Equipose Yoga Studio

Dear Yogis:

ATTENTION: Lee’s classes are cancelled from June 15-18.

We are going to tackle a difficult subject tonight, one that baffled Einstein! Quantum and Consciousness/ The Observer Effect. First and foremost, consciousness is NOT physical; it is metaphysical...beyond. So, can anyone really define consciousness?

Dr. Theresa Bullard at The Quantum Learning Academy has helped me relate consciousness and quantum energy in an understandable way. Here goes. When we observe anything, a particle or wave in a state of being, that is when that particle or wave manifests in its state of being. Before we observe it, it could have been in an infinite number of states or possibilities in the quantum field. Our awareness or consciousness of that state of being is The Observer Effect. Until a being becomes aware of the state of being of that particle or wave, it's in a quantum infinite possibility kind of state of being.

So, consciousness is the key that relates to this observer effect and what it has to do with our choices.
The conscious observer chooses how he or she is going to observe a certain state of being based on possible biases or assumptions. These become filters that set up our perception, and they determine what the observer is going to get out of the observation. Choices really matter!

Consciousness is more primary because it is what initiates the manifestation of that field in the quantum. Scientists cannot pinpoint consciousness because it's not physical; it's metaphysical.

To conclude, nothing is fixed until we observe it. It is pure possibility before awareness touches it. The moment consciousness enters the field, reality takes shape. That's The Observer Effect. Awareness is not passive or random but a catalyst that pulls possibility into form.

What reality are you choosing to observe into existence?

(Quantum is the smallest possible, indivisible unit of any physical property, such as energy or matter)

Please note that the costs of classes will increase the 1st of July: Unlimited Pass $100, 10 Class Pass $150, 5 Class Pass $75, Drop-in is still $25. Private 90-minute sessions are $100.

Regular Class Schedule

SUNDAY:
10AM Yin Yoga
MONDAY:
10:00AM
4:30PM Vinyasa Flow Yoga
TUESDAY:
12PM Lunch Break Yoga, All Levels, 1 hr
6:00-7:30PM All Levels Flow with Wes
WEDNESDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow
5:30PM Yin Yoga [ZOOM + IN-STUDIO]
THURSDAY:
5:30 Yin [ZOOM only}
6-7:30pm All Levels Flow with Wes
FRIDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow Yoga

No need to register for classes—just come! Drop-ins are $25, and you can purchase class passes.

https://equiposeyoga.com/classes-props

One last thing, please vote for “Best of Warrenton.” Equipose is listed under “Health and Fitness.”

Dear Yogis:

I thought this week would be a good time to return to FASCIA . Many of you attend Yin on a regular basis for different reasons, but along with breathwork, an important objective is to reorganize the fascia and allow it to become longer and thicker. Short yang-type of stress will not accomplish this; however, yang types of stress are necessary in order for the muscle to become stronger.

Restrictions to our movement can come from our muscles' fascia being short and tight, but fascia can restrict us in other ways too. One of the functions of fascia is to allow the sliding surfaces of adjacent muscle groups to slide. If the fascia is too dry, the sliding surfaces will start to stick together. Sometimes adhesions glue the surfaces together and mobility is lost. These adhesions are made of collagen fibers that begin as thin wisps of fuzz (1); every night when we sleep, our body produces fuzz between the muscle groups. We break up the fuzz when we move, stretch, and go to yoga. Injury or sedentary lifestyles equal more fuzz layered on night after night. These fuzz fibers start to intertwine and tangle and become significantly thicker. We become "fuzzed over,'' and our range of motion is reduced.

Other conditions can restrict our range of motion. Scar tissue can reduce our range of motion, too. It can build up between the sliding surfaces of the muscle groups or in a joint capsule. Sometimes the restrictions we feel come from deep fascia contracting by itself. It has been discovered that fascia contains contracting elements called myofibroblasts (2), living cells that act like fibroblasts (the most common cell in connective tissue) and a bit like muscle cells and contribute to wound healing. Myofibroblasts support organ function and are found in deep fascia, but this can be a problem. For example, the lumbar fascia has a high myofibroblast density, and these contracting fibers can restrict the length of our fascia, remodeling tissue, shortening it and causing chronic instability in the lower back, headaches, and fibromyalgia.

A consistent Yin practice can reduce or even correct fuzzy or contracting fascial restrictions.

