Dec 20 2011
Play, Retreats, Wellness, Yoga

Yoga Retreat at Bali Beach Resort

November 3 – 10, 2012

Join Montreal Vinyasa teacher Dawn Mauricio and Toronto Jivamukti teacher YuMee Chung on this seven-day yoga retreat to Bali’s breathtaking north shore. Begin each morning with a dynamic yoga practice infused with meditation, chanting and sacred philosophy, and end the day with a gentle, flowing practice. In addition to the twice daily open-air yoga classes, enjoy delicious organic vegetarian meals, and plenty of leisure time.

Optional excursions include hiking to a jungle waterfall; making offerings at Bali’s oldest Hindu temple; visiting a traditional Balinese healer (we have it on good authority that he is the real deal); and dolphin watching. Or simply relax with a Balinese spa treatment using 100% natural hand-made products.

What’s included:
• 7-nights Shared or private accommodation on the ocean
• All meals
• Daily yoga classes and workshops
• 45 minute private yoga lesson
• Airport transfers
• A Balinese music & dance performance
• Free WiFi

Please note that your flight is not included. Any spa services, optional excursions and gratuities are also extra.

Schedule:
Your days will consist of:
• 2 ½ hour morning yoga session
• 90 minute evening yoga/meditation session
• 6 hours of free time to explore Bali each day
• A full day-off for longer optional excursions

Rates and registration
• Shared room: $1350 CAD (includes taxes)
• Private room: $1600 CAD (includes taxes)
• Add $100 for an air conditioned room

A non-refundable deposit of $500 CAD is required to reserve your spot. Balance to be paid in full by October 1, 2012.

Balance may be paid in-person via cash or cheque, or with a credit card via Paypal (add 5% transaction fee).
We highly recommend that you invest in travel insurance for your trip to ensure peace of mind.

Teachers
YuMee Chung and Dawn Mauricio (see below)

Venue
We will be hosted by Villa Boreh Beach Resort and Spa. Located on the north east coast of Bali in a sleepy fishing village, Villa Boreh consistently receives rave reviews for its beauty and hospitality. The area we will be visiting is protected by mountains and has its own microclimate. In other words, it gets very little rain, even during the rainy season.

More information
Email us with your questions and to indicate your interest in attending

Optional excursions

We will be using PlanetAir to offset our personal carbon emissions.

Dawn Mauricio (Montreal)

After discovering meditation in Northern Thailand, Dawn was hooked on the spiritual path. Soon after, she gave up her PR job to become a yoga teacher. Teaching full-time since 2006, Dawn has a playful and dynamic approach that draws from her experiences in Ashtanga, Iyengar, and Kripalu Yoga, as well as Mindfulness Meditation. Dawn continues to sit regular silent meditation retreats and has completed over 1,000 hours of training. She is the founder of Yoga Mala Montreal, a non-profit organization that unites the yoga community in fundraising events to bring yoga to underdeveloped areas.

YuMee Chung (Toronto)

YuMee Chung is a former securities lawyer who left a busy practice to engage more deeply with life. Named in Yoga Journal’s February 2008 listing of yoga’s “who’s who,” she is an Advance Certified Jivamukti Yoga teacher who is also trained to teach Ashtanga Yoga and Yoga Tune Up. She has taught and spoken at national yoga conferences and she completed a tour of 19 North American cities at the end of 2006. Today, she is a yoga teacher, writer and spiritual seeker. Her work and teaching take her around the globe, but she is happiest at home on the shores of Lake Simcoe with her musician husband.


Dec 18 2011
Living

Less

(via mnmlist.com)

Stop buying the unnecessary.
Toss half your stuff, learn contentedness.
Reduce half again.
List 4 essential things in your life, do these first, stop doing the non-essential.
Clear distractions, focus on each moment.
Let go of attachment to doing, having more.

Fall in love with less.

Dec 13 2011
Living, Wellness

Crudessence Gift Packages

Treat the healthy eater (or wanna-be healthy eater) on your list with these great gift packages put together by Crudessence. Click here to purchase online or visit the restaurants to buy in person.

For that person who is into overall health and wellness in your life, try combining the packages below with the great ones put together by Naada Yoga for the ultimate experience!

  • “Back to the Source” kit $245 (value of $295): Crudessence cook book + Intensive Crudessence Academy Kitchen Class (7 hours) + 1 ingredient kit
  • Blissful kit $170: Crudessence cook book + 3 hour Crudessence Academy dessert class + dessert ingredients kit
  • Cacao Lover kit $165 (value of $180): Crudessence cook book + 3 hour Crudessence Academy raw chocolate class + 1 starters’ ingredients kit + 2 chocolate molds
  • Gift certificate to a Intensive Crudessence Academy Kitchen class (7 hours) $160
  • “Romance and Health” Package $159 (value of $228): indoor and outdoor Scandinavian baths and mid-day meal from Spa Eastman + $50 at any Crudessence restaurant (for 2 people)
  • “Duo Heaven” Package $100 (value of $170): 2 x 30 minute Ylang Ylang butter massages from Espace Nomad + $50 at any Crudessence restaurant (for 2 people)
  • Crudessence cook book + 3 hour Crudessence Academy class of your choice $90 (value of $110)
  • Crudessence cook book + Intensive Crudessence Academy Kitchen Class (7 hours) $160 (value of $195)
  • “The Essentials” box $100: Great for those who are ready to start eating healthier at home.
  • Gift certificate to any of the Crudessence restaurants and boutique section $100 or $50
  • Gift certificate to a Crudessence Academy class (3 hours) $75
Dec 12 2011
Living

Email for Minimalists

(via theminimalists.com)

Written by Joshua Fields Millburn | Follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+

 

Email of Yesteryear

I manage my email vastly different than I used to.

When I worked in corporate America, I would get 150 to 250 emails a day. The first thing I did in the morning was reach for my BlackBerry and check my inbox. I was anchored to that BlackBerry throughout the day, checking it every five or ten minutes, always anticipating every new message. It was an unspoken corporate expectation—to be on call, always available.

And at night, before my head hit the pillow, the last thing I did—out of habit—was check my BlackBerry for new messages. Looking back on it, it seems a bit crazy now, but, at the time, that was the expectation, and thus it felt completely normal.

The truth is that less than 40 of those 150 to 250 emails actually required any kind of action. Some of them just needed to be read and filed away mentally. Others were irrelevant but still required my precious time to read and decide whether or not it was pertinent information.

To manage such a daunting load, I developed an elaborate system to organize the chaos—constantly checking my inbox, filing messages into appropriate “to do” folders, delegating tasks to various employees, and setting priorities for various actions I needed to take. It was a vicious cycle, and I was never “caught-up.” I couldn’t, by definition, ever be caught-up with such a barrage of perpetual incoming info. But I soldiered on—reading, filing, prioritizing, delegating, and taking action to get things done.

Email Today

The picture looks much different for me today.

Size doesn’t matter. I don’t subscribe to the five-sentences email philosophy prescribed by some of my friends. I like long emails if they are clever, well thought out, and add value to my life (that last part is the most important). For some emails, however, five sentences is way too long. And most emails shouldn’t be sent at all. Besides, I’m perfectly capable of writing a two-page 277-word sentence that would render this rule irrelevant (as I demonstrated in the first sentence of the fourth story in Falling While Sitting Down). So, instead of limit myself, I think twice before I send an email. Is there a better way to communicate this info?

Use your smartphone as a tool (if you have one). I still get about the same amount of emails (thanks to the success of this site), and I still have a BlackBerry. But my BlackBerry works for me, not the other way around. It is a tool I use to respond when a computer isn’t nearby (I don’t have internet at home). If I’m writing, I leave it in the other room. If I’m on tour, I use it for short responses while I’m traveling. If I’m spending time with a friend, I leave it in my pocket or, better yet, at home or in my car.

Unsubscribe if you don’t find value. My email is my central hub, it’s what I use to aggregate all of my incoming info (comments, communications, websites, newsletters, blogs, etc.). If something is no longer adding value to my life, I unsubscribe.

Don’t respond to email every day. If you send me an email, you will get a response (if it warrants one), but that response is on my terms, on my timeline. No one should send an email to anyone and expect an immediate reply. Life is too precious to spend our days feeling anxious with required email responses.

Don’t act on everything. Not every email requires an action. In fact, most don’t. Sometimes it’s OK to just hit delete.

Delete nearly everything. I used to archive all of my messages, but now I just delete them when I’m done reading. It’s incredibly freeing. But what if you realize you need something you deleted? Well, I save the few messages I’m certain I’ll want to reference later—I save those messages in a folder and I delete everything else. I have the trash set to keep everything I delete for 30 days before the messages are gone. But, in reality, I’ve learned to let go. If something gets lost, it’s not the end of the world. I’m more concerned about the future than the past.

Question: How could you manage your email differently? Feel free to comment below.

Dec 12 2011
Living

100 Days with No Goals

(via zenhabits.net) 

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Joshua Fields Millburn of The Minimalists.

I have lived the last 100 days with no goals. And I have never been happier or more content in my life.

When I met Leo four months ago — two-thousand miles from my home in Dayton, Ohio — he said there were three things that significantly changed his life: establishing habits he enjoyed, simplifying his life, and living with no goals.

