Centering Yoga LLC, with Chad Hallyburton

01/20/2025

It's cold outside but Sunrise Flow Yoga is still 🔥. Get yourself out of bed, Tuesdays and Thursdays 6:30 am. Hosted at Cullowhee United Methodist Church

01/06/2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O10VJbY7pEM

How much of what we do is simply to impress other people? How far would you go to impress others? Would you give your whole life for it? It sounds like a rid...

01/06/2025

Sunrise Flow Yoga begins again for 2025 on Tuesday, Jan. 14.

6:30-7:30 am every Tuesday and Thursday, hosted at Cullowhee United Methodist Church.

Free, equipment provided, free coffee and biscotti after class.

Welcome to "The Self Help Guru," where the ever-witty Diane Morgan dives into the world of self-help with her unique comedic flair! Join Diane as she takes a...

02/01/2024

A blog post from way back in 2016. Come out to Cullowhee United Methodist Church every Tuesday/Thursday morning at 6:30 am and have some church-basement style yoga fun.

What is Yoga NOT?: Part II

My wife, Ann, was recently invited to a baptism party: praise band, full-immersion in the swimming pool, the whole works. When the extremely gracious host found out that I teach some popular yoga classes at local churches, her comment was, “Oh, so he teaches Christian Yoga?” Ann answered, “Well, he teaches yoga.”
If I’d been there, my reply might have been, “If you’re a Christian in my class and practice from that perspective, then, yes, I teach Christian Yoga.” The same goes for Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, or whatever label you want to apply to yourself: I teach the yoga; you bring the context.

In 2015, Catholic Priest Roland Colhoun told his flock that practicing yoga may lead them to The Kingdom of Darkness. Although I generally get very positive reactions from those who consider themselves as traditionally religious, I do receive the occasional inquiry over the fit between yoga practice and religion (usually Christianity). My simplest answer is, Come and see. We fear what we don't understand, and direct experience is often the best antidote for second-hand misunderstanding.

In the documentary film Enlighten Up, a yoga practitioner makes a very sensible argument by saying that yoga is a practice and a philosophy, but not a religion. If you so choose, yoga can support your own religious growth, or it can simply be a nice way to improve both physical and mental health.

So, no need to fear that you’ll be sucked directly from your mat into the gaping Hell Mouth. But, I will say this: if you want to remain comfortable within a narrow set of beliefs, to never question or look for deeper meaning, to never set out on a journey of growth and discovery, then do NOT undertake a serious and intentional yoga practice. Because if you do, you WILL be changed, and there is no way to predict the nature of that change.

Yoga just may lead you to a place where you find your own sense of control slipping, to a place where something bigger than you begins to take the lead. That transition can be frightening, but if you are open to the adventure, and have just a little faith, then you’ll most certainly end up in a better place. Change is inevitable. Our only choice is whether we fight it tooth and nail or let it sculpt us into who we are meant to be.

01/25/2024

Join us tomorrow morning and celebrate a Full Moon day with sun salutes in anticipation of the rising of our nearest star: Sunrise Flow Yoga, 6:30 am at Cullowhee United Methodist Church.

Yoga Sutra Study 3.34: Pratibhad Va Sarvam

"Or, All may rise like a star"

Pratibhad could be translated as “the likeness of a star,” and like a star, it is unseen until we find ourselves in darkness. The preceding sutras have detailed the many outcomes of Oneness, from the knowledge of all that moves to visions of fulfillment. But here, Patanjali reminds us of what we continually forget: our effort is not what brings us to the goal. Practice may be the beginning of yoga, but nonattachment is its end. We don’t reach the goal, it reaches us.

To begin this sutra, Patanjali's offers a mild, almost playful chastisement with the term Va (or). “Forget everything that I’ve tried to teach you. If you feel that you’ll become too caught up in the quest for Oneness, only wait. Oneness will find you.”

Sarvam, meaning all the yogic powers, or perhaps simply another word for Oneness, doesn’t need our work. It is complete and perfect in and of itself. It (and we?) is everything, already, always. Our striving, rituals, and the like are only the noise we make on our way to discovering a silence that was with us all along.

So, I think we should work for better selves and a better world, but I also believe that we should not make more of our own importance than needed. It is not that we are doing something wrong, something that must be corrected; it is that we are only seeing wrongly. If we only see clearly, correct action will follow naturally.

Nonattachment leads us into the dark, to the place where the stars by rise above the horizon. Then, all we have to do is look up.

Pratibhad Va Sarvam Or, All may rise like a star. Pratibhad could be translated as the likeness of a star , and like a ...

01/23/2024

Some more thoughts from my past (posted 10/19/2017). Sunrise Flow Yoga has been around for a while now...

The alarm caught me off-guard this morning.

Most mornings I wake before it sounds, using its ringing as only a fail-safe, but today the sound jarred me out of my dreams. I stumbled to the bathroom to dress for class, zombie-walked to the car, and drove to church at 30-mph. Then I spent 5-minutes trying to figure out how the key was supposed to fit into the lock before I could even get into the building to set out yoga mats, blankets, and blocks.

It was a rough beginning.

Some mornings seem best suited for staying in bed, but as is always the case, by the time class was done I was glad that I’d shown up. We finished our relaxation period just in time for sunrise, and students stuck around for conversation and breakfast.

