Robin Ellen Lucas 11/6/26 Robin Ellen Lucas 11/6/26

Healing with Ashtanga: Modulating stress on autopilot

This time of year brings up stress. It’s not always in real time, but rather in remembering…

Not just in the mind, but in the nervous system and in the tissues. As the mornings are darker, the unconscious becomes brighter, and all that is held inside me comes alive in a new way. This shows up as inklings of thought that generate more depth, or sometimes a standstill—a pause too long—that highlights a blockage.

How to identify and get past the stagnant feeling where words or feelings are numbed? Move my body! My Ashtanga yoga practice has been my savior through the years.

robin ellen lucas 10/19/26 robin ellen lucas 10/19/26

Are you nervous? Ashtanga yoga cleanses the nervous system (2nd edition 10 years later)

It’s good to be proactive and cleanse your nervous system. Ashtanga yoga is one way to do this. I have proof.

I’ve practiced all kinds of yoga through three decades—various methods such as Iyengar, Ashtanga, Vinyasa Flow, Yin—to increase strength and flexibility, to lower stress, and to gain mental and spiritual clarity. I’ve also done it at times just to get out of the house; to soothe an unknown entity rising up inside me, I transported myself to yoga class at the soonest possible opportunity because I had to.

Robin Ellen Lucas 10/7/26 Robin Ellen Lucas 10/7/26

We are who we are

Mom & Dad, do you hear me? I know you do. You visit me as birds, usually whenever I’m hiking. You’re identical, like twins, yet are distinguished and separated from each other on respective branches. I like to see you separate—rather than entwined—so that I can speak to each of you as separate identities.

When I was growing up through to a year or so before you died, you were a hybrid person together as one. It was hard for me to distinguish the feelings I was having about the loss of each of you.

Robin Ellen Lucas 8/27/26 Robin Ellen Lucas 8/27/26

On recovery and intuition

David Whyte, the writer, pops into my Inbox from time to time. Normally, his messages set the stage for great introspection. Here’s the latest:

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavour, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals.