A teacher of teachers is coming to The Yoga Fusion

A little over 10 years ago, I had a flash of inspiration that I should become a  yoga teacher.  This was a very odd flash indeed, in that I was coming off a 20 year run of being ground into shambles by my corporate job as well as a very “unyogic” lifestyle that had left me in terrible physical and emotional condition.  However, the voice that was guiding me was simply too compelling to ignore, so I made the decision to obey the calling and picked up the yellow pages and began to call local yoga studios seeking a teacher who would teach me how to teach.

Only one teacher called me back, a very nice sounding fellow named Mark Horner.  Mark asked me a few questions about myself and why I wanted to teach.  He then asked me a very pointed question, asking me if I had ever taken a yoga class before.  This seemed to me to be a rather unrelated question with respect to my desire to teach, but I had to admit to him that I had never taken a public yoga class in my life (although I had done thousands of hours of self-taught yoga on my own starting at the age of 17).  Mark very kindly suggested that I consider taking a yoga class as a logical first step in my new yoga career process.  This seemed to me to be a somewhat unnecessary diversion and distraction from my urgent need to begin teaching immediately, but I figured I would play along in order get the ball rolling in the direction I wanted, so I made an appointment to appear in one of Mark’s scheduled weekly classes.

I’ve heard it said that every spiritual awakening is preceded by a rude awakening.  Well, I had an especially rude awakening in my first class with Mark.  I walked into his class, albeit a little stiff and rusty from a few years of bodily “under-use”, utterly expecting to rise immediately to the head of the class and be accelerated forward into my exciting new teaching career.  Whoops.  Even though I had been a world champion athlete in my 20’s and 30’s, Mark’s peculiar regimen of movements left me completely flummoxed. To my utter dismay, my body was not performing the seemingly simple, yet elegant, sequence of movements that Mark was teaching with balance and poise.  To put it bluntly, my bodily parts were not working anymore; my feet and ankles were dead and locked, my wrists and hands were frozen like blocks of ice, my shoulders were pinned up by my ears, and my legs, although very strong, could not bear weight in a variety of positions that many others yogis in the class were managing with ease.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, and ultimately far more damaging to my well-being, was that underlying the physical blockage and stiffness were decades of unresolved emotional residue constricting the internal energetic pathways of my subtle nervous system.  This internal energetic blockage was severely restricting and distorting the available lifeforce, or “prana” and preventing the emotional healing I needed in order to integrate the past, live effectively in the present, and expand into my potential in the future.

 I would like to say that this situation was humbling for me, but humiliating would be far more the truth.  Not only had I learned that I could not teach yoga, I learned the painful truth that I could not even do yoga.  The discouragement I felt as I sat in my car after that first class was overwhelming.  Where had I gone wrong?  Was my intuition completely insane?  Was I delusional?  So my ego began to helpfully rationalize the situation.  My conclusion:  these unusual movements being taught by Mark Horner weren’t yoga at all; they were some sort of personally synthesized sequences of motion that were essentially a form of torture.  I had done plenty of yoga in my life and I was actually quite adept at “normal” yoga.  I concluded that I didn’t need his “style” of yoga, that I would find a “regular” teacher who would polish my already existing skill set.  This hopeful rationalizing and wishful thinking only comforted for a moment.  The stark truth began to sink in...at age 43, I was going to have to start over, virtually from ground zero with my yoga practice.  I was going to have to back up and cover all the ground in my preparation work that I had avoided, or conveniently missed, in my prior yoga learning.  The spiritual axiom “the longest distance between two points is a shortcut” echoed in my brain.  The awful truth dawned on me:  I would have to attend my second class with Mark Horner.

Far more shrewd I was from then on.  I got to class early and hid in the corner, behind a far too skinny pole that did not completely block others view of me.  If I could have been invisible, it would have been preferable.  Unfortunately, I was not and every shortcoming and malfunction of my various lever systems were on public display for all to see.  I hoped to God that no one else knew that I had asked to become a teacher.  As Mark called out the various impossible movements, I had to adjust and adapt these positions to fit what my body could do, which was terribly awkward at times.  Thankfully, Mark was completely accepting of what I was able to do, as long as I was willing to put in the effort to do what I could.  Mark could have completely blown me out of the water had he been overly demanding, brusque, or unreasonable in his teaching style.  Far from it; Mark was extraordinarily kind and understanding with me, always offering conversation and understanding after each class when I would stay behind to ask questions or express the emotions or frustrations I was feeling.

Mark’s consistent and powerful message began to sink in with me, slowly, yet surely over the days, weeks, months, and years.  Over and over again, either personally, or in the classroom, I would hear the fundamental principle he was explaining, which was:  “if the preparatory work was diligently and intelligently performed, no matter how long it takes, the deeper and more esoteric benefits of yoga would blossom.  Conversely, if the preparatory work was skipped or avoided, the true fruits of yoga would remain permanently unavailable.”  I personally applied the yogic principle of "tapas", sustained and determined action over a long period of time, and stuck with my practice and my vision of carrying the life-transforming principles and practices of yoga to those hungering for the transformation and healing that i had been blessed with.  Seven years after meeting Mark, I had developed the capacity and determination to complete his extremely thorough teacher training course.  I did become a Yoga teacher and with Mark's help, i found my own voice and my own style of teaching.  I also found out that "when the teacher is ready, the students appear".  I found my "True Place" as a teacher, the body of students who could benefit from my personal abilities (and limitations) as a teacher and the unique gift of my own personal life experience and how that wild and wacky story could inspire others.

Mark’s brilliant teaching of the preparatory principles and practices of true hatha Yoga were a complete Godsend to me.  Not only did his preparatory regimen and system of movements completely transform and re-align the physical and energetic patterns of my own body, they have become the cornerstone principles of my own teaching.  I have had the enormous pleasure and humble satisfaction of viewing the extraordinarily beneficial effects of Mark’s teaching flow through me and bear fruit in the physical, energetic, and emotional healing of hundreds and hundreds of students I have been blessed to work with over the years of my own teaching practice.

As convinced as I was that Mark was utterly the wrong teacher for me after my first class with him, I am now completely convinced he was the perfect teacher for me.  As I like to say, “it’s almost as if there’s a God, or something”.  I am forever grateful to Mark for his direct and uncompromising approach in teaching authentic hatha yoga, with skill, compassion, and uncanny intelligence.  It is entirely inspiring to work with a teacher who really, truly knows what he is doing and has earned that ability through decades of no-nonsense hard work and applied experience.  Add to that, Mark’s ample wit and obvious joy in transmitting yoga to his legion of students, and you have the highest expression of teaching: one who brings out the greatest good in his students.

I heartily invite you to join Mark (and me) at The Yoga Fusion this next Sunday, September 23rd, from 1pm to 3:30pm, for his Workshop titled “How to Grow a Lotus - a Padmasana Workshop”.  I am honored to have my teacher blessing our new studio with his superb teaching.  If you have not yet experienced Mark and his teaching, this is an ideal opportunity to engage him in a comprehensive workshop setting that will be ideal for experienced practitioners and beginners alike.  Especially, if you consider yourself a beginner, this workshop may save you months, or years, of “less than productive” effort expended toward achieving the highest intention for your personal practice of Yoga.

Mark and I look forward to seeing you there.  (I will be back in the corner.)

Pre-register online and pay $45.00, saving $10.00 off the $55.00 day of workshop fee.  Register at:

http://clients.mindbodyonline.com/ws.asp?studioid=19309&stype=-8

Yoga Fusion is here!

dear yoga friends,

2 Great Retreats w/Gloria & Greg! Sonoma, Oct 17-20th, Costa Rica, Dec 7th-14th - Experiences that will change lives.

I have led multiple Yoga retreats and I never fail to be amazed at the astonishing effect these excursions to sanctuary have upon those who participate.  Simply put, something magical and mystical happens when a group of high-intentioned individuals make the decision to gather together in a breathtaking natural environment for the purpose of uplifting and expanding their consciousness.  The result is something beyond words, but I will attempt to express the sublime experience of a yoga retreat.

