In the spirit of my Learned from Yoga posts, I want to draw your attention to a recent post by Aimée Morrison, Let it breathe. An excerpt gives you a flavour of the problem she addresses: When I began teaching, and for some time after, I used to try to assuage such anxieties by crowding […]
Read More »Learned in Yoga Class
How yoga influences how I work with clients. I don’t expect you to do yoga. You don’t even have to attempt the pose I’m going to talk about. Ever. In your whole life. The point of this series is that yoga has taught me some interesting things about how to approach other things.
An advanced writing practice
A friend went to yoga class the other day and lay on her back the whole time, absorbing the energy of the group and doing the poses in her head. She felt great afterwards. This is the advanced practice. You know your body well enough and you have enough self-confidence that you can just lie […]
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The benefits of working small
In another post, I asked: “How could you experiment with working in a relaxed state?” — Is working at or just beyond your limits really effective? I proposed that the ways in which my yoga teacher has been encouraging us to work within the comfortable range of movement and not stretch our muscles to their limits, […]
Read More »Is working at or just beyond your limits really effective?
We live in a culture in which we are often demanded to do more. How much writing can you do in a year/semester/week/hour? How many students can you teach effectively? This constant striving for more leaves many of us feeling inadequate a lot of the time. It also privileges an approach to work that is […]
Read More »Transitions in your work day
Occasionally my yoga teacher focuses on transitions. While the poses themselves are important, how we move from one pose to another is also worthy of attention. Academic work is complex. You do a lot of different things in a day. In addition to thinking about how you do the specific tasks — email, teaching, writing, […]
Read More »How to make it easy for YOU
This post complements others about establishing a writing practice. I’ve been using my yoga practice as an analogy. One of the key questions I asked myself when establishing a home yoga practice was “How do I make this easy?”. Some of the elements of my answer: The smallest possible amount (10 minutes to start) No extra […]
Read More »Developing a new practice: An update on my yoga practice
In my Planning classes I talk about how you learn to juggle by tossing one beanbag from one hand to the other. Your goal is form and consistency. Once you have that, you can add more beanbags, change from beanbags to something else, and do something that looks much more like juggling. You can’t juggle flaming […]
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Using the supports you need
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Using the supports you need One of the things my yoga teachers are constantly reminding us about is that using supports is not a sign of weakness. Sometimes, in order to get the benefit of a pose, you need to use a block or a strap or modify the […]
Read More »What that 15 minute practice looks like
You are probably worried about being able to write high quality academic prose, to get it published, to write and publish enough of it, and so on. You may look at my advice to write for 15 minutes a day and think that is never going to help you with that. What useful writing can […]
Read More »Practicing what I preach
Do you want to be an academic who writes regularly? In December, 2014, I decided that I wanted to be someone who practices yoga regularly. I’ve done enough yoga to know that it is good for me to do it regularly. I have a teacher locally that I really like. But I had fallen out […]
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Boundaries, balance and the whole you
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Boundaries, Balance, and the Whole You The term “work-life balance” is out of favour. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because everyone is working so hard it seems like an impossible dream. I came across a recent piece in Harvard Business Review arguing for the importance of boundaries. They are not […]
Read More »People vary
This post is part of an occasional series about how yoga influences how I work with clients. I don’t expect you to do yoga. Ever. In your whole life. The point of this series is that yoga has taught me some interesting things about how to approach other things. Differences are not necessarily things we […]
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