The five-time NBA All-Star and mental health advocate can’t live without these yoga and fitness tools.
Kevin Love started his eponymous Kevin Love Fund to find purpose beyond basketball. After struggling with anxiety and depression, he developed a trust that focuses on helping people improve mental wellness alongside physical fitness. Through a partnership with Headspace, in 2018 the Love Fund donated 850 app subscriptions and in-person mental health training sessions to UCLA student-athletes and coaches—and this year will contribute to the Just Keep Livin Foundation for empowering high school students. Here, Love shares his must-haves for staying happy, healthy, and hanger-free this fall.
Master teachers Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman Yee discuss hitting plateaus as a yoga teacher and how to overcome them.
The struggle is real. Even long-time celebrated teachers like Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman Yee need new inspiration from time to time. From their Yoga Shanti Studio in TriBeCa, the Yees share where they find renewed passion and excitement to share and teach yoga.
Live Be Yoga ambassadors Lauren Cohen and Brandon Spratt are on a road trip across the country to sit down with master teachers, host free local classes, and so much more—all to illuminate the conversations pulsing through the yoga community today. Follow the tour and get the latest stories @livebeyoga on Instagram and Facebook.
The process that leads to change can be fiercely difficult. Here, yoga and meditation teachers share personal stories of the messy work of self-discovery and their best tools and tips for tapping into your own inner wisdom, love, and curiosity—so you can allow for real healing.
There’s something about physical transformation that fascinates us. We look at before-and-after photos to marvel at what a difference a month, a year, or three years makes. Kids in elementary school stare in amazement at images of the butterfly life cycle, while their parents are busy compiling digital collages marking their children’s growth over the months and years. Follow the hashtag #transformation, and you’ll find an onslaught of people losing weight, gaining weight, flexing muscles, and showing off new hairstyles. Look at #transformationyoga, and you’ll see people moving deeper—sometimes dangerously—into backbends or splits over time.
But aside from all of the changes that are visible and shareable, there are the other forms of transformation that happen entirely out of view. They’re within us. You might look the same, mostly act the same, yet there’s been a profound shift in your inner world. “Sometimes subtle transformations are the most powerful,” says yoga teacher Jennifer Pastiloff, author of On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard. “You find one day that you’re not chanting, ‘I’m a loser’ or ‘I’m a bad person’ 500 times a day. The phrases are no longer tattooed on your mind. Instead, you have moments of quiet where you realize ‘I’m enough and I’m here.’ Your internal wiring is transformed.”
Recovering After Loss
When Pastiloff was eight, her father died suddenly of heart failure, and she says she spent most of her life trying to avoid the pain of losing him: “I didn’t want to feel …
A few years ago, one of my clients asked me to make an easy baked salmon recipe with ground almonds, Dijon mustard, and nearly a pound of butter.
Though it wasn’t one of her recipes, as I folded the ingredients together I couldn’t quiet the resounding chorus of Ina Garten in my ear. How bad could that be?
The answer: not bad at all.
Though I didn’t get to eat the end result myself, I could tell that the slow-roasted salmon that had basted in its own buttery topping was beyond delicious. Everyone else seemed to be on board with the concept as well. I posted a picture on instagram before the fish went in the oven and by the time it came out I had a sea of kitty heart eye emojis in the comment field.
I never shy away from a pat of butter, but at the same time, I try to avoid weeknight seafood recipes where the butter measurements are labeled by the pound instead of the tablespoon. So I started thinking about ways I could take this low and slow baked salmon concept a bit healthier. I love using coconut oil as a butter substitute (I like this brand). Since it’s solid at room temperature, you can whip it and get a similar texture to butter, which is great for smooshing under chicken skin among other things. So I decided this would be the body of my salmon topping and I wouldn’t have to feel bad about using a truck load to keep the fish super moist as it basted in the melted fat.
Coconut oil, salmon and almonds are great healthy fat sources—an essential nutrient in skin care, and therefore one of utmost importance this month as we start our new session of 4 …
Feeling panicked? Give yourself a hug. This simple sequence can help you feel safe and secure when worry and overwhelm sets in.
Anxiety often causes us to feel ungrounded and disconnected to the earth. This 2-part sequence from Colleen Saidman Yee and Rodney Yee of Yoga Shanti studio in New York City, focuses on longer exhalations, forward folds, and constructive rest to help center you in your body and relax your mind.
Yoga teacher Jennifer Pastiloff shares her best tips for making your day more meaningful.
Start your day in silence or prayer
Start your day in silence or prayer. I have a toddler, so I get that this isn’t always an option. We have so many thoughts throughout the day that are on repeat in our minds. They become mantras, or mind tattoos, as I call them. Choose something that opens you up rather than shuts you down, and keep returning to it throughout the day. I am here. I am in my body. I am enough.
Write it out. Ask yourself what radical self-care or compassion means to you and journal on it. Get specific. Pick one simple thing to commit to by a rea-sonable time frame. It can be taking a bubble bath or going to the bathroom without your toddler in the room. Make it tangible.
Dork it out. Check in with your sense of humor. Sing out loud or have a solo dance party in the car or do Tree Pose with your eyes closed and see if you can laugh at yourself if you fall.
Read an excerpt from Jennifer Pastiloff’s book On Being Human.
Check in with your body. What area of your body do you feel most or where are you most aware? Write for three minutes from the point of view of that body part. Notice what comes up.
Ask yourself, “Now what?”
And then do one actionable thing that answers that question. It can be the smallest baby step. For example, I talked endlessly about writing a book. My “now what” was sitting my butt down in a chair and writing the first sentence.
Let yourself off the hook.
Finish the sentence: Today I will let myself off the hook …
Yoga teacher Tatiana Forero Puerta, author of Yoga for the Wounded Heart, shares what she’s learned about trauma, clearing emotional patterns, and finding a vision for the future.
Tatiana Forero Puerta
If at the age of 20 you would’ve asked me to imagine my life 15 years in the future, I wouldn’t have been able to give you an answer. I couldn’t see my life in those terms. When I looked into my future then, I simply saw a field of blackness; my potential was not just obfuscated—it was inaccessible. This is what trauma does: It blinds us. One of the effects of deep suffering, especially during childhood, is that it can rob us of our vision.
I lost my father back in my homeland of Bogotá, Colombia, when I was eight years old. The last time I saw him, he knelt at the doorstep of our apartment and gave me a tight squeeze, consoling me as I cried. He assured me he would be back from his business trip in three days’ time, but on his way home his car was hit head-on by a drunk driver. My father and three of his co-workers lost their lives that night. He was 36.
The last time I saw my mother, I was 14. I held her and stroked her balding head, and when I kissed it, I remember feeling as though I were kissing a baby’s head; it was so soft, so innocent. My mother, emaciated and childlike after a short, brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, took her last breaths in my arms. She was 40.
Influential master teacher, Dharma Mittra, discusses how yoga can foster peace and happiness.
While in New York City, Lauren Cohen and Brandon Spratt stopped by Dharma Yoga to talk to legendary yoga master Sri Dharma Mittra about how yoga can build compassion and happiness in others. Dharma Mittra has been teaching classical yoga since 1967, and has since initiated thousands of students on teachers on the yogic path though his particular practice of Dharma Yoga, based on knowledge passed on from his guru, Sri Swami Kailashananda a.k.a. Yogi Gupta.
Live Be Yoga ambassadors Lauren Cohen and Brandon Spratt are on a road trip across the country to sit down with master teachers, host free local classes, and so much more—all to illuminate the conversations pulsing through the yoga community today. Follow the tour and get the latest stories @livebeyoga on Instagram and Facebook.