As near as I can explain it, something happens while at a yoga retreat that breaks the bonds of ordinary awareness and expands the consciousness of the individual to a level that would otherwise have taken months or years of ordinary living to attain.  This acceleration of evolution is mystical, meaning that the explanation of the change is beyond logic, reason, and commonsense rationale.  The term from quantum physics, “quantum leap”, comes to mind.  A quantum leap in physics is the phenomena where an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom changes its position without having traversed the space between its old and new orbit and without taking any time to do so.  As scientifically verifiable as this phenomena is, it is also on the order of a miracle, for science has no explanation how this effect happens.

The great metaphysical question is now posed:  if an electron can do this, can a human consciousness do it as well?  Can a human consciousness make the jump from a lower state of awareness to a much higher, more powerful, more intelligent, more loving state of consciousness instantaneously?  And the overwhelming proof throughout the history of mankind is a resounding “YES!”  However, there is something a human desiring such a change must do in order to be eligible for such grace to descend upon them:  they must put themselves in the position for such a transformation to take place.  They must be willing to break the bonds of ordinary routine and engage a willingness, open-mindedness, honesty, and adventuresome spirit and seek experience that has the potential to produce such radical change.

A Yoga retreat is exactly just this sort of departure from the routine and ordinary, the commonplace and normative experience of regular daily life.  The Yoga practitioners who engage the willingness and eagerness of spirit and dive into the adventure of a yoga retreat put themselves into a vortex of radically expanding potentials and possibilities that would otherwise be unavailable had they not made such a decision.  A new world of experience, insight, realization, and fulfillment comes available to the yoga student who makes the choice to breakout of the ordinary by attending an excursion to a Yogic sanctuary because they followed their heart’s intention with an action that facilitates their heart’s desire.  It is a formula for transcendent experience that works every time.

This is what a yoga retreat can do for you.  It can lift you up out of old patterns of behavior and perception and set you on a new path toward your fulfillment and heart’s desire.  The wonderful human potential teacher Dr. Wayne Dyer loves to quote the great physicist from the early 20th century, Max Planck, who said “when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”  The implications of this spiritual, scientific, and metaphysical Truth are staggering.  What this axiom really means is that the effort expended to alter one’s perception is infinitely more powerful and dynamic than any amount of physical effort expended to change external circumstances.

Gloria & Greg specialize in local and international retreats.  Our local extravaganza this year will be at the gorgeous Mayacamas Ranch in Sonoma, October 17th - 20th.  Gloria's one of a kind international retreat will be in Costa Rica with her beloved teaching partner Deb Stone, December 7th - 14th. 

For more information and to register for Mayacamas Ranch in Sonoma in October, please visit:
 http://www.theyogafusion.com/retreats.php

For more information and to register for Costa Rica in December, please visit:
http://www.gloriousyoga.com/Retreats.html




The Yoga Fusion
2217-N San Ramon Valley Blvd

San Ramon Ca 94583

Thank you.

yogic massage touches the body and the heart

    While I have been a bodyworker/massage therapist for many years, I have also been a recipient of bodywork from many different teachers with varying styles.  While I’ve learned that all bodyworker/massage therapists have something unique to offer, I will never forget the experience of the first time, many years ago, when my primary yoga teacher, who is a skilled bodyworker, laid his hands on me to release a pressure point while skillfully moving my body into a deeper range of motion.  My intuition told me, “here is someone who really knows what he is doing.”  Not only was there a trust and security in knowing that he knew the mechanics of my body, the energetic transmission through his hands was astonishing, unlike anything I had ever felt before.

    This man’s skill and knowledge of bodywork coupled with his decades long practice of yoga at the highest level enabled him to transmit the most phenomenal energetic resource through his hands directly into the area of my body that most needed it.  It was an electric experience, one that I’ll never forget and it influenced me, as an aspiring bodyworker at the time, to build this same extraordinary capacity into my hands-on touch and massage therapy.

    This experience was nearly a decade ago and it gave me the humble realization that coupling a strong and vital yoga practice along with bodywork and massage therapy would give me a profound synergistic advantage.  This advantage would be the transmission of great healing energy, or “prana-lifeforce”, developed through my lifelong practice of yoga into my deepest intention of healing and bringing relief to others through hands-on touch.  With my original yoga teacher as inspiration, I’ve experienced for myself that a consistent practice of yoga over a long period of time produces an inner reservoir, a container, if you will, of energetic vitality that can be directed, with intuition and intention, through my hands directly into the tissue and energetic release points of my massage clients, resulting in great relief and healing.

