Thank you to Evolution Community…

Dear Evolution friends and family,

It is with a heavy heart that I write to share the news that we are closing Evolution PT & Yoga. With my recent illness I have not been able to oversee the business or keep it moving financially through the added strain of the pandemic.

Over the last 15 years I’ve treasured how Evolution has grown and how many people have passed through our doors, and am so grateful to each of you for your support over the years. You have made Evolution a special community. I know when things change it is difficult. I hope that what happens in the future for the staff, students and patients brings us a new beginning.

We are no longer seeing physical therapy patients. If you had an appointment scheduled, it has been canceled. Our physical therapists will need time to transition to new practices. It is my sincere hope that our patients will be able to continue their care with our talented team of physical therapists as they venture out to start or join new practices. We have included contact information for the physical therapists below so that you can remain connected to them:

Meagen Satinsky: megsatinskypt@gmail.com

Michelle Downing: michelle@integrativeptvt.com

Patsy Tyler: patsytylerpt@gmail.com

Rachel de Simone: rachel.desimone@gmail.com

We are still working out the details for yoga. We intend to offer classes via livestream through the month of January. Our community is strong, and our teachers are coming together to work out a longer-term plan for our yoga students. We know that you will likely have many questions and ask for your patience at this time while we work out the details.

The spirit of Evolution remains strong, even though our doors are closing. I am incredibly humbled by the support that all of you have given to me as I’ve navigated this illness. Please know that you are all treasured by myself and the other members of Evolution.

Deep Respect,

Janet

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sa tu dīrgha kāla nairantarya satkāra āsevita dṛḍha bhūmiḥ

The Yoga Sutras 1.14

Translation: Practice that is done for a long time without a break, and with sincere devotion, becomes a firmly rooted, stable, and solid foundation.

There is a theory that if you do something consistently for thirty days it will become a habit, because neurons that fire together wire together. Consistent application begins to develop positive samskaras. In Ayurveda we say, “like facilitates like and opposites bring balance.” The more often we make a choice, the more likely we are to make the same choice again. That’s good news in the world of behavior change, because every step we take makes it easier to take the next step. 

My teacher, Claudia Welch, says “small changes sustained over time make a big impact.” Coby Kozlowski, author of One Degree Revolution, tells a story about a ship changing its course. Imagine if that ship’s direction was shifted just one degree. There wouldn’t be an immediate, obvious impact. But what would change over the course of a week from making just a one degree shift? Over the course of a month? Over the course of a year? 

Neurochemical changes begin right around 30 days, and if we keep going, we start to see real changes. Internal, biochemical change takes about 4 – 6 months, so we need to give it time. We don’t eat the fruit the same day we plant the seed, and the seed needs tending. This is why consistent practice matters. Sutra 1.14  of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, says “Practice that is done for a long time without a break, and with sincere devotion, becomes a firmly rooted, stable, and solid foundation.” 

As we move into a new year, now is a good time to reflect on small steps you can take to live a life of purpose. How might a one degree shift, a small step, impact you over the course of time? What do you think would be true six months from now if you practiced a little bit every day?  

Structure can facilitate change. Here are some ideas to help you commit to a regular practice:

• Buy a 1 or 2 class per week pass, or become an unlimited member.
• Sign-up for class in advance and put it in your daily schedule as if it were a meeting or appointment.
• Make a date with a friend to take a class together.
• Join the Yoga for Life program and become part of a community dedicated to deepening practice. 

Written by Rachel de Simone

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One of the most useful tools yoga continues to teach me is to feel my connection to the ground. It is an intentional slowing down, a space for a moment or split second of present moment awareness. Feeling my feet on the ground helps me to slice through the muck of what Pantanjali’s sutras refer to as “citta vritti” or persistent mind chatter. The formal practice that reinforces my whole body’s memory to pause and feel connection to the ground is meditation. It is through daily meditation practice that I open again and again to the timeless possibilities of transformation, both personal and collective.

