Yoga Sessions with Cara
Cara Judea Alhadeff began teaching in 1998 and soon after completed the Advanced Studies Teacher Training Program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute. Her background in cultural anthropology, Hindu mythology, Buddhist psychology and human physiology enhance both how she teaches and how she learns. Her injury-prevention approach to yoga combines body awareness of weight, energy, and strength distribution. Internationally, she teaches yoga workshops and privates and trains yoga teachers in Seoul, South Korea. Cara Judea has written extensively on the connection between Iyengar yoga and the arts. Her teaching specialties range from yoga for athletes/dancers to restorative yoga. Through a practice of playful self-inquiry, she hopes to help students both challenge and respect the possibility of moving beyond mental and physical limitations. Her teaching has been deeply influenced by Dean Lerner and by Judith Lasater’s research on the therapeutic aspects of Yoga and psycho-anatomy.
Cara Judea Alhadeff began practicing yoga at the age of eleven in Boulder, Colorado. She began teaching in 1998 after completing the Advanced Studies Teacher Training Program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in SF. Her training in cultural anthropology, Hindu mythology, Buddhist psychology and human physiology informs her injury-prevention approach to practicing and teaching yoga–combining conscious body awareness of weight, energy, and strength distribution. She teaches yoga workshops and therapeutic privates internationally, and trained yoga teachers in Seoul, S. Korea. Cara writes extensively on the connection between yoga and the visual arts. Her teaching specialties range from yoga for athletes/dancers to restorative yoga. Through a practice of playful self-inquiry, Cara helps students challenge and respect the possibility of moving beyond mental and physical habitual behavior. Her teaching has been deeply influenced by Judith Lasater’s research on the therapeutic aspects of yoga and psycho-anatomy.
Yoga Offerings
PRIVATE SESSIONS
Private instruction with an individual student can vary from focusing on the alignment of a particular part of the body (for example, neck, shoulders, back, hips) to refining a flow-centered practice to setting up a restorative practice in your own home.
You are welcome to choose one or several poses to work on. We break down the pose in order to clarify how to best use and support various bones, muscles, joints, connective tissue, and organs. The result is often a deeper experience and understanding of your body both during your yoga practice and off your yoga mat, in your daily life.
We can meet at a yoga studio or I will go to your house to help you set up an active and/or restorative practice that fits into your home setting (i.e., learning how to use objects around the house as props-sleeping bags as bolsters and phone books as blocks, for example.)
Breathing and redirecting the organs of perception (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) are subjects we can explore during a private session. Also, looking at how we distribute our weight and direct our attention can be very helpful.
Private instruction for up to four students may include partner work (ie., learning how to help each other in poses) and getting a clearer understanding of a pose by looking at someone else’s body.
Fees are based on a sliding scale:
Individual sessions:
* 1 hour, $90-$100
* 1 1/2 hour, $120-$140
Group sessions:
* 1 hour, two students – $90-$130
* 1 1/2 hour, two students – $125-$185
* 1 hour, three – five students – $120-$150
* 1 1/2 hour, three – five students – $175-$220
They also make great gifts!
WORKSHOPS
Yoga workshops (generally 10-15 students) and group privates (3-5 students) give both beginning students and advanced practitioners an opportunity to concentrate on a particular subject in a small group setting.
The focus can range from releasing the hips, the shoulders, opening into sun salutations, twists, backbends, forward bends, and inversions, restorative yoga and practices to help relieve anxiety.
All workshops and group privates may include:
- psychosomatic awareness
- Buddhist mindfulness
- how to access and make choices about the breath and breathing patterns
- tracing our habitual reactive thought patterns and learning to make choices about those patterns
- alignment and anatomy
- how to work with gravity most efficiently
- how to access our physical and emotional strength
- injury prevention and yoga therapy
Types of workshops offered
- Stress reduction
- Shoulders
- Hips and groins
- Inversions
- Restorative
- Sexuality
- Pre-natal
- Meditation
BODY CONSCIOUSNESS PROGRAM
Jumping Into the Unknown
Throughout Europe, the US, and Korea, I teach the Jumping Into the Unknown body consciousness workshops to those working in the arts, anthropology, gender studies and ethnic studies. Frequently, I teach them in conjunction with my visiting artist lectures at universities and museums. Most recently, I have been incorporating the workshops into collaborations with medical professionals.
Join Cara Judea Alhadeff, photographer and Iyengar yoga teacher from New York and San Francisco, for an adventure investigating how self-inquiry can become a bridge between the mind and the body. Using the theater of our bodies as a site for exploring both the familiar and unfamiliar, Alhadeff will lead participants through a series of “reaction activities”. The foundation of this relationship is physical and emotional strength rooted in vulnerability and difference. These workshops will focus on postural behavioral patterns/reactions and breath access in relation to a variety of psychological contexts.