    In addition to relief and healing, the transmission of lifeforce energy through the hands simply feels wonderful; there is nothing quite like it.  In my experience, truly effective bodywork must include an intelligent and compassionate blend of the necessary physical movement and pressure along with the element of compassionate touch that relieves, soothes, and elicits a great feeling of pleasure within the body.  One without the other is incomplete and ineffective; skill in bodywork requires the ideal combination of compassion and precision.  Intelligently combined, precise physical movement coupled with compassionate and relieving touch delivers great healing.

    I love hands-on healing through bodywork and massage.  I have countless testimonials as to my effectiveness as a healer but the only one that really matters is yours.  If you haven’t given yourself the gift of energetic healing through yogic massage, you really, really have something to look forward to.  Years of yoga and hands-on healing practice has given me the blessing of being able to intuitively “read” bodies and what they need coupled with the internal resource of healing energy that I can direct precisely where and how it is most needed.  I can humbly say that I have a wonderful touch and that you will feel the difference. 

Please call me for an appointment.  (925) 705-1228 or send me an email at
Upwardspiralyoga@yahoo.com

Thank you!

Prices:  
60 minutes - $75.00
75 minutes - $95.00
90 minutes - $115.00

LifeCoaching: Change Your Life For The Better, NOW

What exactly is Lifecoaching and why is it generating such extraordinary interest with so many avid participants?  20 years ago, scarcely anyone had heard of lifecoaching.  Today, this dynamic way of achieving human potential is being utilized by people from all walks of life, business, personal, relational, athletic, and creative.  There is always one primary reason why any form personal development creates such an enthusiastic response:  it works.

From my own perspective, the purpose of lifecoaching is to empower a client in the accomplishment of tangible and meaningful results in an aspect of their life that is profoundly important to them.  Those who are drawn to lifecoaching are individuals who are no longer willing to settle for mediocrity and have the strong desire to break out of limiting patterns of perception and behavior that restrict their quality of life.  Lifecoaching clients feel, down into the marrow of their bones, that there is so much more available to them, in terms of fulfillment, meaning, passion, and satisfaction.  This “burning desire” compels a lifecoaching client to seek for the solutions, the tangible means by which they may change their mental perspective, their beliefs, and their actions in order to live what they know in their heart is available to them.

My job as an experienced Lifecoach, one who has worked with hundreds of  individuals over the last decade, is to bring out the very best in the clients I work with.  I am trained in a variety of creative and dynamic processes that literally change the mind of the person I am working with.  Rather than attempting to alter the external circumstances of the client, I work with an individual to transform the beliefs and habits of perception that are causative, that is to say, the patterns of thinking that create the conditions and circumstances of life.  Without this fundamental alteration of thought and belief, any attempt to change life circumstances for the better is notoriously ineffective.  I have worked with many, many clients who have experienced the frustration of continuously trying to alter a negative situation in their life, to no avail, until they sought assistance in getting at the root cause of the difficulty, the beliefs and mental habits that create and sustain such difficulty.

To pursue lifecoaching, an individual has already achieved the breakthough of realizing that the answers lie within.  From this moment of clarity, the potential for rapid and profound transformation and accomplishment is set in motion.  When I initially consult with a prospective lifecoaching client, the conversation is designed to go right to the heart of what the clients wants - really, really wants.  When the desire, the intention to be achieved, is crystallized, the lifecoaching sessions that follow frequently become the most profound,  moving, and dynamic learning adventures the client has ever experienced.  This is because I know how to get to the root cause, the place in consciousness that is origin of the difficulty or dilemma and I know how to assist clients in changing their minds for the better, quickly.  Not years of endless therapy, counseling, or futile “self-help” work, but dynamic experiential processes and activities that literally “re-wire” the brain into new habits of belief and self-confidence that make an immediate and tangible difference in the lives of my clients.

If I had named the new and emerging field of lifecoaching, I would have chosen the phrase “destiny consultant.”  My greatest passion and joy in life is being a consultant who assists people in realizing their dreams, their passion, their purpose; in a word, their destiny.  I see the results, the compelling and extraordinary results in the lives of those I work with and I love sharing this process with those who are willing and ready to undergo transformation.  Not mild improvement or slightly measurable progression, but a dynamic change in the experience of living with respect to an aspect of living that is of the greatest urgency and importance to my client.

