Ayurveda with Matthew Remski 

Join us for a rare opportunity to study with Canadian writer, Asana teacher, Ayurvedic consultant, poet and critical thinker, Matthew Remski! Workshops include Ayurveda - Daily Routine, Ayurveda - Digestive Ease, The Ayurveda of Restorative Yoga and a Potluck Dinner & Discourse on "What Are We Actually Doing in Asana?" (WAWADIA), the basis of his next book.

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Jacksonville, FL on Friday, September 25 and Saturday, September 26

Join us for all of these spectacular offerings or some! Learn how to take better care of you and develop a deeper understanding of Ayurveda from a current, poetic international voice, Matthew Remski.

Friday, September 25, 2015, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m., Ayurveda: Daily Routine Stressed? Disorganized? Looking for a natural rhythm? Ayurveda puts daily routine at the center of self-care. This presentation will process on the timing of solar and digestive cycles, and how to smooth over the transitional moments in your day in which you may be prone to low energy, wild food cravings, or emotional burn-outs. Student, parent, executive bring your scheduling challenges to this Ayur-lab. This lecture is open to all students of all levels. 

Saturday, September 26, 2015, 10 a.m. - Noon, Ayurveda: Digestive Ease In Ayurveda, food and the capacity to digest mirror each other. Understanding what is right for you to eat is a very personal journey. Wouldn’t it be nice to build a supportive diet naturally, based upon who you are, rather than what’s in vogue? Ayurveda provides a powerful language for doing just that. We’ll look at the typical states of digestive fire, and what foods best nourish us in the tasks of cleansing, repairing, or building. We’ll look at tastes and timing, raw veganism and omnivorism and everything in between, and echo the fundamental Ayurvedic principle: “Food is the first of all medicines." This lecture is open to all students of all levels.

Saturday, September 26, 2015  2 - 5 p.m., The Ayurveda of Restorative Yoga Ground your practice and teaching of Restorative Yoga with the insights of Ayurveda. Special attention will be paid to the poetry of internal sensation using the language of the elements, dhatus (tissues) and vayus (directional pranic patterns). Postures will be simple but rich, with options provided for injury or mobility concerns. Excellent for practitioners wishing to explore the intuitive dynamics of Restorative, and for teachers wishing to enrich their classroom technique. This lecture and movement practice is open to all students of all levels. Students must be able to get up and down from the floor.  Wear comfortable clothing.  Bring a Yoga mat.

Saturday, September 26, 2015 6 - 8:30 p.m., WAWADIA - "What Are We Actually Doing in Asana?" and Pot Luck Dinner Over the past eight years as an asana teacher and Ayurvedic practitioner, Matthew has heard hundreds of stories of classroom or self-practice injury. In January of 2014, he began a formal qualitative research project to catalogue the pedagogical, psychological, and socio-cultural contexts that can make practice less safe. He'll present stories and themes from the 100+ interviews he has conducted, and moderate a discussion about how we manage and give meaning to discomfort and pain on the mat, and some best practices for creating the best learning environments possible. The book is currently scheduled for publication in the fall of 2016. On our registration page, sign up to bring a dish to share for our dinner! This offering is open to students of all levels. 

About Matthew Remski - Practicing meditation and yoga since 1996, Matthew Remski has been sitting and moving with teachers from the Tibetan Buddhist, Kripalu, Ashtanga, and Iyengar streams. Along the way, he's been certified as a yoga therapist and an Ayurvedic consultant, and has maintained a private practice in Toronto since 2008. From 2008 through 2012 he co-directed Yoga Festival Toronto and Yoga Community Toronto, non-profit activist organizations dedicated to promoting open dialogue and accessibility. During that same period, he studied jyotihstra in a small oral-culture setting at the Vidya Institute in Toronto. He currently facilitates programming for yoga trainings internationally, focusing on yoga philosophy, meditation, Ayurveda, and the social psychology of practice. In all subject areas, Matthew encourages students to explore how yoga practice can resist the psychic and material dominance of neoliberalism, and the quickening pace of environmental destruction.

Matthew is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

Of Threads of Yoga: a remix of Patanjali’s Sutras with commentary and reverie, scholar Mark Singleton writes: “I don’t know of any reading of the yoga sutras as wildly creative, as impassioned and as earnest as this. it engages Patanjali and the reader in an urgent, electrified conversation that weaves philosophy, symbolist poetry, psychoanalysis and cultural history. There’s a kind of delight and freshness in this book that is very rare in writing on yoga, and especially rare in writing on the yoga sutras. This is a Patanjali for postmoderns, less a translation than a startlingly relevant report on our current condition, through the prism of this ancient text.”

Of the forthcoming What Are We Actually Doing in Asana?, Buddhist teacher and author Michael Stone writes: “Matthew Remski’s WAWADIA research digs beneath the statistics of yoga injuries to examine the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies, perfection, inadequacy and freedom. We all know that repetitive strain or too much flexibility creates the conditions for injury. But what we haven’t brought to light yet are the consequences of the narratives we tell ourselves—how they set us up for physical trouble in practice and how they influence the way we go through life. This research will help you pay attention to the strange unconscious intentions that get all mixed up in a life-long practice, so you can clear out unhelpful motivations and follow through on what’s truly good for you.”

As a Ayurvedic consultant, he holds space for people as they integrate the shadows of flesh and heart. In the background of any meeting, Matthew stays aware of whatever experience he's gained through Ayurveda, yoga therapy, and yoga philosophy. Often, these disciplines provide useful lines of inquiry and protocols. He says, "But I try to be careful to not let what I think I know encroach upon the person, their unique growth, or mine. I try to hold my tools lightly, because they change."

Matthew lives in Toronto with his partner Alix Bemrose and their son Jacob. Learn more at www.MatthewRemski.com.

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