Explore Crystal Love‘s offerings on Wanderlust TV: Purifying Barre & Core, Quick FIIT, Core & Soar and the new additions to her Posture Lab series!
What is Posture Lab?
I created posture lab as a way to offer more time and space to dive into functional alignment. It’s a series of variations of movement targeted to strengthen your Core & Soar workouts and guaranteed to take your weekly live practice to the next level.
Each posture lab session will help you break the mental and physical barriers that may come with quicker transitions in a weekly practice, and they might even give you the fitness burst you are looking for—in under 20 minutes! Each posture lab is quick enough to fit into the busiest schedule and can be easily mixed and matched with any practice in my library as warm up or review.
You’re a trauma-informed 750+hr KYIS (Kripalu Yoga in Schools) Registered Kripalu Yoga Teacher, but so much more than just that. Your teachings on Wanderlust TV are based on mindful movement. What inspired you to create these signature sequences beyond asana?
With so many options for improving physical wellbeing, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. People don’t have to adopt a “go big or go home” type of approach to changes in physical wellbeing. I combine effective strategies with cutting-edge mindset tools, movement and breath-coaching for anyone on the sacred path to improving one’s life—mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Drawing on the roots of humanity, my sequences are designed to support you in holistic and alternative, lifestyle habits that honor the wisdom from Native lineage, and from my teacher; Swami Kripalu.
My job when I’m coaching is to show you that we share cross-structural resilience within communities. There are four archetypes that can be fostered and strengthened within each and every body: the warrior, the healer, the visionary, the teacher. My sequences foster my own connection as a survivor, a sense of resilience and sense of hope found among indigenous peoples, my native bloodline. They support change, healing, transition and rites of passage. These are practices that we access within our own inner nature; which is openness and non-attachment, wisdom and objectivity, power, presence, love, gratitude, and acknowledgement.
Your activism in the #MMIWG2s #nomorestolensisters movement is another way you take your practice beyond the yoga mat. Can you share more about the movement and why it is important for you to share about it with your community?
By humanizing this fight, the goal is to create a global connection and support network for Alaskan Native and Native people—advocating for all women—reminding us of the resilience and power of women as a unified, collective.
As a social justice movement, it’s about both honoring my lineage and Native traditions, while also dismantling years of oppression, my own experience as an adopted Native child, survivor of human trafficking, rejection, denial, sexualization and fetishization (Pocahontas) from adults as teenager because of how I looked.
From a trauma-trained educator’s perspective, I feel it is my responsibility to bridge the gap for trauma care access; to mitigate oppression, defend and protect womxn and children (all ages, all ACEs, all races) and build communities based on humanness. The impacts of invasion, colonization, settlement and forced assimilation continue to have multi-generational impact on everyone. Crossing barriers to address access and care as preventative, holistic, and alternative healing is what is needed across the globe. I don’t think we are in community if we do not cooperate with each-other, across Nations, to mitigate systemic racism, hate and violence. My approach helps to create more access and trauma care within the healing industry—especially for trauma survivors living in marginalized and BIPOC communities.
24% of profits the Loveinmvmt Living LLC. Immersion 4.0 Program are donated to one of the following member tribe affiliates or organizations in support of families and Alaska Native and Non-Alaska Native families that include: Menominee Indian Tribe Reservation in Wisconsin, San Bernardino County, CA, Fairbanks, Alaska – Hän Gwich’in and Oglala Lakota Tribe, New Mexico and British Columbia.
You’ve recently overcome a physical injury that impeded your ability to get on the mat. What was it like to overcome that obstacle in a socially-distanced pandemic? Is there something you learned in your rebound from that injury that feels different in this time?
When we remember who we are, we bring our illuminated authenticity to shine bright. It is the action of bringing oneself forward.
Life asked me from an early age to choose only parts of my true self in order to survive. Along the way, I have learned that nurturing all parts of my true self brings a greater resilience, more opportunities, and more quality to the relationships I have with myself, others, nature; with life in general.
Respecting one’s physical body can be a struggle for many. Much of the self-abuse in our physical body develops out of the pain of our emotional self. Overall wellbeing requires that we take care of the vessel we live in.
I found that my injury allowed me to cultivate a greater sense of clarity, strength and healing within my home and the experience that I know of myself. Indigenous people believe that when we have come home to who we are, we sit inside our “Sacred Hoop”. My approach to my own personal practice, and when I’m coaching, is about reclaiming personal agency by revitalizing and restoring personal desire and joy from the truest part of my heart.
This became a daily practice for me to foster love and the sacred ways of strengthening resilience from within my body from the power of my breath and restoration. This practice, and the sitting in these places of pain physically and emotionally, showed me areas in my body where unresolved emotions and feelings were hiding… past trauma, stored emotion, “issues in my tissues” moment-to-moment and hour-by-hour brought me surrender and the releasing of fears to grant access to forgiveness and healing. Over the years I have learned that in order to sustain the strength and resilience of my body I must support my change and healing with integrity. The biggest part of my practice is having courage and not worrying if I am not strong enough. When I lean into my own ritual, during times of transition, I return to the place where I find peace. The place I remember sacred is an experience I can make for me and only me. That brings so much healing and for me it actually expedited my recovery time by 3 weeks!
Other than your own offerings, which Wanderlust TV classes/teachers would you recommend folks to try at home?
Wow! So many! Okay, these are just a few I tried to categorize..
Goal Setting or Speakers:
- Jacki Carr
- Elena Brower
- Kelsey Patel
- Marianne Williamson
- Seane Corn
Music:
- DJ Taz Rashid (4-EVA!)
Sound Healing:
- Laura and Dan Martier
Meditation
- Ona Hawk
Movement:
- Rosie Acosta
- Shiva Rea
- Orlee Klempner
- Natalie Valle
If you could practice with one-on-one with any yoga teacher, living or dead, who would it be?
Forever – Swami Kripalu. I want to thank him for all that his practice and lineage has taught me and remember about myself. I would share with him the way that I have been able to translate his philosophy on compassionate self-inquiry and observation without judgement with communities in recovery and cross-culturally within the lineage from my Native Ancestors. Show up, or choose to be present. Pay attention to what has heart and meaning. Tell the truth without blame or judgement. Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome.