Tag archives: yoga

Tenzin Gyatso, otherwise known as His Holiness the Great 14th Dalai Lama, has made several visits to Santa Barbara to offer his inspired messages of peace and hope for the world. Formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama at age 2, he assumed full duties at 15 in 1950 after the People’s Republic of China’s […]

Meditation is much more than mindfulness, and a deeper state a more readily available through the body, says Timothy Tillman, M.A., CHT, a now Santa Barbara-based Somatic and Hakomi therapist who also leads weekly meditation gatherings at both a yurt at his Mission Canyon home and at Yoga Soup. Tillman – who is also a […]

Grief is a given in this life and a natural part of the human experience, but many people refuse to allow themselves to dive fully into their sadness, and definitely not in public. Yet many other cultures throughout time have processed grief in community; its expression is a casualty of our modern times. Alexis Slutzky […]

Peace Sticks seems like a super-simple concept – participants toss a pair of sticks back and forth with a partner. And that’s exactly how it started with Shane and Evan Rilling, the Ojai-based brothers who created the practice. “It came to us on a hike more than a decade ago, when we picked up some […]

As the one-year anniversary of the Thomas Fire and Montecito debris flow approach, we’re imagining there will be several local events to commemorate the milestones of the twin tragedies. Ojai, which was hit early and hard by the fire, as the village’s Community Healing Sanctuary – a collaborative group that has hosted such events as […]

Anyone who has attended any of Lisa Citore‘s Anima offerings of Women’s Ritual Theater is aware of the solid mind-body-spirit connection exemplified by the self-described “pleasure activist,” writer, sex educator, and healer brings to her work, whether in the field of performance art or sacred sexuality workshops, or anything between. But for the last several […]

The Spiritualist Church of The Comforter of Santa Barbara has roots that date back more than 125 years to its charter in Summerland in 1891, when it served as the focal point of a small community developed as a summer camp for the newly founded Spiritualist Organization. The church had to relocate when the 101 […]

Yemaya Renuka Duby moved to Santa Barbara only last year, but the somatic therapy practitioner-health and lifestyle coach brought with her a wealth a experience. Duby is a 25-year veteran of the Rosen Method – a psychosomatic system integrating body, emotional, and mental experiences in releasing unconscious patterns of behavior – who trained directly under […]

It was early last spring, just over a year ago, that Mark Ruskin published his second book of poetry, On Love’s Path ~ New Versions of Rumi, Kabir & Hafiz, in which he intuitively interprets the words of the great mystic poets through his own heart as a Chinese medicine healer. As with his first […]

Back in 2016, EntheoMedicine founder Jacqueline Lopez not only had no interest or experience with psychedelic substances for medicine or any other uses, she was actively opposed. “I thought people who did this stuff were kind of crazy, probably living on the street because they were hooked on it,” she recalled. “Coming from Brazil, where […]

Making money and living a conscious life are not mortal enemies. So suggests May McCarthy, who over the last 35 years has founded and grown seven profitable companies, in a variety of industries including fashion retail, telecommunications, healthcare software, and capital equipment, that employs 250 people and bring in more than $100 million in annual […]

It takes nine months for humans to gestate in the womb from conception to birth. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the same period has elapsed since the Santa Barbara Consciousness Network events went on hiatus as founder Forrest Leichtberg began to incubate a new format for the gatherings. Complications with logistics combined with a desire […]

In early 2015, we told you about the revival of the Big Yellow House building in Summerland, which included the opening of a top-floor yoga studio, Evolation Yoga, then one of nine studio locations across the country owned by Mark Drost and Zefea Samson. The studio has undergone many changes in three years, including new […]

Sunburst Sanctuary scheduled its popular annual silent meditation retreat long before the flames and flood afflicted Montecito and environs. And while our chatter-filled minds make it seem like staying quiet for a weekend could be cause for anxiety, perhaps quiet contemplation in the community is the perfect elixir for these challenging circumstances. Whatever the impetus, […]

Like all of us in the Montecito/greater Santa Barbara area, I have had a lot of personal reactions to the Montecito mudslide disaster coming on the heels of the Thomas Fire, from numbness to grief to fear to hopefulness and even gratitude. The latter came mostly last weekend in the wake of the community coming […]

Ragan and Alex Thomson met Dale Halaway more than a decade ago, when Alex signed up for a business coaching seminar and immediately felt a connection. Over the years, the Montecito power couple kept working with Halaway, a veteran transformational life coach, in a variety of public and eventually private seminars and coaching sessions – […]

Dealing with the Thomas Fire likely has been stressful, at the least for those in Montecito and environs who have been lucky enough not to have suffered more physical losses. The mandatory evacuation of such spiritual retreat centers as La Casa de Maria, Vedanta temple, and the MacVeagh House at the Museum of Natural History […]

In his most recent email missive, Yoga Soup founder/owner Eddie Ellner mused on how his effort 12 years ago to “construct the place that I’d want to go to when I felt I had no place to go” eventually turned into the thriving consciousness-raising hub as he eventually realized that he was “surrounded by a […]

What better way to start off the Thanksgiving weekend than by centering and grounding yourself before the relatives arrive? Two local yoga centers are offering free classes on Thanksgiving morning, though one of them comes with a give-back catch. YASA Yoga & Wellness Center, 22 W. Mission St., begins the day with a half-hour Thanksgiving […]

Spiritual practices as well as many self-growth paths can leave one feeling overly vulnerable and perhaps even confused about the nature of connection to others. With “Activating Energetic Protection”, slated for 7 to 9 pm this Friday night at Paradise Found, Dr. Valerie Girard and Dr. Fleur Nelson are teaming up for a two-hour presentation […]