Halloween masks

Wednesday night’s class at the yoga center 540-7…quick summary

Since Halloween is coming up I thought it would be fun to tie in Halloween to the theme. I talked about masks. How Halloween provides as a time to put on masks and costumes. We can pretend to be someone else. However after Halloween we take the masks and the costumes off. I talked about the invisible masks or armor that we wear in order to protect ourselves. These masks aren’t necessarily bad because they give us an identity, the protect us… But the probable is we tend to misidentify with mask. We think we are the mask. We don’t realize it is just something that we can use and that we can take off. I said imagine if you were Frankenstein for Halloween and then you never took off the mask and the costume and you began to think you were Frankenstein and after wearing the costume for one year, two years… you were positive you were Frankenstein, you thought you skin was green. Taking off these masks can be scary and puts us in a vulnerable position but I think one of the best places to show up for yourself and be volunteerable is on your yoga mat. I encouraged the students as they moved through the practice to notice if they were “wearing” certain masks in their poses and if they could soften removed the mask and move inside. Become sensitive to the bhavana. Bhavana is a Sanskrit word that means the feeling tone of the pose. Thoughts to help connect you to the bhavana of the pose…What is the pose communicating? If the pose had a color what would it be? What emotion word it be? It was a great class. We continued to work on rooting the femur bones back and I introduced some new poses that most students hadn’t seen.

Two critiques:

1. I said shit in class. I was explain how life can be hard or something and said shit. Oops. I am trying to eliminate swear words from my vocabulary in general because I don’t think they are nice, I think they negatively affect my energy just saying and hearing them, and it is disrespectful to some people (especially in Utah).
2. I could have done better at tying my theme in through the whole class. I continued to mention it but I could have done it more and more smoothly.

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