Whether you seek improvement in personal or business affairs; whether in health, relationship, finance, or romance; whether in spiritual, mental, emotional, or physical matters, the common denominator is your Mind.  As the great spiritual genius Lao-Tzu comments in the Tao, “correct your mind first, and all the rest will follow.”  If you have a “burning desire” for improvement in your life and you are no longer willing to settle for less, take the action now to get into the solution.  Call me or email me now for a consultation and discover for yourself the power of transformational conversation, conversation that goes right to the heart and releases the  knowledge, power, and action you need to fulfill your desires now.

What has Yoga done for me, lately?

Balance this, balance that, everyone is trying to achieve balance in life.  The harder we try, the more out of balance we get.  “Balance is the ability to obsess equally in every area of Life”.  The very thought of struggling to achieve balance is comical; imagine a tightrope walker furiously waving his arms and flinching in order to maintain his perfect balance.  Tightrope walkers do frantically wave their arms from time to time, generally right before they fall.  Balance is effortless, trying to balance is a continuous struggle.

Great Yoga masters have described the state of Yoga as being a condition of mind free of imbalance, free of mental oscillations and fluctuations, the conscious still-point at the center of all polarities.  The practice of Yoga will lead to the state of Yoga; this is what Yoga will do for you, without fail, if the practitioner maintains their “tapas”, or sustained, determined practice over a long period of time. 

So how is it that Yoga will bring about this ideally balanced state of consciousness, this “oscillation and fluctuation free” condition of Being?  Will the practice of Yoga impose stillness, quiet, and mental equilibrium upon the student from the outside, in?  Will Yoga bestow peace and emotional balance to the harried and agitated heart of the sincere student who labors strenuously to find the hallowed ground of stillness?  Well, yes, Yoga will do this for any sincere seeker, but not in the way that most yoga students believe that it will.  In my own experience, and in the experience of most every long-term Yoga practitioner I have every known, Yoga works in the most paradoxical way to establish balance, i.e., mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.  The practice of Yoga brings about the state of Yoga not by imposing balance upon the student, but by exposing imbalance within the student.  And here lies the rub as well as the understanding why so many students of Yoga only dabble with a sincere, committed practice, or give up on their practice when progress seems slow, or missing altogether.

The practice of Yoga, which is the sincere seeking of union with Infinite ground of Being that stills the torment of the mind, will expose with uncanny efficiency every imbalance that lies hidden within or appears obvious on the surface of the life of every single student who is courageous enough to unroll their mat and face their own imbalances.  The infinite wisdom of Yoga will custom design a perfectly orchestrated curriculum of healing for each individual student by exposing the layers of imbalance that have accumulated in their physical, emotional, and mental bodies over time.  As each layer of imbalance is exposed, generally beginning with the physical body and moving inward through the emotional and mental bodies, the student is allowed the “opportunity” to bring awareness, the fire of their own presence to bear upon their imbalance, which inevitably presents itself as discomfort, discomfort ranging from “mild inconvenience” to excruciating, nearly intolerable suffering.

Who among us wants to have their imbalances exposed?  Beginning students are generally faced with their physical imbalances first.  The overly muscular student facing the tension and blockage of their tissue which is far too dense.  The willowy, over-flexible student realizing their extraordinary range of motion will not compensate for their lack of strength and stability.  As these initial superficial imbalances are overcome, deeper and often more subtle imbalances now can make their way to the surface.  The hyperactive, fidgety student, who thought their energetic countenance an asset, will find it difficult or impossible to hold still when necessary.  The slow moving, “take everything easy” student will find it unpleasant to be required to hold to a pattern and establish a rhythm in their practice and they will miss their frequent “serenity breaks”.

As these inevitable imbalances within the student are exposed with surgical precision by the practice of Yoga, the diligence and presence of mind to continue and strive through difficulty will burn away the disparity, the differential that exists between the optimal center and the extreme to which the student has strayed through their habit of living.  It is at this level of attainment the maturing student may well enjoy months, or years, of seemingly stable, balanced living, both in practice and all their affairs.

