NICOLE OHME

My dear Yogis and Yoginis,

I was recently part of an online class and it was said that humans are the only creatures that can feel empathy at will. I think that is a very powerful statement/fact.

It is easy to feel sympathetic. I think this response is mostly influenced and lead by the brain that’s why also judgment takes place. Trying to come up with solutions for the other person or to finding something positive to counterbalance the suffering the other one endures.
It creates a gap and distance between you and the other person.

When being empathetic you can feel and emotionally understand where the other person is at. Sometimes all what needs to be done,
is being simply there and holding that space even if it feels
uncomfortable for you not to be able to do anything or
to have a solution.

All of this is most likely nothing new to you and could be of course much more explained and explored. This is a great little video showing the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZBTYViDPlQ

It is said that one can learn to be more empathetic. But if we train
ourselves how we can be better reacting and be more supportive next time, it is again approached mainly by the intellect.
So that made me think that everything actually starts and ends with oneself again.

How much empathy are you really allowing yourself to feel when you are “in a dark” place for yourself?
In this world or time we are not much encouraged to have or
experience the feelings of suffering.
Isn’t it more like – move on, get over it, there is no time or space for this, what will the people think or say?

I believe you can only feel true empathy to the extend you allow
yourself to feel it in your own heart and life.
This doesn’t mean one resides in that space “forever”, but it needs to be acknowledged and felt.
Then it can leave your body and not haunt you later.

No better place to practice that then in your safe spot, your yoga mat and in your all embracing online yoga community 🙂

Monday 01.08.
Caring Breath
Slow Flow

Wednesday 03.08.
Spacious Heart – Open Hips
Flow

Thursday 04.08.
Open Theme
Yogis Choice

Friday 05.08.
Grounding Safety
Flow

Can’t wait to see you beautiful beings in my class!

Love,

Nicole

My dear Yogis and Yoginis,

I would like to share with you some thoughts about love expressed by different people. Going beyond the usual romantic and conditional love we are mostly surrounded by.

“Love is one of the universal experiences and also one of the most mysterious. That’s because it means different things
to different people.

There’s a power that can be found in a very precise kind of love that’s already within us – it’s something we must acknowledge,
embrace, awaken, and accept in our own lives.
This is what the wisdom of our ancestors said as well.
There’s something within us, and if we can embrace what already
exists, it heals us and transcends the great suffering in our lives.
If we don’t accept it, sometimes we succumb to the pain and suffering that comes from the inability to love and the inability to love
ourselves.

The key is that the role we allow love to play is a choice.

We will all have hurt because all things are impermanent, personal tragedies and suffering – the choice is what do we do with the pain and suffering.
It’s about our ability to awaken a force that already lives within us, to find the strength from that force to give new meaning to those hurts, and when we do that, we find the highest levels of our
personal mastery.
Often, the people who are willing to love and are willing to love on the deepest levels are those who have been hurt deeply and learned to transcend the hurt. That power frees us.

What are the emotional blocks, the psychological dams that we’ve put up?
When we want to love, our job is to find everything about ourselves that is not love. When we do that, all that’s left is love.
The difference between our primal capacity to love and the
perceptions of love that we hold today is the distortion that brings us suffering, disappointment, and fear.

When we create heart-brain harmony, we’re also opening a channel to move beyond judgment and the polarity of the mind. In the polarity organ, you are always going to have good/ bad, right/wrong,
success/failure, worthy/not worthy. This is the way of thinking that creates the suffering.

Shanti Ishta (Cherokee) – “The single eye of the heart.” Discerns right and wrong without the judgement of right and wrong.”

~ Gregg Braden (The Wisdom Codes)

“Strive to make your love greater than your need, and let love be the most powerful force in your life. Then nothing can overcome you.”

~ Kate McGahan, Hospice counselor

“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you could build against it.”

~ Rumi

Monday 25.07.
Overall Love
Flow

Wednesday 27.07.
Loving Kindness
Slow Flow

Thursday 28.07.
Open Theme
Yogis Choice

Friday 29.07.
Self-Love
Flow

I truly love our online yoga community 🙂

With gratitude,

Nicole

My dear Yogis and Yoginis,

I was contemplating on my walk today about how much we as humans want and like to control everything and everyone incl. ourselves.
As long we are under control it feels empowering and everything seems okay. But then there is the fear of loosing control or the
frustration of not getting it under control.
We set ourselves up for self made suffering and struggle that brings a high level of stress with it. Control gives a great sense of power and loosing it an equally strong emotion.

Isn’t it an illusion in first place to have things under control?
And isn’t the need of control a lack of trust?

What if we would shift more often our urge to control to observing ourselves and finding awareness that we begin to trust the flow of life.
We might gain more insight, reduce a whole lot of stress and feel more in flow with what life has to offer. Shifting from the duality of the brain that tends to bring the suffering to the all embracing heart.

