a student or juggling life in a high pressure job. 

You might laugh, you might sweat. You will get quiet, and you will get focused! Whether it's stress at work or home, a competing athlete with chronic injury or a mature fitness enthusiast getting back into the swing of things after injury, repair, or replacement, or you're a fitness/wellness enthusiast somewhere in the middle, yoga therapy is here to help you bring balance back into your lifestyle. 

Current Practice Being Offered 

4 Week Workshop - Breathing and  Meditation for Relaxation

June 17th to July 13, 2024

This practice is useful for everyone, particularly those who do not yet know the art of sitting still … kids, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, et all. It can also prove to be especially beneficial for people with anxiety, high stress demands of life or job situations. And let us not forget stay-at- home parents and caregivers who are juggling life and responsibilities. Learning and practicing control of your breath helps energize yet stills the mind. You become more aware of how you are breathing and why you are breathing the way you are. This is where meditation blends with the practice of breathing.

• Join via Zoom. Begins June 17th @ 7:30 PM For Orientation 

• Mon -Wed-Friday 8:00 PM Enjoy 30 Minute Breathing Practice.

• Saturday 9 to 10 AM for 30 Minutes of Breathing and Yoga Therapy to get your weekend started right

• This practice is taken at your own risk.

• Contact us for additional information. 

As you cultivate the awareness of your being, your mindfulness is enhanced by the culturing of your mind. Look at it like this. You cultivate the soil in your mind’s garden and plant the seeds of your awareness. As you cultivate your garden and culture connections of the various aspects of creating wellness in body, mind and spirit, you are able to feel the growing abundance of positive awareness

The value of the principle of “culturing the mind” for discipline and control of body, breath, and relaxation of the mind, gives you a pleasant approach to reach higher states of awareness and calm wellbeing.

 
Consistent practice of these simple techniques can help you nurture the path of reaching greater clarity spiritually, mentally, intellectually, physically, and emotionally. 

This does not happen overnight. It's like growing a garden ... it takes time to culture the mind and cultivate your awareness. You are working on the garden of your being. You can't rush your garden's blooming! Let your mind relax and grow.

The purpose of this practice is to make you aware of the three different sections of breathing – Abdominal, Thoracic and Clavicular. Learning and practicing control of your inhalation and exhalation of breath helps energize yet stills the mind. You become more aware of how you are breathing. This knowledge assists in bringing a calm to daily life in addition to giving you the benefits of a stronger and more balanced respiratory system. 

 Embrace dynamic movement, which is athletic by nature. 

Learning to relax in movement helps develop inner awareness, and tame anxious energy. Combined with focused breathing, your body's movements can lead to meditative, and reflective thoughts. 

Awareness of body and mind allows a combination of balanced relaxation and energized focus at the same time. This manner of mindful movement is helpful when dealing with the injuries and returning to balanced movement once again. The goal of this practice is to guide, and remind one who knows their body, how to move it in a manner that is both dynamic and static by nature. 

For example, you will hear my modifications during the practice. I may use a strap or a block. Chairs, walls, and doors are great aids, too. You may not have to make any modifications. Then again, you may still be a pretzel and just want to engage in group energy practice! The more the mellower!

Meditation or Reflection involves learning the power to concentrate on a single thought, deep total body relaxation, and slowed breathing. 

This makes room for growth of calmness and a continual awareness. Through the release of emotional suppressions, the opportunity to achieve better emotional, mental and physical health leading to greater happiness becomes possible.  It may be challenging at first but as you practice more, the easier it becomes to focus on the breath and relax the mind. 

  Yoga was not popular or well known by athletes or fitness enthusiasts in the 70s, and 80s. I applied what I learned at VYASA-LA to what I know about athletics and the fitness lifestyle coupled with what I felt most athletes and physically active people would benefit from in yogic practice to maintain their fitness health and become less prone to injury. I base this on my personal experience.   

The benefits of breathing and meditation practiced regularly increases calm focus in competition level athletes as it does for everyone who embraces the practices. This training has produced beneficial results in today's youth and is becoming a welcome release for today's working professionals who are coping with elevated levels of stress.

I believe mature fitness-minded people will benefit in a shift of their still active fitness mindset, if they are willing to embrace a program of building strength, flexibility, and stamina for healthy balance and fitness at their level of ability regardless of age. I have had to do this myself since I am no longer the pretzel I used to be… a result of living a continually active life. The “no pain no gain” mantra has a different meaning now. I am grateful to be moving and active. 

Enhance your body and balance awareness with SANDDUNE Stepper in 2024 and Beyond.   Improve motor skills, reaction time, on a low impact surface and it's easy to use. 

