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This class is pretty much the popular girl at school that everyone couldn’t help but like. One breath, one movement. Every class will be different, every teacher will add a brand new spin. Do you even flow, bro?
It’s not what you think. ‘Slow’ doesn’t = ‘easy’. Imagine your Power Yoga class but at 0.5 of the speed...burn baby, burn. The slower pace of this class will allow you to explore what you’re feeling; where it feels good, where it doesn’t and ultimately, cultivate a sense of calm that sometimes, a faster class just doesn’t.
The gateway drug of Yoga. This is the class that sets fire to your abs and the idea that yoga is ‘easy’. A dynamic, fiery, mindfully sequenced class designed to get your heart rate up, your muscles shaking and your mind tuned into only what is happening within the 4 corners of your overpriced yoga mat.
Have you ever been in Savasana at the end of a practice and thought “I wish I could just do this for an hour”? ENTER YOGA NIDRA aka Yogic Sleep. And it’s literally as chill as it sounds. In this hour you will slip into a mega deep state of relaxation as your brain switches from Beta to Alpha Waves.
Hate to break it to you City peeps but you can’t live in your Yang. Sometimes you gotta balance it out, take the proverbial chill pill and let go. This almost entirely floor based practice will help you to stretch deep into places you didn’t know existed...muscles, joints, ligaments, you name it. We bet you can’t not fidget in sleeping pigeon pose.
This is the default rich text value for a symbol field. A guy walks into the gym. He’s never worked out before. Walks straight over to the bench press and throws a couple massive plates on. Asks for a spot, wraps his hands around the bar, pushes up and...nothing. Tries one more time. Nothing again. Gets up, walks out of the gym and says “I can’t exercise”.
Ever seen this happen? Nope, we haven’t either. But we see it all the time with meditation because most people think meditation is a state we magically drop into when it’s actually a set of skills we build over time that allow our brains to build better habits and form healthier pathways.
Maybe you’ve already met the Buddha himself on the blissful kaleidoscope plane of enlightenment. Maybe you’re still unsuccessfully trying not to think about your shopping list for the trip home while you’re meant to be focusing on your breath. Either way, meditation is still a set of tools and skills you’re practicing rather than a place you simply slip into.
Also like exercise, there are different strokes for different folks in mediation depending on what you want to cultivate in your life. We offer a small and simple subset of practices that worked well for us, have the science to back them up and deliver the results most of us are looking for: calm down, chill out, feel happier and get out of our heads.
Your brain makes up 2% of your body’s weight, but uses 20% of its energy. It also uses the same amount of energy when you’re doing nothing as it does when you’re focused on an intense task. Why? Because your brain has an entire area designed to activate when your mind has time to wander. Unfortunately, this area loves drama, especially “me drama” - my problems at work, my relationship challenges, my worries and anxieties - which means that whenever you’re trying to relax, your brain has other ideas. It’s like having an entire room in your house set aside just for your mother to second-guess your life decisions...and being forced to go there whenever you want to relax. By learning to turn our attention to something else - our breath, any of the five senses, a mantra - focus-led meditation allows us to close the door to our mum-room and grab a proper nap in the living room for a bit. While focus practices can be a little tricky at first, they enhance our ability to focus and improve our memory while building toward the ultimate goal of calming our mind and properly chilling out for a bit.
Came for the love, stayed for the happiness. This practice uses focused imagery to cultivate feelings of goodwill, kindness and compassion toward ourselves and others. In the process, we shift our mental states quickly and easily by activating the same circuitry in our brains that lights up when we love our family and friends and energizing the neural networks involved in feeling joy and happiness. That’s some pretty critical brain architecture and as you might imagine, leveraging it makes this practice not only one of the most powerful, but also one of the quickest, easiest and most rewarding to learn.
It’s common to confuse breathwork with the focus-practice of mindful breathing and assume they’re basically the same thing. Until you’ve taken each class. In the same way, it’s easy to confuse a pint of water and a pint of vodka. Until you’ve drunk each pint.
In the late 1960s, psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin were widely banned by Western governments after they were co-opted for recreational use by that generation’s counter-culture. That’s widely known. What’s less so is that those bans put an end to decades of wildly successful research into the use of those same psychedelics - and the altered states they produced - to treat mental and emotional trauma across a broad range of categories.
In response to bans on substances that created altered states, many researchers and therapists began to look for new, legal ways of generating altered states in order to continue treatment. One method that quickly developed and was widely adopted by early pioneers was holotropic breathwork: a repeating cycle of rapid, deep, even breaths in a supportive, guided environment that is used to induce a brief shift in state that can be used for self exploration and personal growth.
At Easy Tiger, our breathwork classes trace their lineage to holotropic breathwork. They allow us to access a deeper understanding of ourselves and the internal beliefs we carry that might be slowing us down or holding us back. For many, this feels like a more intense form of meditation. For others, it’s a chance to set down whatever baggage we’re holding on to, see it for what it really is and then leave it behind.
