As the year draws to a close, it’s natural to reflect on the experiences, lessons, and growth that have shaped us. The holiday season, with its moments of stillness and introspection, provides the perfect opportunity to take a pause and evaluate how far we've come. One of the best ways to close the year with intention is through mindfulness practices like yoga and journaling. Both offer powerful tools to help you reflect with gratitude and set the stage for a positive, purposeful New Year.

The holiday season is often filled with joy, but it can also bring a fair share of stress. From the pressure of gift shopping to managing family gatherings and balancing work with seasonal events, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. In the midst of all the excitement, it’s important to prioritize your well-being and find ways to stay grounded. Yoga can be a powerful tool to help you navigate the holiday season with calm, energy, and mindfulness.

Here’s how yoga can help you stay energized, present, and stress-free during the holidays:

In today's world, maintaining a strong immune system is more important than ever. While eating well and getting enough sleep are essential, many people don’t realize that yoga can also be a powerful tool for boosting immunity. Whether you’re looking to stay healthy through flu season or just improve your overall well-being, yoga offers both physical and mental benefits that support a healthy immune system all year long. This blog will explore how yoga can help strengthen your immune system and provide tips on poses and practices that can keep you feeling your best!  

Yoga has been around for thousands of years, yet there are still a lot of misconceptions about what yoga truly involves. For some, yoga is seen as just a series of stretches (I had a friend once say, “Yoga is just advanced stretching.”),  while others think it requires extreme flexibility or a certain lifestyle.  In this blog we are breaking down these myths so everyone can enjoy the benefits of this practice — both physical and mental. 

Have you ever been in a yoga class and wondered what the heck the teacher was saying when they used traditional yoga terms? It can definitely be confusing! However, understanding some common yoga terms can really enhance your practice. By familiarizing yourself with these words, you open up a world of deeper understanding and richer experiences in your yoga practice.

There are many benefits to incorporating regular movement into daily, or weekly, life during pregnancy and beyond. Prenatal and Postpartum yoga practices combine strength training, flexibly and range of motion stretches, and breathing and relaxation techniques. In this way, a balanced yoga practice offers a supportive approach to both the pregnant person and the baby’s overall physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing during pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond.

The world's pretty wild right now, right? For grown-ups and kids alike. Imagine juggling school, sports, trying to make friends, squeezing in time to play, and keeping up with everything else on your plate. Phew, it sounds exhausting. Thankfully yoga can help! Here are 10 reasons why yoga is great for kids!

After teaching yoga for 20 years, in addition to low back pain, I can also say that probably in 4 out of 5 classes I teach, at least one person will share that they are experiencing head and neck pain. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic! For almost two years people have been working from home with improper ergonomics and slumping into their couches late at night. Nevermind the amount of tension and stress we all have these days that tends to go straight to our upper back and shoulders. I know when I sit at my desk too long, I start to feel my upper back ache and my neck hurt! We may not be able to reduce our stressors, but we can do something about the pain in our neck. Today I’m sharing how you can improve or even eliminate your head and neck pain with awareness, self care and specific yoga postures designed to rebalance your muscles.

Do you hold back telling others that you struggle with stress, anxiety, depression or other mental health concerns because you are afraid they will think negatively of you?

And, do you specifically hold back from sharing your concerns with your managers or co-workers because you are afraid it will negatively impact your job, career or relationships?

Yeah, this is a real thing, and it’s called a “mental health stigma”.

Oh my gosh, I LOVE this question! I have been practicing and teaching yoga for so long that it has become such a huge part of my daily life and I take for granted how it has impacted me. So when someone at a networking event asked me this very question a few weeks ago, I was so excited to reflect back on all the positive changes throughout the last 20+ years! But you don’t have to take my word for it (I mean, after all I do teach yoga for a living!). Here are a few amazing responses from the students at Serenity Yoga & Wellness!

Transitions in yoga, and in life, are hard. We tend to want to push through the uncomfortableness of moving through something to get to the destination. But what if the destination is the transition? Here’s how to make the difficult transitions of your life a bit easier to manage.

It feels almost impossible to stop your mind from overthinking - especially when we are caught in worry about bad stuff. It’s exhausting! When you are worried, your mind jumps from one thought to the next - spending tons of energy but getting nowhere. And The worst part is that it is all consuming. You can’t focus on anything else, you feel sick to your stomach, you might spend hours researching your concerns on the internet, or you might even jump to conclusions and react to situations that can end up damaging relationships. But mindfulness can help! Here are three simple steps you can take to ease your worry and better manage your anxiety.