I was already living the first two: I had established my pleasurable habits, I had simplified my life. But it was difficult for me to grasp the “no goals” thing. The thought of living a life with no goals sounded insane to me — it was counterintuitive, it was scary, it went against almost everything I had ever learned about productivity.

In my corporate life of yesteryear, I managed hundreds of people for a large corporation, an organization in which I was often considered theproductivity guy, the goal guy: I met deadlines, overproduced, exceeded expectations, got results. That’s why they paid me the big bucks.

I regularly had umpteen goals in various stages of completion: short-term goals, long-term goals, personal goals, business goals, health goals, financial goals, vacation goals, consumer-purchasing goals, you name it. I thought if I crossed enough goals off my to-do list, I’d eventually be content. So I worked harder and harder, focusing on every new goal with lapidary precision.

But I was stressed out of my mind with all those goals. My hauntingly perpetual to-do list was just that — perpetual, never-ending. And it was ever-growing. Plus, I was continuously disappointed when I didn’t achieve a goal, or when I missed a deadline. Hell, I was even disappointed when I attained a goal but didn’t overachieve. It was a self-consuming cocaine high — it was never enough.

I needed a way to quit my goals cold turkey, so I did two things after speaking with Leo.

First, I asked myself, “why do I have these goals?” I had goals so I could tell if I was “accomplishing” what I was “supposed” to accomplish. If I met a goal, I was allowed to be happy — right? Then I thought: Wait a minute, why must I achieve a specific result towards an arbitrary goal to be happy? Why don’t I just allow myself to be happy now?

Second, I decided to live with no goals for a while. I didn’t know how long, because I didn’t make it a goal. I figured I’d give it a shot for a month or so, maybe longer, to see what happened. If it affected me negatively, I could return to my rigid life of “achieving” and “producing results” with my color-coded spreadsheets containing scads of goals.

What happened? Breaking free from goals changed my life.

Three Ways Living with No Goals Changed My Life

1. I am less stressed. I have virtually no stress now. Sure, there are brief moments in which I feel vexed or bothered — but I feel so much less stress these days. People I’ve known for years comment on how calm I am. With no goals, they say I’m a different person — a better person.

2. I am more productive. I didn’t anticipate this one. I thought getting rid of goals meant I was going to sacrifice results and productivity. But the opposite has been true. I tossed productivity and became more productive. I’ve written the best fiction of my life, I’ve watched our website’s readership increase significantly, I’ve met remarkable new people, and I’ve been able to contribute to other people like never before. The last 100 days have been the most productive days of my life.

3. I am happier and more content. During my 30 years on this earth, I’ve never been this consistently happy or content. It is an incredible feeling, even surreal at times. With the decreased stress and increased productivity resulting from no goals, I am able to enjoy my life, I am able to live in the moment. And thus I am appreciably happier and more content.

Three Misconceptions About No Goals

Three arguments against the no-goal lifestyle presented themselves to me in the last 100 days, all three of which I’d like to address.

1. Complacency: Doesn’t a life with no goals make you complacent? Well, if by “complacent” you mean “content,” then yes. But, otherwise, no it didn’t make me complacent. In fact, the opposite was true: after removing the stress from my life, I partook in new, exciting endeavors, while living a passionate, meaningful life.

2. Growth: Doesn’t a life with no goals prevent you from growing? No. I’ve grown considerably in the last 100 days. I’ve gotten into the best shape of my life, strengthened my personal relationships, established new relationships, and written more than ever before. I’ve grown more in the last 100 days than any other 100-day period in my life.

3. You still have goals: You say you have no goals, but don’t you still have some goals, like finishing your new novel or “being happy” or “living in the moment”? It’s important to make a distinction here: yes, I want to “be happy” and “live in the moment” and “live a healthy life,” but these are choices, not goals. I choose to be happy. I choose to live in the moment. I choose to live a healthy life. I don’t need to measure these events, I simply live this way. As for my new novel, I intend to finish writing it — I’ve never worked harder on anything in my life — but I’m enjoying the process of writing it, and if I never finish, that’s okay too. I’m not stressed about it anymore.

Living with no goals has changed my life. It has added layers of happiness and contentment I didn’t realize were possible. It has allowed me to contribute to other people in meaningful ways. I’m not going back to a goal-oriented life. No goals. None at all. Life is outstanding without them.

Joshua Fields Millburn writes essays with Ryan Nicodemus about minimalism and living a meaningful life with less stuff at The Minimalists. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, orGoogle+. Subscribe to The Minimalists for free updates.

← Older posts
Newer posts →
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.