1. I am borrowing the term "fuzz" from Gil Hedley. The more correct term for fuzz is loose connective tissue. You can view Gil's "Fuzz Speech" on YouTube.
2. R. Schleip,et al., 'Fascia is Able to Contract in a Smooth Muscle-loke Manner and Thereby Influence Musculoskeletal Mechanics," Journal of Biomechanics 39 [2006], p.S488.

Illustration by bendablebody.com

Regular Class Schedule

SUNDAY:
10AM Yin Yoga
MONDAY:
10:00AM
4:30PM Vinyasa Flow Yoga
TUESDAY:
12PM Lunch Break Yoga, All Levels, 1 hr
6:00-7:30PM All Levels Flow with Wes
WEDNESDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow
5:30PM Yin Yoga [ZOOM + IN-STUDIO]
THURSDAY:
5:30 Yin [ZOOM only}
6-7:30pm All Levels Flow with Wes
FRIDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow Yoga

No need to register for classes—just come! Drop-ins are $25, and you can purchase multi-class and monthly unlimited passes.

https://equiposeyoga.com/classes-props

The Best of Fauquier contest is open for voting (link in comments), shining a spotlight on the local businesses and people that help make this community thrive. It’s time to show some local love. ❤️ Link in comments >>

Thai massage master!

Check out Wes Lorber. Check it out now!

Merino.tech

Dear Yogis:

The diaphragm, the organ of respiration, is actually much more! It decides whether you are safe enough to feel because it is the dividing line between the survival body and the safety body. Above the diaphragm lies the heart, lungs, and throat, below the digestive system, gut, and reproductive system. The diaphragm sits right in the middle holding tension between the upper and lower body.

If someone grows up in an environment where it was not safe to speak, feel, cry, or even take up space, the diaphragm learns to hold or brace and create a wall between what is felt below and what one is allowed to feel above.

Over time this shows up as shallow breathing, chronic anxiety, digestive issues, or tight mid-section. There is never a full exhale because a full breath would mean that person would feel the pain of everything.

If a person's nervous system still feels unsafe, breathing exercises will not retrain the diaphragm. The drainage organs, the lungs, kidneys, colon, and skin are still blocked, and there is no place for the processed emotion to go.

A full breath is not just oxygen; it's the body's signal that the threat has passed, and it's safe to feel; the survival mode can end.

To conclude, our emotions impact the movement of our diaphragm. Grief, anxiety and fear can cause the diaphragm to tighten. The diaphragm has a memory, and it learned really early that a full breath wasn't always safe; everything that lives below the surface is too much, too vulnerable, too exposed. That wall that the diaphragm makes is subtle, unconscious. That half- breath keeps you functional but never really present in your body. That wall doesn't come down with technique; it comes down with safety, which is not just a feeling. Our nervous system has to be guided into safety, slowly and gently over time. To unblock those drainage systems, one has to feel safe enough to breathe fully.

youtube.com/fitomizefitness

Regular Class Schedule

SUNDAY:
10AM Yin Yoga
MONDAY:
10:00AM
4:30PM Vinyasa Flow Yoga
TUESDAY:
12PM Lunch Break Yoga, All Levels,1 hr
6:00-7:30PM All Levels Flow with Wes
WEDNESDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow
5:30PM Yin Yoga [ZOOM + IN-STUDIO]
THURSDAY:
5:30 Yin [ZOOM only}
6-7:30pm All Levels Flow with Wes
FRIDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow Yoga

No need to register for classes—just come! Drop-ins are $25, and you can purchase class passes.

https://equiposeyoga.com/classes-props

Students in this morning’s Yin class received a sound healing session from Seana Ankers, during śavāsana. Seana is going through Sound Healing Certification training with Mark Torgeson, and is trying to gain more experience.

Watch for future announcements regarding special collaborative classes with Lee. Seana is giving a limited number of free individual sound healing sessions. These sessions are first-come, first serve, so reach out to Seana for more information or to sign up.

Dear Yogis:

Let's talk quantum physics as it relates to every emotional thought and feeling you have! Every thought and feeling creates a measurable electromagnetic field around your body. This field is not static; it vibrates. Different emotions carry different frequencies; fear, anger and envy generate lower frequencies, while love, gratitude and joy produce higher more coherent frequencies. Most people live unaware that their inner state constantly broadcasts signals into the field around them.

This is important because over time those signals influence the kinds of experiences they attract. This is called resonance, like two tuning forks matching frequencies. Your body's electromagnetic field interacts with the environment, aligning it with similar vibrations. Have you ever felt your mood shift the energy of a whole room?