This season, as our bodies breathe the pulse of summer’s yang or active energy, there is a sense of needing to remember our connection- to ground, to our values, to one another. We are living into a re-opening of our world that a year ago no one could have fully imagined. We are ripe for transformation! In order to transform there is a period of vulnerability, time spent in that place of not knowing. Meditation is one yogic tool that can support us to be in and move through our not knowing. When we sit and watch our breath on the cushion we cultivate the resiliency to slow down and the courage to stay. We learn how to better care for ourselves as individuals, our collective in our families and communities, and ultimately beyond.

May we feel our connection to the Earth. May we continue to cultivate present moment awareness. May we open to the invitation to transform for the benefit of all beings.

I hope to see you on the mat and around town this summer.

A practice to try:

Come to stand in tadasana, mountain pose, or come to sit in a chair with your feet firmly connecting to the floor. Take a moment to look and listen- What colors and shapes do you see? What can you hear in the environment around you? Now allow the eyelids to grow heavier and let your gaze soften towards the floor in front of you. Imagine you could simultaneously soften the channel to the inner ears while also muffling the sounds of any external noise.

Welcome a deep breath in through the nostrils, fill up the belly, when you are full to the brim open your mouth and release all the breath out. Lightly seal the lips together.

Drop your attention down into the feet.

Kate Floyd teaches Mindful Flow Thursdays 9-10:15 am, and Yoga on the Deck Sundays 7:45-8:45 am, View our full schedule here

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Yogic philosophy explains that change and transformation are an inherent part of nature and life(Parinamavada). The practice of yoga on and off the mat helps us learn to accept these changes.

Life involves transformations, some good, others less welcome. Our bodies age. We graduate from school. Relationships start and end. We begin and leave jobs. Move into, then out of, apartments and houses. We suffer injury and illness, some of which result in permanent changes to our abilities and chronic pain. We experience the death of someone close or the loss of a cherished animal companion.

Change and transformation are stressful. In the throes of grief, we may wonder how we’ll manage after a loss. Or we resist an undesired change, fearing the unknown. This is natural, as our brains prefer certainty.
So how do we keep moving forward when facing a transformation? When the future is unclear and the outcome unknown?

It requires courage.

The courage of transformation.

Courage and vulnerability researcher Dr. Brené Brown provides a helpful definition for courage: being brave and afraid at the same time. This reminds us that courage isn’t something we arrive at once we figure everything out and are no longer fearful. Quite the opposite. Navigating change requires that we accept that the future is not guaranteed, and transformation is something of a leap in faith.

I experienced this leap several years ago while facing a midlife career change due to severe burnout. My mental and physical health was suffering, and it was time to transition to something different. This terrified me. The field of medicine was my life. Becoming a clinician had been my dream since childhood, and I loved my patients and the science of medicine. In fact, helping people navigate frightening clinical challenges with greater ease was one of the reasons I’d become a yoga teacher. However, systemic challenges and chronic stress had taken a toll on my wellbeing. Yet I had no idea what came next, how I’d support myself, who I’d be once I lost my identity as a clinician. It took a great deal of courage to admit to myself that the most self-compassionate choice was to leave a field I loved. And more courage still to reinvent my career.

Courage is self-trust.

The thing is, when facing a transition, we aren’t starting from scratch. We have lived experience, acquired skills, and learned knowledge to rely upon. I’d navigated many challenges and transformations over my lifetime. And while the experiences hadn’t necessarily been comfortable, I’d always landed on my feet, usually stronger and wiser than I’d been before.

So I compiled a “Courageous Moments” list. A literal catalog of transformations I’d successfully navigated. The length of this list surprised me! I’d thought of 32 times in my life where I’d stepped into the unknown and figured things out. Where I was afraid and brave at the same time. The final item on that list? “Trusting myself to figure this out.”
Our ability to be courageous is directly proportional to our willingness to trust ourselves. To know that we will figure things out, even if we don’t know what comes next. To have faith in our ability to choose what’s best for us and create a path forward.

Change is inevitable. Asana and meditation help support us during times of transition by connecting us with our inner selves, strengthening our bodies and mental focus, and helping us approach our lives with equanimity. In this way, yoga teaches us to believe in and trust ourselves, allowing us to negotiate life transitions with courage and self-compassion.

