Oh Vivid Love

By Heidi Michel Fokine, February, 2012

Can you fall headlong into your beingness? What would it take today and everyday to look again and again at what you are? Go deep into the fabric of your humanness and you’ll find connection to the world. Exciting. Breathtaking (you know you don’t own that breath—there’s no holding it. But sometimes we do to keep the desired inside and the undesired out).

Look what happens when people are made to move like machines (goose step…fascism…holocaust). Is there any element of disembodiment in your yoga practice? If your asanas feel like an imposition, or mechanical, look again. Look at the smallest gesture—a handshake…heart to hand to another: it’s a spiral. Or the infinity symbol of a hug. Find the spirals in you, moving through you, extending beyond you, and parivrtta trikonasana will be revelatory. Standing in tree pose could break your heart and wear you down to nakedness. That heart, that little muscular transformer at the center of the circulatory system, giving exactly what it receives is the essence of spiraling infinity. Remember that the sobbing person in yoga class is the bravest person in the room. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Heidi Michel Fokine

A daydreamer by nature but not lacking the determination to pursue technique as a means to realize the dream, Heidi studied modern dance at North Carolina School of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 1981. While working as a professional dancer in New York City she discovered yoga at Jivamukti in 1991, which led her to study in the Iyengar tradition with Genevieve Kapuler and Rodney Yee. She has also studied Light Body energy work and meditation with Diane Goldner, and movement with Martha Yoshida. She is currently studying Q'ero Shamanism with The Four Winds Society and is a full mesa carrier. Heidi acknowledges the influence her wonderful teachers and students have had on her life including her parents, sisters, husband Chris and sons Elias and Wyatt. She has been teaching on Shelter Island since 1995 and at Yoga Shanti in Sag Harbor since 1999 and was part of the faculty of the Yoga Shanti Teacher Training 2009-2014. She leads retreats and offers a 200hr TT at The Giving Room in Southold, NY.

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