When you wake up every morning, you get a clear sense of your body’s starting “budgetary state” – whether your internal body budget is balanced or depleted. Then, everything you do or experience during your day serves either as a deposit toward the body budget or as a withdrawal.
Every routine thing you do in your life subtly affects your arousal level and valence, meaning that it is either stimulating or sedating and more or less pleasant. But you might also have some chronic budget-draining things going on, like financial insecurity, loneliness, being a primary caregiver for a child or an aging parent, chronic pain, and so on. If that’s the case, are those factors being balanced by other, nourishing experiences in your life?
Your body is very sensitive about the budget going both too low and too high, while negative balances and surpluses usually lead to disease. Your yoga practice can become an effective strategy for managing your body budget. It can help you move toward a more pleasant state and closer to balance between the hyper-aroused and hypo-aroused states. Clearly, you will need different types of practices for stimulating your energy and unwinding. Luckily, the yoga tradition has developed comprehensive strategies for managing your body budget and facilitating both deposits and withdrawals from the system (as necessary).
In this workshop, Olga Kabel, C-IAYT, will introduce you to the yogic model you can use to manage your body budget. She will show you why breath is the most effective tool to regulate your inner budget and teach you simple practices and breathing techniques that you can use to stimulate your system or purge excess jittery energy. She will demonstrate how simple and subtle changes you implement can shift the energetic tone of your yoga practice.
What You Will Learn:
- What kind of asana, breathing, and sound practices are appropriate for the hypo-aroused states when your system is weak and depleted
- What kind of asana, breathing, and sound practices are appropriate for the hyper-aroused states when there is too much agitation in the system
- How we can maximize the effect of these practices to improve sleep, reduce stress, and manage energy
- How we can use these practices to affect our nervous system and other physiological systems in the body
- How we can adapt these practices to different situations, conditions, and purposes.
This Course Includes:
Two 50-minute presentations that demonstrate various yogic ways for managing your body budget.
Two 40-minute yoga practice videos: one practice will illustrate how you can stimulate your system, and another, how you can unwind.
ABOUT OLGA KABEL
Hi there! My name is Olga Kabel. I’ve been practicing and teaching yoga for over two decades. Over this period of time, as yoga had carried me over life’s peaks and valleys, I came to realize that yoga to me is not about achieving a particular physique, but more about how I handle life’s challenges, big and small, that get thrown my way. It is also about finding joy and contentment in everyday moments. To me, yoga is not just a thing to do, but a place to be—it’s a state of feeling more centered, more awake, and more aware of my experiences. This is why I practice yoga, and this is how I teach it. This is why I’ve made yoga both my profession and a way of life.
I don’t want you to miss out on the full potential of what yoga has to offer. Regular yoga practice has the power to transform any area of your life for the better. One thing that’s always fascinated me about yoga is its ability to affect change. We all know change is inevitable—our bodies and our lives go through it every single day. We cannot stop change (no matter how hard we try), but through our yoga practice, we can affect the direction of change. This redirection doesn’t need to be dramatic—even the slightest one will set you on an entirely new course. And this can show up in any area of your life, whether it’s your health, your work, your relationships, or your experiences of joy and contentment.
