I have so loved writing this column every week for the last year and a half. And I've also loved hearing your thoughts about my posts and your practices, whether you commented here on the site or sent me personal emails. Together, we've looked at just about every aspect of the local yoga scene, from new yoga studios, movies, and books to exciting events, kirtans, cooking classes, and even the presidential election.

While I am sad that I'll no longer be writing Samadhi & The City, I plan to continue writing about yoga. Check out my Web site to see what I am up to: www.kmacklin.com.

OM!

Is this just the beginning? Makes me wonder how yoga will be affected. I haven't noticed a shift in class attendance lately--have you? But it would make sense if we started to see studios offering more community classes, maybe some special cards with softer expiration dates. Maybe some of the way pricey studios re-calibrating a bit.

Sadly I won't be reporting on that here. Yoga Journal has been caught up too and is cutting the local blogs. I've really loved posting on the NY yoga scene the last year or so and am so grateful for all of you who read. I do hope to keep in touch. Let me know if you'd like to join my email list for future updates and new yoga-related writing ventures (valerie AT valeriereiss.com). After New Year's this blog's savasana will commence. Om, shanti, shanti, shanti.

Here are some local yoga and meditation events to look into on December 31. If you know of any others, please let us know!

Where: Laughing Lotus
When: 10pm-midnight
What: New Year's Eve Midnight Yoga with Kate (celebrating yoga, music, and community)
How Much: $25

Where: Integral Yoga
When: 8:30pm
What: New Year's Eve Interfaith Service and Peace Chanting
How Much: See website for details.

Where: Being Yoga
When: 10pm-midnight
What: New Year's Eve Yoga in Burlingame
How Much: See website for details.

Where: Yoga Tree Castro
When: 6:30pm-8:30pm
What: Yoga For the New Year with Janet Stone (and kora master Daniel Berkman)
How Much: $35

Where: Yoga Tree Castro
When: 10:30pm-12:30am
What: New Year's Eve Kirtan and Revival with Rusty Wells (an evening of candlelit with special musical guests)
How Much: $25

Where: Spirit Rock
When: 8:00 pm - 1:00 am
What: Another Year? We Just Had One: A New Year's Eve costume-friendly meditation and celebration hosted by Wes Nisker and Nina Wise with drumming led by master percussionist Barbara Borden and dance music by 5Rhythms DJ diva Davida Taurek.
How Much: $50 - $80, sliding scale, plus a donation to the teacher

If you could sum up the essence of what you would like your students to learn in one word, what would it be?
Fierceness

What's your favorite place to get an after-class juice or smoothie?
Juicy Lucy on Avenue A

What's your favorite asana? Least favorite? Why?
Afternoon Napasana and Seated Cat/Cow tie for most energy restoring, and Plow Pose literally gives me a headache.

What's your most recent yoga triumph?
Press-up handstand, finally

Why do you do yoga?
To be able to endure the intensity of life, and love.

How does yoga help New Yorkers specifically?
It detoxes what they retox through stress, breathing the fumes of a thousand cabs and teaches them how to be the eye of life's hectic storms.

What's the most important yoga tip you'd give non-yogis looking to relax in the chaos?
Be like tea, and change the water you're in: life comes at you, but you have the power to come back at life in any way you choose.

What's your favorite healthy restaurant in NYC?
Angelica Kitchen

Which traits do you most admire in your students?
Perseverance, receptivity and heart

What's the weirdest thing you've ever seen in a yoga class in NYC?
A 116 year-old swami smacking my asana with a stick. Or the pet snake.

What's your favorite NYC-synchronicity moment?
The day I chose a random route home, and without missing a step, walked across an intersection, and pulled an oncoming woman out of the path of being hit by a speeding taxi... by inches.

Music in class? Yea or nay? If so, any rules or preferences?
Yea. No speed metal, polka or square dance. Otherwise, anything goes.

Sadie will be teaching New Year's Day at Pure Yoga from 12-2 pm. Class is $25. Call for info or to reserve a spot: 212.360.1888.

During these crazy times, remember the good stuff.

Owning that attitude of gratitude became an inspiration for my Kundalini Yogi friend Jodi Fuchs and her sister Wendy. The Fuchs sisters, both yogis and artists too, started the Gratitude Art Project (GAP) during a time when Jodi was experiencing some financial hardship. "I knew if I focused on what I had instead of what I was lacking, that might offer the key to unlock more prosperity in my life," says Jodi. The sisters also had wanted to work together as a way to heal, co-create, uplift, inspire themselves (and others) by focusing on the positive that already EXISTS in all of our lives.

So they distributed a 1,000 postcards via friends and in yoga studios all over the country asking for people to mail back their "gratitudinals". They also started a blog and a Facebook group (The Gratitude Art Project), so they could share all this gratefulness and use it as inspiration to create works of art (pictured here) focusing on big themes like family, health, God, abundance and small thank yous like car seat warmers, great lip gloss, and good coffee.

This grateful theme is also something near and dear to my New York friend and YJ colleague Valerie, who has been blogging about her gratitudinals both big and small, mundane and fabulous, for quite some time.

Thanks ladies. Your attitude of gratitude reminds me that I have lots to be thankful for too. Please share your gratitudinals with Jodi and Wendy either on Facebook or on the GAP website and if you like, post them here.

Sat Nam.

If you are still looking for some last minute holiday prezzies, check out these inexpensive yoga-themed gifts that can all be bought online (meaning: no gas needed). And feel free to write in and suggest some ideas of your own!

+ The beautiful Yoga Studio on Divisadero is now officially a YogaWorks studio. Give a friend a gift certificate for classes there to see what it's like under new ownership.

+ Books are personally one of my favorite gifts to give and receive. Check out local yoga teacher Sarah Power's new book Insight Yoga, or any of the yoga books at local bookstore Green Apple (type in "yoga" in the search box).

+ If your friends like to watch more than read, hook them up with any of the great yoga DVDs put out by San Francisco company Pranamaya.

+ A gift certificate for a massage at International Orange is a great gift at any time of the year, but it's best during the winter months when we all feel cold and sluggish. A massage at IO includes free use of the steam room, too. Ahhhh.

+ Everyone is always up for some new yoga gear. Of course, it's hard to tell if your new girlfriend or boyfriend's booty is a size small or medium. Buy them a gift card at lululemon and let them go crazy.

+ Giggle Fish puts out the cutest eye pillows, which are made locally and smell yummy. Small, inexpensive, and perfectly portable.

+ Grab a new mat bag for that special friend whose old mat looks like a pack of hungry puppies went at it. Oonasera is a Bay Area company that makes yoga mat bags in original designs.

His practice dwindled down to the few stretches that he would do on my living room floor to release the muscles in his back, tight from all of the paddling. I tried, fruitlessly, to get him back to yoga class. He kept telling me that, during surf season, surfing was his yoga. I was perplexed at the time. Now I get it.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend and fellow Yoga Journal contributor Jaimal Yogis sent me an advance copy of his new book Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen Out at Sea. It's the perfect read for those who love the ocean as much as their yoga mats, or for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the spiritual practice that is surfing.

In his funny and poignant coming of age memoir, Jaimal (at left) tells tales of his teenage journey to live and surf in Hawaii, his later short-lived stint as a monk in Berkeley, and his eventual decision to pursue a degree in Journalism at Columbia. Through it all, he keeps returning to the ocean, and drawing comparisons between Zen meditation and surfing, the waves of the mind and the waves of the ocean.

There are many beautiful passages, but here is one of my favorites:

" . . . it seemed to me that what the mind brought forth while surfing a wave was as close as I'd come to Zen. The great ancestor Sengcan described the Zen mind by saying that the subject disappears without objects, objects vanish without a subject . . . Riding a wave, this happened naturally. The wave demanded such hyperfocus, there wasn't room for judging. On a steep, hollow wave, there wasn't even time to differentiate between one's body and the wave. There was only this and this. Just power and presence."

Saltwater Buddha is out in May 2009 (but is available for discounted pre-order now at Amazon).

WHAT: Eco Gift Festival
Over 150 green companies presenting innovative gifts, an organic food court, children's Stage, live music and a speaker series with leading Eco-Preneurs and Visionaries.

