Sandy Naimou has been teaching yoga since 2011, practicing yoga for over 20 years, and writing in personal journals since childhood. Yoga and writing are central to her spiritual life and development. She currently blogs on her website, CreativeEnergyYoga.com and teaches yoga full-time, primarily at General Motors Corporation.
Sandy holds a B.A. in psychology and M.L.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies. She spends her free time studying theosophy, anthroposophy, actively working as a board member for the Theosophical Society in Detroit, taking long walks at Cranbrook Botanical Gardens with people she loves, and watching sunsets on the beach, sometimes with a yoga mat.
Her main focus is to help people maximize their potential at work, at school, at home, and in other areas of life’s challenges. That’s why we’re delighted to have her lead a yoga class at The Path of Consciousness spiritual and writing retreat on October 5-7th at the Colombiere retreat center in Clarkston, Michigan where, weather permitting, we will practice outside in the fresh open air on the beautiful grounds of the retreat enter. We will close our practice with sounds of a crystal bowl and Tibetan singing bowl. For more information, click here:
“Yoga opens the channels of creative energy so that the streams and rivers of your own consciousness flow freely towards your beautiful creations,” she says.
In this gentle and heart-centered yoga practice, she will engage participants with breath-work, concentration, and physical movement to open and connect the body, heart, and mind.
“Expansion in the heart center particularly opens us to truth and awareness of possibilities,” she said. “Connection between heart, mind and body brings into physical manifestation the ideas that live in our minds and the feelings and desires that live in our hearts.”
She adds that in addition to focusing on the heart center, the physical postures in this practice works on other areas in the body that require attention based on the physical demands of sitting and writing for long periods.
I was introduced to yoga over 15 years ago when my Reiki and Sikkim teachers asked the students to do a standing forward fold. Although I was fit and exercised daily, sometimes twice a day, I discovered I couldn’t touch my toes. I had limited flexibility, which can and does impact our daily life in ways that become obvious especially when you get older. I started going to yoga classes and immediately noticed a difference.
Yoga does more than burn calories and tone muscles. It’s a total mind-body workout that combines strengthening and stretching poses with deep breathing and meditation or relaxation. In my case, it helped distress me during my stressful motherhood routines and allowed me to focus on my writing. Then, when my mother moved in with me, with dementia and in a wheelchair, the balancing and strengthening poses, along with the breathing exercises I’d done in yoga helped me care for her.
Yoga can be healing, strengthening, and transformational. In 1970, Billy Hayes was caught at Turkey airport with two kilos of hashish taped to his torso, then convicted of smuggling drugs and sentenced to four years and two months. Only weeks from his scheduled release in 1975, a high court extended that sentence to 25 years. He escaped after 5 years and went on to write a book about his experience which Oliver Stone wrote the script for and later made into an Oscar winning film called Midnight Express.
In one interview, Billy said, “Before I got arrested, I discovered yoga. And I’ve literally done yoga every day for forty years. It’s the only thing that saved me in jail, physically and emotionally. And in Hollywood. Emotionally, you have to be really tough to be in this business, Yoga just helps keep me balanced every day. It helps.”
In another interview, he said it was like a “magic act” that distressed and relaxed you.
Download from Sandy’s website a free guided meditation to know what truth feels like in your body. Click here