If anyone knows how to bring a yoga mindset into action it’s Bryan Kest. His kind and practical approach to yoga’s many lessons has led him to lead transformational classes for yogis struggling with body image, eating disorders, and self-love. He describes these classes as a “multi-dynamic experience” used to create “a supportive dialogue developed to empower the practitioner.”
If you can’t you can’t take a class with Bryan, you might as well hear what he has to say. Use these bits of wisdom next time you need an emotional pick-me-up. At the end of the day, it’s all about the love.
Yoga doesn’t ask you to be more than you are. But it does ask you to be all that you are.
Everybody wants to be pretty because that’s what they’ve been told will make them feel good even though there’s no proof that people who are prettier are healthier and happier. So why don’t we just cut to the chase and go straight to what makes us feel good?
Being empowered includes developing the powerful qualities that lead human beings to cultivate wellness and healing. And those are the same qualities that enhance all relationships on earth and reduce stress (which seems to be the largest precursor to disease)-gentle ness, calmness, patience, humility, compassion, and gratitude.
Fall with awareness and acceptance.
This is what our yoga practice is trying to accomplish. Not white light descending from heaven and engulfing you, not energy released from the base of your spine going up through your crown chakra so you become a human lightening bolt, not a halo floating on top of your head. Simply heightened states of awareness, enlightenment, becoming more and more aware which gives more and more insight, which brings wisdom and gives choice. With that wisdom and choice, we become the masters of our destiny and at peace in our life.
Because we are not separate and we are a strand in the web of this existence, there is nothing about us—which includes who we are and what we do—that is not happening perfectly.
Everything becomes an opportunity to evolve and grow.
It doesn’t matter what it looks like; it matters what it feels like.
There are certain yoga laws and principles that are, shall we say, less tangible than others. For example, the law of karma. Science has proven what goes up must come down, but that’s about as far as it’s gone. To believe that for every action, word, and thought, there is an equal consequence takes something more intuitive, more personal; it’s more metaphysical.
I do not believe you could intellectually comprehend all the different forces playing upon us. Yet what you can do is become very silent, so you are not distracted and then begin to feel how these forces playing upon us are affecting us, and according to how we feel, we can then make intelligent decisions as to how far, how deep, how much, we explore in any pose.
Bryan Kest is headlining Wanderlust O’ahu. For more information, including tickets and lineup, click here.