Today’s blog post comes from one of our Circle of Grace members, Tammy Scott. Tammy has been in the fitness industry since she was 17 and has maintained her commitment to health and exercise over the years in various capacities. We’re thrilled to share one of her latest accomplishments with our Zobha community and hope it inspires you to take on a new challenge as well!
Hello Zobha Community-
As an active runner, cyclist and mom, Zobha is my daily go-to apparel. Most recently I ran the Wine Country Marathon in Healdsburg, CA on October 27. It’s imperative to have the right gear when running a race of that distance which is why I chose my Zobha performance tech infinity bra and the performance hot short. I felt well supported and both pieces kept everything in place throughout the entire 4 hours and 24 minutes of my race. The fabric has great breathability and wicks moisture very well, i.e. no chafing! It’s hard to find active wear that has it all, comfort, style and is still technical enough to get the job done.
Tammy Scott, Zobha Brand Ambassador
Tell us about your recent accomplishments! Leave a note in the comments section so your story can inspire others to challenge themselves in new ways.
Zobha had a pleasure to partner with Collective Hearts Yoga as a sponsor for Collective Hearts For Haiti, a yoga-inspired fundraiser class for a new Children’s Center in Jacmel, Haiti. The event was truly inspirational and we are grateful to have been able to connect with our community, help raise awareness and funds to provide a safe and promising future for Haitian children.
Lisa Rueff, a Bay Area yoga teacher and founder of Collective Hearts Yoga, will travel with a team of volunteers to Haiti this month to build the Jacmel Children’s Center.
Zobha will be donating 25% of all online sales to Jacmel Children’s Center in Haiti. Shop on zobha.com, enter the promo code ZGIVE2HAITI at checkout and you’ll help us contribute to this amazing cause (through June 30, 2011).
If you’d like to donate to the construction of a home and community center to provide education and care to neglected children, visit Collective Hearts yoga website.
To learn more about the cause please watch this video:
If you’d like to learn more about the organization, please visit Collective Heart’s yoga website.
Posted by Shannon Paige Schneider, Zobha Circle of Grace Member
At the age of twenty-one, I was diagnosed with cancer. The path to health was messy at best and seemed to be one without any sense of grace. I experienced days, weeks, and months on end of pain and complications and tears and tears and tears.
I thought of all of the things I SHOULD have done to miraculously avoid the diagnosis. I thought of what I SHOULD do to obtain an illness-free future. I thought what I WOULD do differently if only I COULD soften the weight of illness, sadness, and suffering.
Shoulda’ Woulda’ Coulda’. It was not until I found the practice of my breath and body that these three little words began to lose their hold on my perspective. Yoga escorted me into the dark and bright spaces of my own experience. The poses asked me to see how I respond to myself and others, how I view the word “strength”, and what I was willing to accept as the truth of my story, perspective, hopes, and dreams.
Yoga invites us to participate fully with our own sense of personal resonance, health and wellbeing. Down Dog does not take away the pain of personal evolution; rather it asks us to explore on an ever-deepening level exactly what is at stake in every breath, moment, movement, and response to stressful or joyous stimuli. It asks us to choose, to learn to respond rather than react – in spite of what we SHOULD have, WOULD have, or COULD have done differently.
So the next time you feel like sitting and shaming yourself with a SHOULDA’, WOULDA’, COULDA’; realize that you are already there, here. Choose. Choose to participate and welcome yourself into your very own life!
Shannon Paige Schneider is an author, sacred activist, inspired life coach, and dedicated teacher of Shiva Rea’s Prana Flow Vinyasa Yoga. She interweaves her students’ unique purpose driven inspiration into the divine play of body and breath to unlock the secret wisdom held within the heart. Shannon is the founder and yoga director of om time yoga centers and Anjali Restorative Yoga. Shannon recently taught a Zobha – sponsored Breast Cancer Awareness class to raise awareness, energy, and the vibration of health and wellness for those affected by a diagnosis of cancer. To learn more about Shannon and where she will be teaching next, go to her blog.
The word “Inspiration” is derived from Middle English to express the experience of ‘Divine Guidance’.