WHO: Speakers include:
Arianna Huffington (Founder-Huffington Post), Michael Brune (Executive Director-Rainforest Action Network), Josh Tickell (award-winning filmmaker "Fuel"), Shallom Berkman (Founder-Urth Caffe), Blake Mycoskie (Founder, Tom's Shoes), Eco-designer Linda Loudermilk, Tom Szaky (Co-Founder TerraCycle), Susan Olsen, aka Cindy Brady on the Children's stage. John Marshall Roberts ("Igniting Inspiration, A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries"). Mallika Chopra "The Power of Intent to Affect Global Wellness" plus more.

WHERE: Santa Monica Civic Auditorium - 1855 Main Street, Santa Monica 90401

WHEN: Friday December 12 & Saturday, December 13 - 10:00am-8:00p,
Sunday, December 14 - 11am-8pm.

* 10% of the profits from the show will be donated to select Los Angeles charities, including GLOBAL GREEN USA.

1) It's a classic and reliable staple: Jivamukti's New Year's Eve celebration. You can choose your evening ala carte or the whole shebang from: a class with David and Sharon, vegan dinner, kirtan dance party, silence and chanting, and a final talk from Sharon and David. Go here and scroll for all the yogic new year deets.
2) You can either add to the spiritual energy or wash your achey head on New Year's Day by chanting the Hanuman Chalisa at Dharma Mittra's studio. All you can chant, any time between 8am and 7pm.
3) Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to watch the fireworks with a New York tour guide.
4) Take to the streets with New York Road Runners' annual four-mile midnight run through Central Park--there'll be a non-alcoholic toast, plus fireworks and a DJ.
5) Om into 2009 at Laughing Lotus with live music.
6) And if that's not hot enough, sweat yourself silly on the Lower East side at Bikram LES.

Got other tips? How are you planning to breathe into 2009?

B.K.S. Iyengar turns 90 on Sunday, December 14. Come to the new and improved Iyengar Institute and celebrate 90 glorious years with 108 Sun Salutations and chanting too.

"The sun-salutation is a part of daily religious prayer, which comes from time immemorial. Every one, along with offerings and prayers, saluted the sun, since Surya, the Sun God has a tremendous solar energy, which is a vital need for mankind." - Geeta Iyengar

What: 108 Sun salutations for Guruji led by Jim Benvenuto and chanting led by Eric Small

When: Sunday, December 14 at dawn - 6:30AM

Where: IYILA

Who: all who wish to honor Guruji -- any level of student, any yoga tradition -- practice one or all the sun salutations, chant and be part of the community.

FREE & Open to all - Chai & sweets follow!

We all know that yoga can be modified for "stiff" people or newbies, but JoAnn Lyons has proven that it can be modified for anyone. JoAnn teaches these two classes weekly at Piedmont Yoga Studio:

+ Yoga for People with Disabilities (Thursdays, 3-4:30 pm)
+ Yoga for People with Special Needs (Saturday, 3-4:30 pm)

The first class is for people with all kinds of physical disabilities, from quadriplegia to cerebral palsy. The second class is for people who have lesser disabilities, like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, arthritis, MS, or scleroderma. You can also come to the Special Needs class if you are nursing a bad injury, and don't want to give up your practice. Both classes are sliding scale, funded in part by the California Yoga Teachers Association's Yoga Dana Foundation.

Recently, I went to assist in one of JoAnn's class and I saw people doing the most incredible things! With a team of staff and volunteer assistants—and a range of props that include a headstander (see student Ramona up top), a yoga sling, cushion wedges, beanbags, and bolsters—JoAnn swiftly directs students into a wide variety of postures, modifying each one for each student's separate needs.

Know someone who thinks they'll never do yoga because of a physical limitation? Suffering from an injury yourself? I highly encourage you to check out the classes. And if you are interested in being an assistant in one of these classes, contact JoAnn to find out about her special teacher training workshop in May.

Taking the time to develop a home asana practice is hard enough. Add a restorative element and you've got another challenge. But for me, restorative yoga is essential, especially during the holidays when designated chill-time keeps me sane and grounded.

Thanks to yogitoes and one of Los Angeles' favorite teachers, Annie Carpenter, the new relaxDeeply CD ($24.95) is a no-brainer path to relaxation. With three options -- the full 73 minutes, a 32 minute moonCYCLE sequence or the sleepWELL 41 minute choice -- Carpenter takes you on a soothing journey that allows you to sink comfortably into poses like Viparita Karani, Supta Baddha Konasana and Balasana accompanied by a mellow soundtrack of Michael Perricone's Tibetan bowl music.