These body consciousness workshops integrate both the philosophical and the psycho-anatomical into a framework that sheds light on how to thrive on contradictions and ambiguities in our chaotic daily lives. The mind’s natural tendency is to be preoccupied with the outside world. When we cannot separate ourselves from our reactions, we are no longer committed to the practice of being in the present. When people resist the unfamiliar and become unwittingly frozen in the habitual, tension is stored in muscles, diaphragm, and the nervous system. This attachment to ego may have detrimental short and long term effects on our psycho-neuroimmunology: body, mind, and emotions. Since a lot of us are addicted to stress—to the chemical, endorphin high– we tend to confuse feeling energized with nervous system stimulation. Alhadeff encourages participants to slow down enough to find connections within their own bodies, between themselves and others—to develop self-awareness by paying attention to the present moment. Adaptability, rather than attachment, is a central aspect of this practice. For Alhadeff, this is the definition of “commitment”—a willingness to jump into the unknown.
Participants will explore body awareness activities, Alhadeff’s photographic work, and participate in group discussion as lenses through which they can investigate choice and creativity in their daily lives. Most importantly, the workshop offers the possibility of experiencing empathy and layers of interconnectedness.
These are not the titles, but the subjects for the different workshops include: Yoga and Sexuality, Yoga for Stress Reduction, Neuroplasticity and Ego, Yoga for Performers and Public Speakers, Yoga for Parkinsons and other Chronic Disorders, Yoga and Fertility, Yoga for Pregnancy
• Increase concentration, mental clarity, and receptivity
• Ease exhaustion, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue or other stress-related physical and psychological issues in order to relieve tension from our demanding daily lives
• Notice and Cultivate stillness and silence within– the space inside our bodies and consciousness that already exists
• Develop physical and emotional vulnerability as a source of personal strength
• Improve posture, digestion and essential body functioning
• Explore our comfort zones with empathy and the unfamiliar by identifying how we react to the unknown
• Pay attention to how often we create a separation /b/ ourselves and others; us vs. them
• Learn how to let go of counter-productive habitual patterns of behavior
• Take aesthetic, personal, and intellectual risks in order to listen to and nourish our own bodies, minds, and spirits
- Questions we will investigate in small and large group activities:
• What is Ego? And how does it manifest in your mind and body?
• When do we expand our energies? When do we contract our energies? When do we contain our energies?
• What is Stress? How do you define it? Where does it come from?
• Where does rest come from?
• What do you need in order to balance your energy? Is it erratic, lethargic?
• How does your body respond to external and internal expectations? Where does your body hold these pressures? How does your mnd react?
• How does your body respond to the unknown/vulnerability/ambiguity?
• How does your mind respond to the unknown/vulnerability/ambiguity
• How does your body respond to relaxation?
• How does your mind respond to relaxation?
TEACHING TEACHERS
Cara works for yoga teachers in training both in the US and in Korea. She focuses on unraveling layers of perception. The core of this investigation rests in group analysis of the notion of alignment in relation to communication, habit, willpower, ambition, neural plasticity, and the nervous system.
SEX HEALTH
Are you craving connection with other women in a safe, intimate environment? Or a one-on-one private session?
Yoni (in Sanskrit, meaning vagina) steaming is a cross-cultural holistic health practice that uses herbal steams for well-being. This practice can be for all genders.
Using a hand-crafted wood stool
Individual sessions or group gatherings include:
- steaming together among women or individual private sessions for all genders
- pelvic floor anatomy
- hip opener yoga asanas
- meditation
- journaling
Benefits of steaming include:
- reduce bacterial growth
- yeast infections/candida
- hemorrhoids
- postpartum healing
- irregular cycles
- cramping
- PMS
- polyps, cysts, or fibroids
- endometriosis
- hot flashes and night sweats
- hormone challenges
- vaginal dryness
- uterine and bladder health
- circulating sexual energy
- body image—cultivating self-love, body self-awareness
- sexual or physical trauma
- low libido
- infertility
- infections
- hysterectomies
- c-sections
- monthly well-being routine
Gatherings are women-only, but steaming is also great for men and hemorrhoids, digestion challenges, patterns of somatic distress, prostate and bladder health!
Wild Menagerie’s hand-crafted wood multi-gender steaming stools:
$65 12″ stool
$75 16″ stool
We use a quart-sized mason jar with the following steeped herbs:
- motherwort
- lavendar
- rosemary
- calendula
- yarrow
- blue malva
- rose
- sage
- nettles
Contact yoga@carajudea.com or 970-433-1904 for questions