Last weekend I attended Sara Ivanhoe’s Detox weekend workshop at Yoga Works. It was an intense sweaty affair that she characterized as “not for the meek.” The goal: to create heat and rid the body and the mind of impurities.

But her nurturing spirit and thoughtful sequencing enabled me to survive (and thrive) during two consecutive days of a grueling three hour practice that incorporated purging poses like squats, twists, pranayama (breath of fire) and lots and lots of vinyasa – all designed to work with a form of downward moving, eliminating, root chakra-based prana called Apana Vayu.

With an emphasis on exhales, the workshop was also about letting go and resolving to move forward into the new year with a sense of what serves us and what holds us back. She helped us clarify those resolutions with a mantra (om lam muladevatayae namah) that invoked the spirit of the root charka or the true self. She also threw in a detox mudra.

While I wished she would have varied the sequences from day to day, it was a relief and quite freeing to hear Ivanhoe say, ‘We’re not here to obsess on alignment, we’re here to tap into something deeper.”

Next weekend my friend Sarah Tomlinson will be in town from New York to lead an Ayurvedic yoga workshop at Liberation Yoga. Sarah is an inspiring teacher and a yantra artist who works with a series of 21 poses in the most extraordinary way. I promise you’ll leave feeling refreshed. She’s also leading a Yantra painting workshop on Sunday. Yet another way to practice sankalpa as this year starts to speed by.

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Yantra by Sarah Tomlinson