Written by: Christine O’Neill, PA-C, ACC, RYT-200

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With the early spring in Vermont this year, we are reminded of the prevalence of tick season. As you are out and about, please take precautions to protect yourself against tick-borne illnesses. Below Evolution teacher, Zach Wilson shares his experience and transformation working through Lyme disease. For more information on Lyme disease, please check out the CDC website.

Pain, Acceptance, and Healing

My journey with Lyme disease has been the biggest reality check of my life. It led me across a spectrum of emotions including sadness, loss, confusion, hope, acceptance, and eventually transformation. An insidious presentation of joint pain, partial joint dislocations, brain fog, skin rashes, transient nerve pain, short-term memory loss, and anemia with associated fatigue crept into my body and took grasp of my daily life. Unexplainable symptoms and limitations transitioned into feelings of sorrow and confusion. Why me? Why does it seem that doctors can’t figure out how to treat this? How do I even know it is Lyme if the tests are inconclusive?
As I tried my best to navigate the obscure world of lyme doctors, testing, and treatment, the more I took my healing into my own hands and did what intrinsically felt right. Diet change, activity modification, and a consistent yoga practice became my new daily routine. The practice of intentional and therapeutic asana, pranayama, meditation, and relaxation techniques became a big part of my medicine. Yoga provided the opportunity to modify asana poses with my changing needs and examine the subtleties of joint alignment and breathing mechanics during sun salutations and dirgha pranayama with extended inhalation and exhalation.
My experience with the symptoms of Lyme disease taught me how to slow down, adjust what can be changed, and accept what can’t. It taught me that I’m not invincible; it taught me empathy; it taught me how to move my body; it made me a better therapist and it brought me to the practice of yoga. Lyme disease was an unexpected teacher. It took years to shift my perspective, but I now consider this experience a gift.
Zach Wilson

Dirgha Pranayama – 3 part breath or Yogic Breath

Dirgha pranayama is from the Kripalu tradition. It’s referred to as the complete breath or the yogic breath. Dirgha pranayama includes diaphragmatic, thoracic, and clavicular breathing. This technique is foundational and prepares the practitioner for proper deep breathing. Some benefits include its harmonizing and calming effects.

To practice Dirgha pranayama:

• Sit tall and relax the jaw and throat.
• Inhale smoothly and steadily into the belly, rib cage, and collar bones.
• Exhale from the top down down, gently contracting the abdominal muscles at the bottom to squeeze all air out.
• This completes 1 cycle – continue fluid and rhythmic breath, avoiding force or strain
• Before transitioning to your next activity allow a few cycles of natural breathing

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When I hear the word “transformation,” I think total change. Caterpillar to butterfly. Guest bedroom into home office, made fresh with paint and plants by pros on a reality TV show. I think of water shape-shifting into ice or steam. Still H20, just in a different form, morphed by external forces.

Scientifically speaking, transformation is defined as a “change in composition, state, or organization of matter, or movement or rearrangement of material by flow, heat, or diffusion.”* Filtering this through the lens of yoga, I read it to mean this: through flow (connecting movement and breath), heat (built through physical movement), and diffusion (creating space with shapes and breath), we can rearrange our molecules into a new composition, transform ourselves into a whole new state. Powerful.

Hatha yoga tells us that aiming to change our mind often doesn’t work—that, for transformation to occur, it’s useful to move the physical body, to direct the breath. Our mind and emotions will follow. Basically if we start with the outside in, we can create the context for inner transformation.

But, truly, context is what exists beyond—beyond ourselves. It’s the community that supports us and inspires us to do better. The circles and structures that empower us to shed the layers standing between the way we show up in the world and our purest, truest selves. (Or the circles and structures that hold us back.) Context is the set of circumstances in which we’re living: a global pandemic, a culture rooted in white supremacy, the physical body we’re in right now, our employment situation, the caretaking for which we’re responsible.