I would like to share with you what Krishnamurti has to say from the yoga point of view.
“Yoga does not mean merely keeping your body healthy, normal, active and intelligent. The word in Sanskrit means ‘join together’ – joining the higher and the lower – which is the tradition.
⠀
There are various forms of yoga, of which the highest form is called Raja Yoga, the king of yogas. That way of living was concerned with physical wellbeing and, much more, with the psyche. There was no discipline, no system, nothing to be repeated day after day.
It was to have a brain that was in order, that was all the time active but not active in chattering. It was to have a very deeply ordered moral, ethical and disciplined life, not based on taking various vows.

That was the real meaning of the highest form of yoga. Although the body was kept healthy, it was not of primary importance.
What was of primary importance was to have a brain, a mind, a state of wellbeing that was clear and active. Not active in the sense of
physical movement, but a brain in itself active, alive, full of vitality.
⠀
The highest yoga is not to be taught to the casual; it is something that you do, perhaps every day, to have perfect awareness of your body.
You watch your body so that it does not make any movement or
gesture that is not observed. There is no unnecessary movement of the body, but it is not controlled. That is where the difference is. 
⠀
Perhaps you consider yoga something to be practised day after day to have a muscular body. It is not that at all. It is something you live all day long, watchfully observing, being clear about. “

~ Krishnamurti (from the book Meeting Life)

Monday 18.07.
Spine Awareness
Flow

Wednesday 20.07.
Thought Awareness
Flow

Thursday 21.07.
Open Theme
Yogis Choice

Friday 22.07.
Body-Breath Observation
Slow Flow

Give your body/mind the attention it deserves!

Love,

Nicole

My dear Yogis and Yoginis,

I am still immersed in “The Wisdom Codes” and would like to share with you some insights from it concerning impermanence and
the suffering that results from it.

“Change is happening all around us. We all have loss in our lives. Sometimes we don’t even recognize that it’s happened.
Other forms of loss are so great that the whole world stops when those things happen to us – the loss of a loved one or a job. Loss means
different things to different people.
– We, as a society, are rarely given permission to mourn what is past. It’s doesn’t have to be a deep expression of grief – it’s the
acknowledgement of the loss that begins to free the chemicals so they can metabolize and allow us to move forward.
– Once we have a loss, we can’t un-lose it. We have it, and the only way out of it, once it happens, is to go through it – not discount it, not sweep it under the carpet.
– When we have an experience of trauma without the tools to heal or reconcile, we create neuropeptides, which want to leave the body, and when we don’t hold them in, they will move out of our bodies in the ways that chemicals always move out of bodies – they pass through.

What do those losses mean to our bodies?
Every emotion we have creates a chemical in our body.
The joyous emotions are rarely the problems, but the traumas can cause a lot of problem.
– When we have an experience without the ability to reconcile that experience, we contract, constrict, and lock it down in our bodies. That chemical cannot then metabolize and move. So, we store it in the organs, tissues, or body system that we associate with the trauma – heart, lungs, reproductive system. They stay there until we are ready to deal with them, but they don’t know about time, and they begin to create conditions in the body that let us know that they’re there:
inflammation or something that elevates to some else that lets us know we have the hurt, fear, or loss that we have never reconciled.
– The key is to embrace it and let it pass through and out of the body

– We suffer because we expect that someone or something will
continue to exist in a way that meets our expectations. We enter into a relationship, job, or state of health – consciously or subconsciously, we expect that things are going to remain the same as they were, and if they don’t, it’s the difference between what was and what is in the
moment that is the source of our suffering.”
~ Gregg Braden

Monday 11.07.
Each inhale is a new beginning
Slow Flow

Wednesday 13.07.
From the roots to the heart
Flow

Thursday 14.07.
Open Theme
Yogis Choice

Friday 15.07.
Acknowledgement – Gratitude – Letting Go
Flow

Let go of the old and welcome the new 🙂

Love,

Nicole

My dear Yogis and Yoginis,

As you know my writings are always about things that are present in my life at that moment. This is my way of sharing my inner self with you. Even though I can only touch the surface of the subjects I hope it inspires you to look deeper into one or the other.

Here are some insights about our heart:
– There are about 40,000 specialized sensory cells in the human heart called sensory neurites, these cells see you apart from all other forms of life in the world today.
– Neurites are essentially brain-like cells that function in the heart very similar to the way that neurons function in the brain.
– These Neurites learn, think and experience independently of the
neurons in the brain.
– Every Experience that you have, you’re essentially having in two places: in your brain and in your heart.
– It’s important to access both of these networks for our healing.
– The arteries and the valves are all regulated through the neurites.
– They respond to your perceptions, the way you feel about your
relationship to the world.
– This allows you to self-regulate and to choose your response to the world around you.
– The neural network in the heart is where we access our heart
intelligence and our deepest states of intuition.

– We’re the only form of life that can harmonize two organs into a single potent system in your lives.

The better you know yourself, the less you rely on the outer world for balance.
~ Gregg Braden (The Wisdom Codes)

This week will be an other glimpse of what you could be exploring at home on your own; our main focus will be on continuing to get to know ourselves better 🙂

Monday 04.07.
Balancing your effort
Flow

Wednesday 06.07.
Aligning Heart & Brain
Organ Flow

Thursday 07.07.
Open Theme

Friday 08.07.
Flow into Harmony
Continuous Flow

Let’s harmonize!

Love,

Nicole