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transform your stress
Are you overwhelmed? Anxious? Stressed out? Kripalu’s newest Healthy Living program will teach you how to address the negative impact that stress is having on your life and regain your health, energy, and clarity. Led by holistic medical doctor Susan Lord and members of the Healthy Living faculty, the program will teach you mind-body techniques you can use every day to create a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.
Take the first step toward changing your life.  Read a Q&A with Susan Lord on transforming stress.
Check out the program: Transforming Stress: Mindful Living and the Art of Nourishment, June 4–7.
the annex is here!
Kripalu’s new Annex features 80 guest rooms (each with its own bathroom), offering spectacular woodland and lakeside views as well as comfortable European-inspired accommodations. Described as a “paragon of environmental thoughtfulness and responsibility,” the Annex is connected to the main building by a glass-enclosed walkway, making it an easy stroll to the dining hall, your program room, and other amenities.
Kripalu thanks the many donors whose support has helped to make the Annex a reality. As we continue to move forward and invest in a vital and thriving organization, we advance Kripalu’s mission of teaching the art and science of yoga to create positive change in the lives of individuals, their communities, and society as a whole.
Request a room in the Annex when you register!
what size is your life?
Forget the idea that bigger is better. Building on her work in the Not So Big House series, best-selling author and cultural visionary Sarah Susanka has applied her revolutionary approach to the architecture of our lives. Drawing from her book The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters, her new program shows us how to change the way we live by fully inhabiting each moment of our lives.
Get back to the basics with The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters, May 29–31.
total pranic immersion
Energy. Prana. Life-force intelligence. Whatever name it goes by, we all want to increase and harness its flow to bring greater vibrancy and joy to our yoga and our lives. This Memorial Day, join Shiva Rea, a pioneer in the evolution of vinyasa yoga flow, and liberate your life force with dynamic and meditative yoga flows, Indian martial arts, yoga trance dance, and much more.
Dive into Pranafication Immersion: Living the Flow of Yoga, May 22–25.
View a YouTube video of Shiva Rea.
not just for women
From yoga and meditation to fitness to the latest in neuroscience, Kripalu’s programs can help men explore their true nature and live a fully integrated life. If you’re a man looking for a different kind of experience, an opportunity to challenge yourself in new ways, or time to deepen your relationship with your passions and interests, these programs may be what you’re looking for.
Check out programs men might like.
the pulse of your new career
The Kripalu School of Ayurveda’s next certification programs all begin with the first session of Foundations of Ayurveda, September 13–25. A great beginning for anyone interested in pursuing Ayurveda professionally or personally, the session explores the core concepts of Ayurveda, including its practical applications and its philosophical approach. Applications are being accepted now—take the first step toward getting certified as an Ayurvedic Lifestyle Consultant or Ayurvedic Yoga Specialist.
Get started in Foundations of Ayurveda.
from the archives: one great big creative experiment
healthy living recipes
Inspired by a Kripalu volunteer who hails from Spain, this month Executive Chef Deb Howard offers you Kripalu’s take on paella, including both seafood and vegetarian versions. And Nutritionist John Bagnulo reveals why nutrient-dense shellfish and pollack are his favorite additions to a plant-based diet.
May 2009 Healthy Living Recipes
Basic Paella Recipes and Technique
corrections to kripalu catalog
desktop wallpaper
Enjoy the beauty of the Berkshires every day with Kripalu’s desktop wallpaper. Available with and without a calendar.
Easy-to-download.
we love to hear from you
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welcome
May is the heart of spring—and this month we offer you a few “travel tips” for your spring steps along the path of self-discovery and integrated living. It’s the perfect time to set sail—on a journey into the second half of your life, a quest to rebuild the architecture of your days, or an exploration of what helps your prana flow and your stress go. Take advantage of the energy of the season to come fully alive, letting the seeds of awakening take root and committing to the promise of a colorful blossoming of your most authentic, creative, and connected self. Happy trails!
time to embrace your unlived life: design a second journey
by Joan Anderson
In this essay, motivational speaker and best-selling author Joan Anderson highlights the possibilities and rewards of big change—the chance to consciously design and live out a new journey, a second chance at creating a thriving, fulfilling life. Drawing on her most recent memoir, The Second Journey: The Road Back to Yourself, she reminds us all that our lives are brilliantly “unfinished” and encourages us to embark upon our own second journeys.
The call to a second journey usually commences when unexpected change is thrust upon you, causing a crisis of feeling so great that you are stopped in your tracks. Surely the economic downturn has stopped many of us in this way. But the truth is that most of us in midlife, halfway to 100, have had to face monumental change—a betrayal, a diagnosis of serious illness, the death of a loved one, loss of self-esteem, a fall from power, to name just a few. Midlife seems to be the time such crises present themselves, and if we are able to face our various dilemmas, we might just be rewarded with a new and necessary reality. It makes sense that finally—when the power of youth is gone, the possibility of failure begins to appear, and dreams of earlier times seem shallow and pointless—an authentic awakening can occur.
But what also accompanies such a potentially great moment is the dreaded need to address tough questions that many of us have, until then, been able to avoid: What am I meant to do now? What truly matters? Who am I and who could I become?