Not a bad way to end a rough beginning.

I recently read a story about the infant Krishna. While nursing, the contented baby yawned, and inside his mouth his mother saw the entire universe; swirling galaxies, endless skies, all creatures and all times. Her impulse was to worship the young avatar.

In response, Krishna simply erased her memory of the event. He didn’t want the worship of a devotee. A mother’s love was enough.

This got me thinking: often we strive for what seems impossible; complete selfless love, kindness in all our actions, a vision of divinity in every facet of creation, enlightenment of the soul. And don’t get me wrong; we should set our sights high, we should hope for more than what we as people have settled for. But must we achieve perfection? That isn’t human.

Perfection is inhumane.

Some mornings, getting up and trying again to find more strength and ease seems pointless. Some days, thinking that the world can be less divided, less hateful, and less violent seems ludicrous. Most of the time, our tininess in the face of the enormity of life’s problems makes hope seem like a naïve dream.

But here’s the thing: we don’t have to save the world. We don’t even have to save ourselves. All we need do is open to becoming fully who we are, to walk as authentic human beings. We will often fall down. We’ll often break bread with grimy hands. Our words will be careless and unbeautiful. We’ll stumble half-awake into the morning.

But then we’ll find ourselves in the presence of other lost and half-empty souls, sharing breakfast as the sun rises, admitting that our practice falls far short of our ideals, and asking one another about our hopes for the day. We’ll hold a hot cup of coffee on a cool autumn morning, and it will be enough.

We don’t have to see the face of God and fall down in worship. We don’t have to bring the Kingdom of God into being through the sweat of our brow. We don’t even have to know exactly where we’re going. We just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Perfection is inhumane. Humanity is divine.

The alarm caught me off-guard this morning. Most mornings I wake before it sounds, using its ringing as only a fail-safe, but tod...

01/21/2024

A blog post from 2017 for a chilly Sunday morning:

Running is a great time to ponder. Shuffling along trails today, I began thinking about C. S. Lewis’ classic, The Screwtape Letters, and tried to recall the ending. I remembered that the story’s hero dies in the WWII bombing of London, and that he has a last-moment glimpse of the divine which frees him from the clutches of Wormwood, his personal demonic tempter.

In my memory, I thought that the hero, at last, saw the infusion of divinity in all aspects of creation: in the terrified citizens around him, in the falling bricks, and even in the overpassing drone of German bombers; but after checking the text, I was disappointed to find that he only saw heavenly apparitions surrounding the mortal world. Though they watched over him, they were separate, waiting for his arrival into perfection. His revelation was of an angelic company shining above and beyond a fallen world, not a God-full but misunderstood creation waiting to be envisioned with new eyes.

So who is right, those who persevere through the pains of a sinful life, hoping for acceptance into a blissful afterlife, or those looking for that bliss today and tomorrow, here and now? Who is closer to the truth, the seekers, turning both inward and out, searching for the boundaries of the ALL, hoping that they will discover the folly of their task in the boundlessness of their quarry, or the others who rest in the comfort of clear demarcations of sacred and profane? No one really knows for sure. None of us has found the proof that renders faith obsolete, although you’d never know it from some of the things we say we believe.

We can think about matters divine until we’re maddened by the complexity of our questions or deluded by our certainties, and we can talk about life and death and everything in between until words and breath are exhausted, but in the end all that we can know is this:

Any theology that fences God in with words provides an incomplete understanding of God; any god that can be fully described with words is a fragment of God.

And yet, to reach this understanding of the inadequacy of the intellect and words, we must use…the intellect and words.

Jnana Yoga is often described as the yoga of study and understanding, but that is a misrepresentation; it is really the yoga of giving up. It is the pursuit of thought and intellectual comprehension to the limits of their effectiveness, and having fully explored their borders, we can lay them aside without regret.

Personally, I try to find comfort in unknowing, in the deliberate attempt NOT to have all the answers. But why then do I have so many questions? Perhaps it is because I am still seeking, rather than simply waiting to be found. And maybe the multitude of my questions are trying to teach me that each answer only brings more questions, and that answers are truly not the answer. Or as a more learned author discovered after a lifetime of seeking knowledge: “Of the making of books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh (Ecclesiastes 12:12).”

I’m still looking. I still want to know. And that is why I continue my yoga practice. My faith is that I can someday reach the “knowing from which all words turn back and thoughts can never reach (Taittiriya Upanishad).”

What do you know?

03/13/2023

Sunrise Flow Yoga is back from Spring Break. We'll start gently tomorrow to help recover from the time change. 6:30 am at Cullowhee United Methodist Church.

Jennifer Hinton Mae Miller Claxton Madison Lovingood Judy Seago

08/26/2022

When the 🥎 is more interesting than the 🌧️

08/08/2022

Sunrise Flow Yoga this week, 6:30 am Tuesday and Thursday at Cullowhee United Methodist Church . Free coffee and biscotti!

08/04/2022

No yoga tomorrow. Time to sleep late.

07/27/2022

We have some class members out with illness and post-surgery care duties, so no Sunrise Flow Yoga on Thursday, July 28. See you next week.