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From a therapists perspective, one of the biggest problems we create for ourselves is how we avoid emotional trauma. On the path to healing, these methods for avoiding the pain in our lives can sometimes become hurdles rather than enablers for survival. With the right tools in a safe environment, experiencing sensations, feelings and thoughts can help us see our shadow self. Seeing can then become accepting and accepting can then become understanding with compassion.

The Inspiration Workshop enables each student to experience an entire range of sensations, feelings and thoughts in a safe and supportive environment. In this experiential context, the student finds a healthy container for the self to unfold and be embraced with compassion.

Having experienced the Inspiration Workshop myself, I can personally attest to the healing that it can provide.

Lisa Gray
Marriage and Family Therapist

What did the Inspiration Work mean to me? In all honesty, I nearly canceled the morning of the workshop. Afterward, I was extremely grateful I hadn't.

For nearly my entire life, I have dealt with depression and the spectrum of effects that arise from it. From pre-pubescence through early adulthood I assumed it was an integral part of me. Eventually I realized that was not the case, but did not have the strategies, know-how, or life experience to effectively reverse the mentality. For the last few years, I have actively addressed my depression, gaining knowledge of it, coming to know it and ultimately working toward completely overcoming its effects. I think of it as being cyclical or wave-like. Finding enjoyment in "navigating the seas" has been quintessential to growing out of depression. Learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, as is taught in yoga, has sparked the fires of this growth.

I was not in a good head-space the weekend of the Inspiration Workshop. In fact, I did not have a "negative" photo because nothing I saw was making me feel worse than what I already felt. Really I was at a low somewhere in the mental sea. Giving myself the gift of showing up for the Inspiration Workshop at this time allowed me to realize that as long as you continue to show up, and do the work, you will reap the rewards. This is true even when, or perhaps especially when, things seem at the worst or most impassible.

Enlightenment, or as I'm coming to understand it, bringing together my ego and my subtle body/energy is not a fun or easy task. The age-old adage that nothing worthwhile is easy has never been more true. This difficulty marrying ego and existence I consider the lingering echo of depression, something which with time is getting more and more quiet and less and less distinguishable from a vague memory of an uninteresting event.

The Inspiration Workshop to me was proof positive that no matter how hard life may seem, one need only stay present and grounded to overcome anything. Staying grounded in the physical moment is both highly crucial to well-being and amazingly easy with the proper training and technique.

Inspiration Workshop provides an experience and a tool with which to achieve and sustain, for lack of a more appropriate description, enlightenment. Being asked to feel very fully on an emotional level, and subsequently engage in yoga, which is feeling on a physical level, stimulates a bond between feeling and movement/breath. A powerful experience, to be sure. - Jason Ricca

This was the second Inspiration Workshop for me. The first one was last Spring(?) with Darwin and Kelli at Cosmic Dog.
The first workshop, for me, was a real awakening experience about choices, and how we, as individuals, all have the power to make a choice as to where we want to go, or the attitude we can make the choice to have.
I forgot to bring pictures with me for that time, but I did have some items I carry around with me at all times-a watch I found out in the street after a very difficult job I had, a stone with "essence" carved into it, and a little Buddha head. They worked in lieu of photos, as the objects brought back both happy pictures and sadder pictures from my memories in my mind.
The most powerful aspect of that day, and the one I have carried with me all these months, was the significant and striking difference between the positive sections of the workshop and the yucky tasting section. Not only was it yucky tasting, but the deep, specific poses Kelli lead us into...I kept thinking that "Digging in the Dirt" by Peter Gabriel would have been perfect for this part...because that's what it was. And after I was there...I was struck by, "why would I ever choose to go there, or chose the muck and mire on purpose...make a deliberate choice to be in that mind frame?"

Now, I realize that sometimes, yes, we all have to face reality, and I am not saying, just live like Unicorns are prancing around with rainbows and flowers 24/7...yucky stuff happens. Facing ourselves is difficult. And I have done A LOT of that starting around 2007 with the death of my father. But what I left with from that workshop was..I have a choice. And I don't chose myrhh.

This time, I came equipped with my photos, and totally open to whatever was going to come up, to face, forgive...whatever. The myrrh section was different this time-it was about strength this time-and standing up. Courage. Maybe because I knew something yucky would be presented (I didn't know if it would be the myrrh as in the last workshop, or some other flavoring!), but I had this power within me to just go beyond, or to some other place. I wasn't like, "oh, when will this be over? How long? When is this flavor going to disappear?" Instead, I found myself examining the myrrh flavor, facing it, being in it..thinking, "okay, I am here for a while, let's settle in and turn it in my favor!"

I felt like, "bring it on!" ...and still do. Not in some confrontational, neanderthal mindset , that is, but knowing I have this powerful inner strength from looking inside. This workshop just built on my first one. So with the first one I discovered the powerful strength of choice, and which path do I want to take, and in this workshop, I discovered myself using my choice powerfully in order to further examine, heal, and go beyond. - Caryne Finlay Mount