Grace
Faith
Strength
Perseverance
In February 2006, I left a relationship of 14 years. Throughout the last 4 years, my connection to the aforementioned words has been nothing less than the most magnificent roller coaster ride.
Ending my relationship, I left behind the identity that had become my prison. Don’t get me wrong. I was safe, and comfortable. I wanted nothing, but needed freedom and space. The confines of my relationship with the most wonderful person had begun to strangle me. Safe, stable and comfortable are words that I would never have used in describing my life prior to this relationship. The lifestyle of uncertainty and comfort of change is how I was raised. I missed the familiarity of the unfamiliar. In order for me to grow, I had to go.
I think I felt this realization on a cellular level before I took action. I stuffed away my emotions of doubt and eventually became a shell of myself. Finally, I had no choice. My body told me it was time to go, ready or not. Sometimes we can prepare for the earthquakes, sometimes we see them coming. They still have the power to shake us to our very core, and completely change our landscape. Other times we are blind-sided by that lone phone call which, within an instant, changes our lives. So, what is the recipe for making it through? How do we gather the courage to release from comfort or an unhealthy environment and leap into the ring of change, the ring of fire?
For me, I had to recognize that through the cracks there was a great light shining, a light that was fueled by spirit itself. Ultimately I had buried my light all on my own. No one else can do this for you or to you. We give away our power, it isn’t taken from us. I had to remember that being Empowered comes from within. It was up to me to go through rather than around the fire. So I did. I moved out of the house that I owned with my partner, I took nothing with me but my clothes. I moved consistently without laying down roots for the next 3 years.
It was at one of my temporary homes that I opened my first package of Zobha clothing. My friend, and now fellow Circle of Grace member, Shannon Paige Schneider had recommended that I would be a good example of Zobha’s message. I felt the farthest from this! However, when I wore my Zobha, I felt feminine, connected, and graceful for the first time in a very long time. It felt so good.
As I traveled and connected with my extended yoga family, everyone noted the difference in me. They said I looked lighter. I felt lighter, I was lighter. I realized that I had felt like a fraud. Mostly because I was! I wasn’t living my truth, following my Sva-Dharma, my heart’s true purpose. Now that I had begun pursuing this it was clear that it wasn’t an option.
We must recognize that the feelings of safety, stability and comfort can only truly come from within. No matter where I am or what the resources may be, I have the deep depths of my well of faith, perseverance, grace and strength to draw from.
Our yoga practice can heal the deepest wounds. Sometimes it is our practice that reveals where the wounds are residing. By recognizing where our imbalances are, we can create a practice that correlates to the energetic body or Chakra(s) that need nourishment. Through this balance and strength we are prepared to face whatever the Universe provides.
I get incredible joy from teaching yoga, from my holistic (mental) health practice. I aim to cultivate an environment that fosters healing and integrating not only body, mind and spirit, but inspiration, faith and truth. Live your Truth. This is my passion and my ‘Divine Guidance’.
Coral Brown, is a certified senior teacher and teacher trainer for Shiva Rea’s Prana Flow Yoga. She leads retreats, workshops, and teacher trainings worldwide.
Posted by: Circle of Grace Member, Shannon Paige Schneider
My mother would laugh at me as a child and marvel at my creativity with language. I would sometimes hear words as I heard them and offer definitions that I felt made contextual sense. I would make words and their definitions my own.
“Empowerment” was one of those words. I remember hearing it and in the conversation it seemed clear to me that the power in question was something that made a person feel good on the INSIDE. I began to use the four-syllable word in the everyday, feeling really, REALLY, really big in my little boots.
Only, I was saying, “IN-powerment.”
My mom asked me to qualify it once. She cocked her head to one side and said, “You know, I think you are right.” So she did not correct me. In fact, she NEVER let on at all. I do not actually remember who DID finally point out the snafu but it kind of stuck with me my whole life and I think about it every once in a while when I feel small, contracted, or a little uninspired.
Who does NOT like to be powered on the inside? Who does not like to feel lit up and in the seat of solid decisions and following truth, joy, inspiration, and intuition?
Everyone can operate from a sense of internal power. This is actually the sustainable state. It is like GREENING one’s decisions and life-lived patterns. When we live without this, our energy falls, we push ourselves to the limit and burnout, exhaustion, fatigue, and depression are not far behind.
Power is something very different from force, though both can be internalized and can find a strong presence in the day-to-day. We can force ourselves to sit in front of a situation and take it in. We can force ourselves to show up in a situation where we are diminished or told we are not enough, screwed up, somehow not quite right. We can force ourselves to act as though we feel a certain way to attain a certain outcome. We can force a decision to feel right and righteous. We can simply force for the sake of force.
OR, we can soften and listen to the questions we are asking inside. We can soften and listen to the vibrations of grace we are answering to ourselves on the inside. When we soften and tap into the way life and love and energy moves through us, we realize that it is our nature to live in connection to an expanding universe. In lining up to that pulse of expansion, remembrance and placing ourselves in tandem to universal embrace, we too power up from the inside.
We find ourselves IN-powered.
When IN-powered, we are much less likely to make a decision for a small outcome. When IN-powered we don’t really feel the need to push a single agenda. When IN-powered, we look for grace, goodness, and a win-win in service to the expansion of the universe herself. When we live in a state of IN-powerment, there is less fear, there is more creativity and there are rows and rows and rows of more love blossoms blooming. When we are IN-powered, we give unconscious permission for others to do and live the same.
So the exercise is to sit, to soften, to listen, to re-spond rather than re-act and therein lies the work of a lifetime. However, the power certainly outweighs any sense of force, leverage, or sense of unsustainable lack.
Make a list of all those activities you have in your day that lift you up. Make a list of all those people in your life who make you feel held, safe, and present. Do you realize that these people, places, things all live in the vibration of you, your memory, your body, your capacity to connect? At ANY one time, you, me, we can turn within and see them, feel them, know that they are part of us from the inside out. We are, therefore, constantly IN-powered by those we love.
Here’s to living IN-powered.
Shan, as she is known to her students and friends, is the founder and muse of om time. She is an activist, an eternal optimist, and a lover of the flow of grace within everyone. Shannon has been featured in Alternative Health Magazine and Yoga International. She leads weekly classes in Boulder and Denver, as well as workshops, intensives, teacher trainings and retreats nationally and internationally.
Shannon will be teaching a Zobha-sponsored community class along with fellow Circle of Grace member, Coral Brown, at the Yoga Journal Boston Conference on April 10, 2010 from 1-2PM. For more information on the community class, see our events page - http://www.zobha.com/t-events.aspx
Find out more about Shannon at omtime.com, or read her blog here.
I love dresses! Now I love dresses, but I didn’t start out that way.
As a little girl growing up in South Louisiana (read: the very deep south), my mother often dolled my younger sister and I up in adorable dresses paired with pretty, lace-edged socks and patent leather Mary Janes. We were precious! And I hated every minute of it. I longed for the more hip look of my elementary school friends in their jeans and sweatshirts. I don’t think I wore a pair of pants until I was 5 years old. I’m not kidding.
I’m a child of the 80’s with our totally awesome pegged jeans, “Jams” shorts, and neon-colored socks (and jelly bracelets). I attended Catholic school with the uniform to boot, but I totally rocked the plaid shirts and cut-off jeans after school in the 90’s (hello, Eddie Vedder). Over these two decades, I was not into looking like a girly.
I’m not sure what the turning point was. Perhaps it was moving from my 20’s to my 30’s where I discovered that, for me, being a woman was about being beautiful and strong – and there was nothing “girly” about it. Whatever it was, now I love dresses! I can’t get enough of them. Living in the Bay Area, I LOVE that I can get through the year in our 50-60 degree average temperature with a dress & a pair of boots.
So naturally, I was DE-lighted when our design team came out with Zobha Dresses, which I feel are a little known secret. They’re made of our Performance fabric, so you can wear them to yoga (with leggings, pants or capris) and to play traditional dress sports like tennis. But you can also wear them to work, for a night out, lounging at home…anywhere. I don’t have a favorite style – each offers a different look. And, while I’m plugging my favorites, I have just 3 words for you: Asymmetrical Zip Pullover.
What’s your take on dresses vs. pants? Have pics to share? Post them on our Zobha page on Facebook.