When I’m feeling anxious, stressed, angry or anything unpleasant, I typically want those feelings to just disappear. I mean, who wants to actually sit in feelings that make us uncomfortable? I might binge a show on Netflix, dive into work, eat a pint of ice cream, or make other “bad” choices to avoid feeling my feelings. And while these types of activities can be helpful in the moment, I also know that avoiding my feelings will make them more intense and have a negative impact on my health over time. Thankfully we can practice mindfulness activities to face our emotions in a healthy way instead of just ignoring them. Here are 10 mindfulness activities you can do in a short amount of time to reduce your anxiety and feel more calm.

In my opinion, there is nothing worse than a bad night’s sleep.  Lately, I’ve found myself tossing and turning in the middle of the night, throwing off my comforter one minute and then pulling it up the other, and checking the clock to see how much time I have before morning.  There really is nothing more tiring than trying to fall asleep.  If you can relate, then this blog is for you. Today I’m sharing 3 restorative yoga poses you can do right before bed to bring your awareness to the present moment, slow down your nervous system, reduce your stress level, and get a better night’s sleep.  

A lot of people confuse self-care for self-love. Although they are closely related, they are not necessarily the same thing. We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of self-care, how to make time for it even when we don’t have time, and how without it we are left feeling depleted, unproductive and generally unhappy. However, no matter how important you think self-care is, you’ll probably never make it a priority if you don’t have a strong sense of self-love. Which is why today I’m sharing exactly what it means to have self-love, how self-care plays a role, and the importance of improving your self-love in order to show up in life as your very best self.

When someone is feeling anxious, the first thing most people say is, “take a deep breath.” Instinctively, we know taking a deep breath will help us pause, relax, and reset in order to continue on with our day. What’s interesting is that sometimes when people say this to me, I actually get frustrated! I don’t want to breathe! I’m in panic mode over here! But then I learned why the breath is so important and how to breathe in a way that almost instantly reduces my anxiety. And now it’s my number one go-to tool when I’m feeling anxious. And I want the same for you! Today I’m sharing exactly why taking a deep breath works and how to do it properly so that you can slow down your nervous system and reduce your anxiety.

I’ve been teaching yoga for almost 20 years, which means that I’ve been asked a LOT of questions about yoga.  But there are a few questions that tend to come up time and time again. So today I'm sharing my answers to the most commonly asked questions so that you can feel more confident and informed as you begin or continue with your yoga practice. 

Here we go! 

I don’t know about you, but I have a REALLY hard time doing nothing.  If I’m awake, my mind is on and I feel like I need to be productive every moment until I go to bed at night.  If I’m not productive, my inner critic chimes in and makes sure I feel “less than” because I wasted the day away.  

Unfortunately our anxious minds want to be “doing” all the time - and if we aren’t physically active, we sure as heck are mentally active.  But this belief has a negative impact on our nervous system and our overall health.  Pausing to slow down, even just for a breath or two, can make a big difference in how we feel.  Here’s why rest is important and various ways you can start to slow down in your life in order to reduce your nervous system and reduce your anxiety. 

I used to love eating lunch while scrolling through my phone and standing at the kitchen counter.  Or watching TV while plopped on my couch with dinner.  But I noticed that I was also feeling a bit scattered and really stuffed after each meal.  And I was having a hard time digesting my food, especially after overeating when out to dinner with friends.  And then I learned the practice of mindful eating.  I am now fully present for most meals, which has helped slow down my nervous system, improve my digestion and ultimately reduce my anxiety.  And I want the same for you.  So today we’re breaking down what mindful eating is, how it works and what you need to get started right away to help you reduce your anxiety too.

Headaches are the worst.  And they usually show up at exactly the wrong time.  Even though there are so many types and tons of causes, headaches have one thing in common - they are unpleasant, extremely painful and can be down-right debilitating.  Thankfully the practice of mindfulness and yoga can help.  Whether it’s a specific movement or pose, simply breathing or practicing meditation, the practice of staying present allows you to reduce stress and tension in your body and mind, become more aware of what might be triggering your headaches (so that you can avoid those things in the future) and build resilience to life’s challenges so that you can handle difficult situations with more awareness, calmness and ease.