However, in the search for perfect balance and true freedom of the spirit, which so many yogis have established as their purpose for living, deeper and far more insidious demons and dragons of mental and emotional imbalance will necessarily wind their way to the surface of consciousness, in much the same way that shrapnel long lodged in the deep tissue of a war veteran will find its way to the surface of the skin to allow a much deeper healing to commence.  In Yogic terminology, we have made contact with the far deeper “koshas”, or layers of our emotional and mental bodies, which have stored, buried, and repressed patterns of feeling and perception that have, in many cases, seriously affected and discolored our lives from our inception.  Making these “painful patterns of perception and feeling” all the more insidious is that they have been doing their damage unbeknownst to us as their operation is silent, lurking below the surface level of consciousness in the vast tracts of the sub-consciousness.  Although their operation may be silent and automatic, these hidden patterns can and do create terrible pain and suffering in the experience of the spiritual seeker, which is made all the worse because the cause of the difficulty is hidden from conscious view.

How hopeless we would all be if there was no access to exposing and altering these “viruses of perception” that bring such discomfort and imbalance to so many sincere and hard-working spiritual aspirants. Carl Jung commented “that which remains in the subconscious comes to us as fate”.  Because we are not aware of these deeper levels of disturbed, or imbalanced perceptions, the mayhem and chaos they cause most often seems to come out of the blue and we are cast down by circumstances, people, or situations that catch us unaware, off-guard, and often without any defense.  We can find ourselves powerless, overwhelmed, swamped with emotional turmoil or mental disturbance which can be so powerful, it acts as a near perfect firewall between our individual soul and our infinite connection to Spirit.

The great gift of Yoga is that a sustained, committed practice will find these unresolved and hidden emotional and mental imbalances within us.  This is both good and bad news, depending at which moment of the process we happen to be experiencing.  The infinite and compassionate wisdom of Yoga, with perfect precision, will orchestrate the curriculum of events, circumstances, and people to expose our mental and emotional imbalances that they may be brought into harmony and alignment with the perfect balance that is our eternal state of Being.  To our limited and mortal minds, this can seem to be a terribly unfair and excruciatingly painful process, so much so, that we would never, in a million years, consciously initiate such a process upon our own selves.  And because we could never initiate such “healing seasons” upon our selves, we could never heal the deepest and most harmful imbalances of our nature on our own volition or will-power.  The “long, dark seasons of the Soul” are arrangements of Spirit that our individual egos would never agree to; they are far too painful.

So, take heart, Yoga friends.  Your committed practice of Yoga is searching, scouring, and locating all the “land-mines” of repressed emotional residue, as well as the painful and limiting patterns of perception that were laid down in the subterranean caverns of your psyche over the many years passed.  When these deepest inner energetic coils of thought and feeling were originally imprinted into our minds, we did not have the emotional maturity nor the intellectual or spiritual wisdom to prevent such accumulations of disturbance from taking hold of us.  We swallowed the pain at the time of original imbalance because to digest before we were ready would have killed many of us.  The infinite wisdom and love of Yoga knows we harbor such painful and debilitating patterns of energetic holding within us and we will be given every opportunity to bring our current presence, faith, and persistence to these emotional and mental barriers as a higher intelligence brings them out of energetic escrow for us to survey - exactly as we are willing to do so.

Ease up on trying to achieve balance.  Let your loving practice of Yoga bring you to balance as every imbalance is exposed to the light.  We may be strengthened and encouraged by the knowledge that there is but one energy in the Universe and that energy is in eternal and perfect balance, which we may call Love.  In our forgetfulness, our experiential disconnection from Spirit, our separateness, we unwittingly, or perhaps deliberately, warped and shaped this one eternal energy into imbalance, turning it into anger, fear, grief, sorrow, impatience, regret and all the rest of the unholy lot.  As our practice finds, and unwinds, these mortal coils of energetic disturbance, these great organic and primal energies of our Being will be transmuted, alchemicalized into the far finer, more subtle, more creative, and more cooperative expressions of the energy of Love.  We will be brought into ultimate balance and once there, we need never stray again.


blessings to all, welcome to this new website
Greg