Personally, I was at just such a juncture some years ago—a woman trapped inside a person she no longer knew. Having lived my life mostly for others, I had gradually become restless and unhappy. I was standing at a crossroads with an indefinable ache and no clear direction. Subsequently, I did the unthinkable. I jumped ship, took a leap of faith, walked away from the mainstream, and dove headlong into the unknown. The wisdom I carried into the vast wasteland was three quotes:
The unexamined life is the wasted life.—St. Augustine
The first half of life is learning to be an adult—the second half is learning to be a child.—Pablo Picasso
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed with the things you didn’t do rather than the things you did. —Mark Twain
I spent a year alone in a cottage by the sea and was gifted with my long-lost consciousness. After a few weeks of feeling guilty about those I had left behind, I came to see that I had taken a natural step—a second journey—during which I began to redesign my life in my own image. It was an accidental journey, nourished by nature, in which I was obliged to call on my instincts and intuitions—two sensitivities that had, for too long, gone untapped. I began to see myself as a very “unfinished” person who possessed numerous hard-earned strengths that were very much intact.
Even so, critics and reviewers of the book I wrote describing my year somewhat mocked my isolated interlude, labeling me the woman who got away, the runaway wife, the one who took a vacation from marriage, and my favorite (and perhaps most accurate), the woman who granted herself a sabbatical. Although my actions were considered “feminist,” I saw myself as simply needing to be in touch with my feminine energies, which over the course of the years had been sucked dry. That side of my being needed refueling. For, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh pointed out, “If it is in a woman’s nature to nurture then she must nourish herself.”
It seems to me that one of the goals in life is to come of age in the middle of life rather than live out our days lacking purpose or energy. No matter the cards each of us has been dealt, the challenge is to embrace each new stage, being both creative and clever as we do so. Many unfinished people awaken their childhood wonder; others gravitate to a cause they deeply believe in; still others awaken long-felt passions. Taking any step, however small, leads to another step and then another until eventually, without really knowing it, you have carved out an entirely new itinerary for yourself.
Surely happenstance played a role in my second journey, which was buoyed by my mentor, Joan Erikson, wife and collaborator of famed psychotherapist Erik Erikson. Caught in an “identity crisis,” who should I have the good fortune to run into on a foggy Cape Cod beach but the very woman who, along with her husband, coined the term! In time Joan helped me understand that by working through various adversities and conflicts an individual gains particular strengths. Week after week we wove our life cycles on a loom, all the while discussing the pulls and tugs we experienced as we shifted and grew up. During this time, I was able to identify various innate strengths, which in turn catapulted me into a new-found sense of selfhood.
During my odyssey I also began to realize that a woman’s individual meaning comes from the changing powers of her body—that her physical, spiritual, emotional, and creative life work together to form a wise woman at maturity. Although once an innocent maiden, I gained particular strengths through mothering and over time began to build a personal philosophy based on the myriad phases through which I’d grown. My husband informs me that the same is true for men. Although their bodies don’t send as many blatantly obvious messages, the cycles of a man’s work life, his sexual prowess (or lack thereof), as well as waning physical endurance alerts him to the fact that some things are outlived and change is afoot. Life is, after all, not just about progressing through the world but moving through stages of understanding. Only if we come to terms with the inevitable can we justify our various quests. The good news is that the first half of life is prescribed, whereas in the second half we get to write our own prescriptions.
I’m beginning to think that a human being is not unlike the proverbial cat with nine lives. Indeed, most of us live a lifetime in a decade. Who we are, what we look like, and who we live with may be entirely different 10 years from now. Each decade brings with it a new certainty—a passage through a portal to the other side. Wouldn’t it be revealing if there were an actual ritual at the end of each decade that marked a person’s achievements—crises managed, lessons mastered, attitudes and ideals changed—so we weren’t merely aging but rather honoring and affirming life’s journey? We are all in need of pondering and then appreciating what is outlived so we can make room for all that is unlived.
Growing up and “growing on” are inevitable. The great loneliness is that people don’t know who they are—they tend to resist their changes and then miss the rewards of the second journey in the process. Now is the time to first look back and then befriend—not berate—the person you are becoming. “Toss off the bowlines, pull up the anchor,” as Mark Twain states, for it is high time to embark on that second journey. I guarantee it will be the adventure of your life.
Joan Anderson is a sought-after motivational speaker, workshop leader, retreat facilitator, and author of A Year by the Sea, An Unfinished Marriage, A Walk on the Beach, A Weekend to Change Your Life, and The Second Journey. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today Show, and Good Morning America. www.joanandersononline.com
Don’t miss the chance to discover the rewards of your own second journey with Joan Anderson at Kripalu, June 5–7, The Second Journey: Every Woman’s Odyssey.
spreading the word…
get more of the teachers you love
You’ve experienced their masterful teaching at Kripalu—spend more time with them at the Yoga Journal New York City Conference, May 15–18, with workshops led by Lilias Folan, Ana Forrest, Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, Sarah Powers, Shiva Rea, and other frequent Kripalu presenters. Yoga Journal New York City Conference
the healing power of yogadance
Remember how energized and alive you feel after a Kripalu YogaDance class—as if your whole body is giggling? Offered every day at noon, YogaDance™ is an integral part of the Kripalu experience—and the highlight of the day for many Kripalu guests. The combination of yoga, dance, breath, and meditation that YogaDance offers turns out to be a powerfully healing experience for those with Parkinson’s Disease, and senior Kripalu teacher Megha Nancy Buttenheim is leading the way in bringing this innovative approach to meditation-in-motion to a new audience.
Read about Megha’s YogaDance experiences with people with Parkinson’s.
Experience the healing power of Kripalu YogaDance in Grace in Motion: Let Your Yoga Dance!, May 22–25.
annual green yoga conference
The Green Yoga Conference on Yoga, Animals, and Ecology, in Los Angeles, California, May 29–31, focuses on the interrelated nature of humans and animals with animal-inspired yoga practice, a performance of traditional animal movement in classical Indian dance, and lectures on the consciousness and empathy of dolphins, animal rights and nonviolence, and Gandhian principles. Find out more at www.greenyoga.org.
quote of the month
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist and short-story writer
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