How do each of these contextual influences individually and collectively shape how we show up? What do we have the power to change? How can we shift situations and systems in ways that allow us to shine forth our best selves and help others to do the same? We can start small: stand tall in tadasana to feel into our power, take a break to check in with the breath, drink a glass of water, go for a walk, call a friend, unfollow an unhelpful social media account, quietly do something that helps someone else. We can be consistent, taking actions small and big that contribute to creating positive context. We can draw from, and offer, the support of community to keep going. This is the practice of yoga. This is how we transform—from the outside in, and back out.

*”4 Chemical and Physical Transformations.” National Research Council. 2003. Beyond the Molecular Frontier: Challenges for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1063

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As we continue to explore the theme of transformation at Evolution this 2021 calendar year, I can think of no simpler and more accessible place to begin than with the breath. If you pick up the recently published book Breath by James Nestor, the above quotation is what you’ll see printed on the inside cover. Nestor, an author, journalist and self-proclaimed pulmonaut takes us through a history of breathing as it relates to humankind. In the process he aims to explore how and why humans became among “the worst breathers in the animal kingdom”, and explains some of the effects this has had on our species over millions of years.

The majority of the book is dedicated to various experiments he conducts related to altering (his own) breath through both researched and inventive techniques and recording specific outcome measures in order to better understand the data he collects. Some techniques and experiments are quite simple and easily applicable. I particularly enjoyed the early chapters that took a closer look at nose versus mouth breathing and personally experimented with these at night with some satisfying results. Others required substantial research, support and preparation and sound downright torturous to this reader, nevertheless they were interesting to learn about and consider.

As the reader makes their way through this text it’s difficult to resist breathing and one can’t help but conduct their own informal experiments in the comfort of a familiar reading chair. Needless to say, for the past year as we’ve all been enmeshed in COVID-19 and its variants and have taken up the practice of mask wearing (sometimes for more hours of the day than not), the opportunity to practicing breathing with awareness in any form is ripe and may even offer the reader new insights into their own habits and practices.

If you have a chance to pick up or borrow a copy of the book and would like to join in a discussion, sign up for our Livestream: Evolution Bookclub with Janet Carscadden happening Saturday, March 27th, 7:30-8:30 pm.

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Darkness is not the absence of light. Fear is not the absence of love. They are both contained within each other. Like the Chinese yin/yang symbol, there is darkness in the light, and there is light in the darkness. Our mission is not to abolish the darkness, but rather to balance it, for it is through darkness that we appreciate the brilliance of the light.

In yoga practice, we often work with the play of opposites to help us find center. For example, you might oscillate between spinal flexion and extension in cat and cow to help you find center in a neutral spine. The goal is never to be only flexed or only extended, but rather to be able to move fluidly between the two and to find balance in the center. A neutral spine is not a rejection of flexion or extension, but rather an even balance between those two forces.

The same is true for our emotions. We cannot expect to feel good all the time. And that isn’t the point of our practice. The point of our practice is to be able to hold space for the good and the bad at the same time, and to recognize that they are two aspects of one whole. Instead of holding on to the things we like or prefer, and pushing away the things we dislike or avoid, eventually, we begin to ride the waves as they peak and as they fall. With practice, we are no longer knocked over by each wave that passes through.

Every breath is a reminder of the nature of impermanence and the play of opposites. Every inhale becomes an exhale. Every exhale gives birth to a new inhale. Each breath contains both the fullness of the inhale and the emptiness of the exhale. The inhale and the exhale are not separate things; they are two aspects of one complete breath.

Just like the breath, our goal is not to abolish fear, but to balance it with love. Our goal is not to avoid discomfort, but to balance it with ease.  May your yoga practice help you to stay grounded and steady like a mountain, even when the winds of change are blowing fiercely. May you ride the waves with fluidity and grace. May you remember the deep and abiding truth at the core of your heart, and have the courage to keep your heart open in the face of fear. As Valarie Kaur says, “May you see no stranger,” and approach each moment, situation, and being as “a part of you that you do not yet know.” May the fire of transformation inspire you to carry your practice off your mat, and to transform the seeds of violence and oppression into compassion and love.

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