You'll need props to get the full benefit (a bolster, a couple blankets, a block and a strap should suffice). Carpenter's expert direction and the accompanying booklet that gives detailed photographs helps you to transition from pose to pose to pose.

But if you want to get the full yogitoes rKit, you can purchase all the props plus the CD for $225 (gift idea, anyone?). And I have to say, I think the yogitoes prop line is one of the chicest and sleekest out there, thanks to the vision of yogitoes founder Susan Nichols.

So take some relaxation time this holiday season and let us know how you unwind.

Last weekend, I attended a workshop with Paul at Yoga Tree Hayes. He has spent a good deal of his life immersed in spiritual studies, and has focused in more recent years on Hindu Tantra. In class, we chanted the Tantric version of the Gayatri, meditated, and listed to Paul talk about various Tantric principles, like staying open to the mutability of your identity, and spending time in meditation to learn what's really going on inside, and beyond, yourself.

Paul also talked about how we are experiencing a new age of consciousness education right now, and I believe that to be true: I think there is a reason that mind-expanding practices like yoga (and, specifically, Tantra) have become so popular lately. People in the West are starting to more fully investigate themselves, their bodies, and human consciousness. And because Tantra incorporates, rather than restrains the use of, everything that is human—from the intellect to the body and the senses—people in the West seem particularly drawn to it.

Want to know more about the local Tantra scene? Check out the blogs I've written in the past year that have a Tantra bent:

John Friend Talks in San Francisco

The Samavesha Experience

Stacey Rosenberg Teachers Anusara on the Beach

Chris Tompkins' Tantra Studies Class at Rudramandir

Shiva Rea Raises Money for Book on Tantra

Also, Yoga Kula is an Anusara-only yoga school, which has roots in Tantra.

And here's a recent post by LA blogger Stacie Stukin on her White Tantra experience.

Have you been touched by the Tantra bug? Tell us about your experience.

1) Kula Yoga Project's 7:45 am classes
2) The vegan pumpkin scone I had recently at the Jivamukti Cafe
3) That a new Lululemon is opening on Friday, November 30th in the Flatiron District right near my office (or, um, maybe that is something for the non-grateful, too tempting column).
4) The MELT class Monday nights at the Breathing Project. Hard to describe, wonderfully relaxing to the entire nervous system
5) Souen on 13th Street
6) The Girlie Girl Army newsletters--full of vegan recipes, NYC sample sale info, charity info, and other hip-but-spiritual pointers
7) The Dharma Punx meditation and darshan I went to the other night
8) Organique, an all-organic deli on 23rd street
9) Meditating on the subway
10) You, for reading.

What are you grateful for today?

Mani Niall is known in L.A. as the namesake of Mani's Bakery -- the wholesome cafe that uses natural ingredients and specializes in pastry that is gluten-free, low-fat, and sugar-free. While he no longer owns the bakery, his cookbook from that time Sweet & Natural Baking: Sugar-Free, Flavorfull Desserts from Mani's Bakery is a staple in my library and highly coveted since it's out print. Lucky for us, Mani hasn't abandoned his mission to develop healthful, satisfying desserts and continues to bake and publish.

His latest book Sweet! could not have come at a better time, especially for bakers looking for something a little different (and more mindful) for the holiday table. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the cookbook this week at Niall's L.A. book signing, where samples of his sweet treats were served. Did I mention the Melt-in-Your-Mouth Chocolate Cake with Dulce de Leche was not too shabby and unbelievably rich and moist?

Sweet! is a great primer for anyone interested in baking with specialty sugars that offer a lot more than just sweetness. And Niall does a really good job of breaking down the flavors and characteristics of different sugars including ethnic varieties like Jaggery (from India), Panela (from Mexico and South America) as well as raw sugars like evaporated cane juice and sucanat. Then there are my favorites: the moist brown sugars like muscovado and demerara.

If you thought there was only one kind of white and brown sugar in the world (and generally the brown sugar you buy in the market is just white sugar with food coloring) and if you didn't know that most conventional white sugars aren't vegetarian-friendly because they are processed using bovine bones, then this is the book for you. It will definitely make everything a bit more sweet.

Any favorite sugars or recipes you love? Share the wealth, please.