Harvest Month

It’s here! Perhaps my favorite month of the year. One of the best reasons to live where I do is to have seasons and October is the time to witness nature in all her wisdom and splendor. Plus, ya know, sweater weather!

October is the time of harvest. Where all the care and attention of preparing, planting, pruning/weeding and watering comes to fruition.

So it is fitting that this month, we bring to you a bounty of classes and new offerings, ripe from years of our collective passion and education.

Two new classes this month, giving you LIVE classes 6 days a week on Kari & Co.

Larissa will be leading Vata Balancing classes every Wednesday at 9am for October only.

Tiger is launching a brand new class, Fridays at 9am called Katonah and Breathing.

Read all about this wonderful hybrid class in her newsletter takeover below.

What will you be harvesting this month?

Happy October Everyone,

with so much love,

Kari

•••

Breathing: More Than Meets the Nose
by Tiger Bye

I’ve come to learn that the most valuable pieces of knowledge are seldom realized in formal education. The most relevant example in my life is breathing.

I’ve been privileged to experience lots of formal education. From a fantastic public high school to New York University, and most recently, Georgetown. Yet somewhere between the study of American politics and public health, I fell in love with breathing.

 It’s funny to say such a thing. I mean, hadn’t I always been breathing? Hadn’t I studied pranayama in several yoga teacher trainings? How was I only just realizing that I want to dedicate my career to something everybody already knows how to do?

But that’s the thing… do we? Do we know how to breathe?

I sure as heck didn’t, not really.    

Breathing carries mystical connotations, and while I am partial to the world of “woo-woo”, it was the science of breathing that convinced me to dedicate my career to it. It was an understanding of biochemistry that really taught me how to breathe.

You see, without knowing it, I had boxed myself in. I was a “right brain person”. I was “good at the humanities”. I was “not good at math or science”. I always used to say, “I’m not really smart, I just work hard.” It was that incessant need to work harder that drove me to apply to grad school. I had to find a way to combine my academic background in politics with my growing love for practicing and teaching yoga. So, public health it would be. I thought, I need to find a way to scale my passion for healing on a personal level to a populations level. And boy was I scared to apply for a Master of… yep… SCIENCE!

I’ll never forget getting that acceptance letter. The momentary disbelief, double checking the wording over and over to make sure I was reading it correctly. I had been accepted at Georgetown. And I guarantee you I was hyperventilating.

 That’s the thing though—I was frequently hyperventilating two years ago. Unknowingly, how I was breathing was exacerbating feelings of anxiety and worry. How would I make money? Why don’t I already have a job at a big firm? Will all the other students be lightyears ahead of me? The mounting self-judgement and baseless expectations not only made me over-breathe, but the over-breathing just fueled that fire even more.

 When I got to Georgetown, two things occurred to me. One, I learned I was a part of a vast majority—every student seemed to have some sort of anxiety. And two, the worst thing anybody can ever tell you is “no”.

 Amid the nerves, my fellow grad students and I had to designate a capstone project by the end of Fall semester. So, I cold called the Oxygen Advantage®, a breathing education and training organization based in Ireland. I asked if they had any internship opportunities, telling them, “I will literally do anything.” At that point, I had no interest in doing a project on chronic disease, but rather wanted to invest my time and energy into preventative health practices. I’d heard of the founder, Patrick McKeown, and his book, The Oxygen Advantage, a year or two before. Since I’d encountered it, I stopped mouth breathing during all physical exercise, for reasons you’ll learn if you come to class. Safe to say though, the improvements I encountered made me a HUGE fan of Patrick’s work.

 By October, I was asked if I could write a manual on breathing and mental health. Naturally, despite having zero experience in psychology, emphatically, I said yes.

 Now, I won’t bore you with the details. While the work was riveting to me, I don’t need to walk you through the hundreds of academic papers I’ve read and synthesized to create a manual for psychologists to integrate science-backed breathing techniques into their practices. But what I will tell you is that you’d be amazed how effective functional breathing training is for clinically diagnosed disorders such as anxiety, panic, depression, PTSD, and more. I’ve gotten to collaborate with several brilliant psychologists, and we are set to complete the manual by December of this year.

 But it wasn’t writing this manual that changed my life. I’d spent the past 6 years writing papers, the work was the work. The integration was where the magic happened.

 Through writing this manual, I was fortunate to get to take an Oxygen Advantage® instructor training. I began to layer functional breathing techniques over my personal Katonah practice and was blown away by how my practice was transformed. In yoga, we strive toward archetypes by physically manipulating our bodies. Yet, it is something else to come to learn how the breath animates the shapes we make. The poses are like flat tires without the thoughtful inflation that comes from respiration. And while exploring poses via the breath can be detected on an energetic level, the biochemical and biomechanical dimensions are what made me feel like I was in the driver’s seat.

 I knew that breathing could produce immediate and acute effects but learning to harness the power of the breath was now about my longevity. It was now about potentiating. Through practicing functional breathing, I began to live my yoga. I was able not only to experience an elevated asana practice, but those same techniques dissipated my stress and anxiety. I felt like I always had a piece of the practice in my back pocket. Because breathing was something I was doing all the time, it was always there for me to manipulate. It became about adaptation—supporting my nervous system for the long haul.  

 Today, I try to keep myself out of self-made boxes. The fact that I crushed biology classes and now have such an appreciation for biochemistry gave me confidence. I am literally inspired. 

 On Fridays at 9am, we will explore how science informs these energetic experiences. We will use breathing techniques that build tolerance to carbon dioxide, making us more resilient to mental, physical, and emotional stress. We will be putting ourselves in the driver’s seat. As Kari and I like to accentuate—the practice is about becoming well-rounded and spherical enough to be able to bounce back. Finessing your approach to breathing will make you bouncier than ever before. I hope you’ll join me.