At the smallest level, everything is vibration and probability. Particles, including the ones that make up you, exist as waves in a vast nonlocal field, which some physicists describe as "a soup of possibilities." Each thought and emotion you repeat sends a kind of signal into that field, influencing how those possibilities collapse into form. So those emotions you feel are not just private; they are shaping the probability of what unfolds in your life.

When you hold consistent states of love, clarity or gratitude, you begin training your field to stabilize in higher frequencies. The longer you hold that resonance, the more your external world starts to mirror it. You are not separate from the universe; you are woven into its fabric. Your electromagnetic field is constantly interacting with the waves that surround you.

Lower vibrations tend to align with heavier realities; higher ones align with lighter, more expansive possibilities. This is happening con.stantly.

So, ask yourself what frequency you are training your field to carry. When you choose gratitude over envy, peace over chaos, love over fear, you are not just changing your mood, you are shifting the possibilities of reality itself.

Levy, Paul. Quantum Revelation.


Regular Class Schedule

SUNDAY:
10AM Yin Yoga
MONDAY:
10:00AM
4:30PM Vinyasa Flow Yoga
TUESDAY:
12PM Lunch Break Yoga, All Levels, 1 hr
6:00-7:30PM All Levels Flow with Wes
WEDNESDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow
5:30PM Yin Yoga [ZOOM + IN-STUDIO]
THURSDAY:
5:30PM Yin [ZOOM only}
6-7:30PM All Levels Flow with Wes
FRIDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow Yoga

No need to register for classes—just come! Drop-ins are $25, and you can purchase class passes.

https://equiposeyoga.com/classes-props

Dear Yogis:

So tonight I take a different direction! I was very moved by my reading of Vaclav Havel's 1985 essay Disturbing the Peace, from which I took most of the thoughts below.

First, a little background on Havel. You may know his renown work in Theater of the Absurd, but his role as a global symbol of moral resistance against totalitarianism is the focus of this piece. He was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic or Czechia, including Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (1993-2003), which reemerged as a democratic country after forty years of Communist rule. Havel was born into a wealthy family which was persecuted as bourgeois by the Communists. Although barred from higher education by the Communists, Havel finished his schooling and is considered one of the great intellectuals of the 20th Century. He spent five years in prison for his human rights manifesto which argued that citizens could dismantle a "system based on lies" by choosing to "live in truth." He spearheaded the non-violent Velvet Revolution in 1989, later that year becoming Czechoslovakia's unanimously elected democratic president. He oversaw the country's transition to a free-market democracy and its entry into NATO.

He argued that the fundamental struggles under totalitarianism were moral rather than political. He further believed that even small acts of truthfulness could undermine an entire oppressive system. He championed a "civil society," one in which independent organizations and active citizens, rather than political parties, hold power accountable. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (2003), Amnesty International's First Ambassador of Conscience Award (2003), and The Ghandi Peace Prize (2003).

Havel defined hope not as optimism that things will turn out well, but as the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. He emphasizes that hope is a state of mind, an orientation of the heart, and a "lifeline of sanity" anchored beyond immediate, dire circumstances. " Hope is the conviction that some things are worth doing, no matter how they turn out." " Hope is an internal decision, a dimension of the soul, rather than a reflection of the external world's state." "True hope is found in performing hopeless tasks, which provides the strength to live with dignity...." The roots of hope connect to a deeper human experience of responsibility and respect for something beyond oneself.

I hope Vaclav's words give you hope. It was very intentional that I choose Havel's picture above which the Dalai Lama because his yogic teachings have always been about hope, service and responsibility, and he, too, has suffered greatly under totalitarian rule.

Regular Class Schedule

SUNDAY:
10AM Yin Yoga
MONDAY:
10:00AM
4:30PM Vinyasa Flow Yoga
TUESDAY:
12PM Lunch Break Yoga, All Levels, 1 hr
6:00-7:30PM All Levels Flow with Wes
WEDNESDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow
5:30PM Yin Yoga [ZOOM + IN-STUDIO]
THURSDAY:
5:30 Yin [ZOOM only}
6-7:30pm All Levels Flow with Wes
FRIDAY:
10AM Vinyasa Flow Yoga

No need to register for classes—just come! Drop-ins are $25, and you can purchase Multi-Class and Unlimited Monthly passes.

https://equiposeyoga.com/classes-props