Your job has you standing or sitting all day, meaning that your lower back and body are being compromised. Using the SANDDUNE Stepper can help alleviate the pressure in the back and legs caused from sitting or standing for long periods of time. This is especially true if you are an active person and are now sitting or standing without breaks for long hours. You may be experiencing pain and swelling in the legs and feet because you are not as active as you would be normally. Why? The lymph nodes have become sluggish and circulation has slowed. Periodic padding can help alleviate this issue. 

If you are not getting outside as much to walk or exercise or allowing yourself the time to practice physical wellbeing at home or don't have the space because everyone is at home, give yourself the invigorating challenge of walking, jogging, exercising, or working at your desk in the sand at home. You take the SANDDUNE Stepper to the backyard, the kitchen, the garage, the home gym. Use it while watching a movie, listening to a podcast. You will give yourself a 20% more challenging workout than if you were at the beach! 

Exercise with the SANDDUNE Stepper to help 

activate and strengthen your body

The SANDDUNE Stepper is a new “balance pad system” designed specifically to treat foot, ankle, knee, hip and lower back pain.  It is a simple exercise and rehabilitative method for fitness enhancement and general well-being.

It is made from a combination of memory and closed cell foam (polyurethane foam blend) with a combination of two separate platforms, angled with a slight pitch for independent training, rehabilitation, and dynamic movements.

This low-impact tool leaves you with the feeling that you are walking on a sandy beach. Its secret is that it delivers an immediate bounce-back effect, otherwise known as Mirror Resistance. This means the energy you put into the device is delivered back into your body. It is a great tool to utilize for prehabilitation before surgery to strengthen muscles in the area around targeted for surgery, like a hip replacement. Consider it as an alternative or additional tool for your rehabilitation after surgery, recovery from a debilitating illness, and/or for sports injury recovery.   It is also ideal for pre-warmup before a walk, riding your bike, jogging, or lifting weights.

Many uses include lower and upper body rotations and movements for conditioning workouts and recovery. The SANDDUNE Stepper has also proven itself to help those with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease with the benefit of low impact body movements.

·         Improve Motor Skills

·         Gentle padding Warm Up…Cardio Burst Opportunity

·         Strong Core…Improved Grace and Balance

·         High Frequency Contractions

·         Rehabilitating after surgery (hip, knee, ankle & foot)

·         Training through an injury

·         Reduced impact training & conditioning

·         Gait training for neurologic

·         Weight control and reduction

·         Strength and conditioning for older patients

Different ways to use the SANDDUNE STEPPER:

§ Improved Motor Skills for young and mature users

§ High-Frequency Contractions ...excellent for enhancing athletic  performance and fitness levels utilizing the Cardio Burst exercise

§ Gentle Padding for Warm-Up, Warm-down 

§ Strong Core…Improved Grace and Balance

§ High-frequency contractions working muscles close to the bone

§ Pre-Surgery and Post-surgery rehabilitation (hip, knee, ankle & foot)

  I was given the book, “ Wholistic Health And Living Yoga” by Malcolm Strutt, in the mid-70s and began teaching myself the “exercises” and soon realized that the “stretching,” and mind relaxation techniques were far superior to the regimen I engaged in on a regular basis for fitness, relaxation and stress relief. After helping friends with stretching and sharing what I learned from my personal yoga practice over the years, I decided to begin my certification in 2016 as a Traditional Yoga Therapy Instructor through SVyasa LA-Vivekananda Yoga which opened a new understanding of yoga. 

As a lifelong fitness enthusiast, and athlete who didn't think my body would ever age, is now a mature, inflexible yogi. The inevitable gift of the inflexibility factor allowed me to become an inflexible yogi who still has some flexibility and I work with that flexibility. I prefer to use what I have than lose what I have. I have also learned how to enhance the outside physical awareness with the inner awareness that meditation and breathing practices bring. This fulfills the definition of Yoga or Yuj which is to yoke the body, spirit, and mind. I have worked with kids, athletes, veterans, elders, officers, business owners... It is always uplifting to see students realize their progress! Come and make the most of your flexibility or inflexibility factor - props or no props! You might laugh, you might sweat. You will get quiet, and you will get focused! You will relax. But you won't know until you try!

Certified Yoga Therapy Instructor 2016 

Vivekananda Yoga Research Foundation, Los Angeles

(aka - VYASA-LA)

Namaste

  Practice for Positive Health is meant to inspire and master greater control, balance, and strength in body and mind so that you can grow to a state of being which will  allow you to develop the ability to maintain inner peace at all times, in all of your actions. You are cultivating your capacity for equanimity. It is an invitation to yoke body, breath, mind, and soul not just for your good but also for building a cohesive and productive society. 

Equanimity - The ability to concentrate your attention on any givn subject or object, and the capacity to quiet your mind at will in any given situation.

Yoke is Yoga. Yoke:  Noun. Something that couples or binds together; a bond or tie.