Week in Review + New Strength Classes + Lessons from Dan Harris

Hi friends! Happiest of Fridays. After two weeks with a lot of travel, I am looking forward to a chill weekend in Charlotte with my little guy.

I don’t know what has gotten into me but I spent this morning on an organizational tear. I have a feeling I’m going to be doing a lot of it this weekend. Maybe it’s spring cleaning fever? I am not one to enjoy cleaning out/organizing things so I need to take advantage of this motivation while it’s here. Haha.

Speaking of cleaning and organizing, the comments on my Hoover SmartWash+ giveaway are GOLD! I love that y’all shared such amazing stories and are so pumped about this giveaway! (It ends tonight, BTW!)

Finn is down for a nap right now and I just ate lunch and made a cup of tea so I thought it would be a nice time to check in with some scenes from this week.

Let’s start by talking about the weather. I know it’s not the most riveting topic but it’s been ALL OVER the place in Charlotte this week. I swear we had all four seasons in the span of four days. It’s gone from clear and crisp to rainy and snow/sleet to almost 80 degrees and everything in between.

Although the weather erratic, it was mostly really gorgeous! We spent a ton of time outside doing everything from running and walking to hanging in the backyard.

Oh and I had to snap of pic of Finn’s pacifier in the middle of the road. I cannot tell you how many times I have to retrace or run or walk route because he somehow throws his paci out without me noticing. Just last week I had a neighbor leave this same pacifier on my porch with a note, “I think this is Finn’s.” I need to get some sort of pacifier tethering apparatus!

Meal times have been fun. This is Finn going face first into his tray. Guess he really liked his meal and wanted to get every last crumb!

And the girls are eager to help with cleanup of the food that makes it to the floor. I am currently trying to teach Finn the sign for “all done” because his current method of letting me know he’s all done is to frantically move his hands back and forth over the tray and knock all the food off to the floor. Some room for improvement there. 😉

I had a really good week of teaching. I taught a few hot power classes (where we did the pose you see above!) and I just picked up a new class at VIBE5 on Tuesday mornings called “Strong VIBE5.” It’s a cross-training class that focuses on strength training using things like dumbbells, gliders, bands and body bars with a little flavor of yoga. The ownership of the studio has been encouraging me to teach this class format since I started back in January but I was unsure if it would be a good fit since I’m on team “separation of yoga and strength.”

Let me explain that a little more…I think that yoga and strength absolutely go hand in hand. All too often people are strong or flexible but lack the balance between the two to support healthy functional movement. I’m just not a fan of doing strength training movements in yoga asanas.

Once I took a few classes and talked to my supervisors about the class in more depth, I decided to go for it. The class is MUCH more like a traditional group strength but with more of a focus on intuitively sequencing strength sets together and spending good time stretching at the beginning and end of the workout.

I taught my first class last Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. and I LOVED it! 🙂 I’m also going to be picking up a circuit training/strength class at the Harris Y on Wednesday mornings! 🙂 Feels good to be back to teaching strength regularly.

Finn has been doing workouts of his own. He’s been pulling up for about a month now but usually only on me. Well, just in the last couple of days he has decided to start pulling up all the time on everything! And today he started to “cruise” a little. So much fun to see him mastering these new skills. 🙂

On Wednesday evening I saw Dan Harris speak. I mentioned this event on my blog last week. I am so glad that I went. I read and liked Dan’s book 10% Happier, but I liked him as a speaker/presenter even more. He was funny, engaging and relatable.

I walked away from the evening with two things that really stuck with me.

1. Dan’s Definition of Mindfulness

I feel like so many people say they can’t do yoga or meditation because they “can’t quiet their mind.” This is exactly why we NEED to do practices like yoga and meditation. The second yoga sutra says, “Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.” This is translated as the “yoga is cessation of the fluctuations of the mind” or the “the restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is yoga.”

We talk about the monkey mind a lot in yoga and Dan did too. One of the greatest gifts that meditation can give us is the realization that our minds are crazy places. Once you build an awareness that all sorts of thoughts are constantly racing through your head (like an inner narrator), you are able to realize that YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS! You don’t have to attach to them but rather you can choose to notice them and let them go.

Dan defines mindfulness like this, “Mindfulness is a skill, generated most commonly through meditation, where you learn to see what’s happening in your head right now, clearly, so that you don’t get yanked around by it.” 

Not getting yanked around by your thoughts…sounds pretty amazing, right?

2. Dan’s Stance on Modeling

During the Q&A, one of the audience members asked Dan if he was teaching his 4 year old son meditation. He not only replied no but said that it’s not something he plans to do. He doesn’t want to shove meditation at his son and end up having him turned off by it because dad won’t leave him alone about it.

Instead, Dan said he focuses on MODELING the behavior that he wants his son to learn from him. He said this is a priority for him in everything from physical fitness to his marriage to work ethic to mental fitness/meditation.

I loved that and it really gave me something to think about. What am I modeling for Finn? What do I want to model for Finn? How can I model these things in the best and truest way?

He emphasized that modeling is also the way to go when it comes to family, friends and co-workers. You want people to come to you asking what it is that you are doing instead of you pushing things on them. (We all know how that goes, right?)

If you want to learn more or try meditation…

Dan’s latest book is titled “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.” His approach to meditation is simple and not overly “woo-woo.” I highly suggest reading Dan’s books and also checking out his app if you are looking for a straightforward and not overly complicated approach to meditation.

I have not personally tried his app but my friend Virginia has and she really liked it. She said she used it for about a year. (I use the Insight Timer app, FYI.)

Okay, that got long but I hope you enjoyed today’s post. 🙂

Have you been doing any spring cleaning? 

What are your weekend plans? 

Do you meditate? What types of topics on meditation/mindfulness/yoga might be helpful for you here?