Root.Rock.Radiate with Emily

Emily Nicholson – Contributed Photo

At Balance for Life, a healing event at Brickworks this past weekend, I attended Use the Force: A Meditation Workshop. Emily Nicholson, our instructor, taught us about stress, breathing patterns, mantras, and how to incorporate meditation practice into our everyday lives.

Along with attending the class, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Emily to ask her about her life and her experience with yoga and meditation.

Emily Nicholson, originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, moved to the San Juan Islands about six years ago. She was 18 when she took her first yoga class in college. She adored it, and after college, she began to teach free introductory yoga classes and subbed in at the studio where she was enrolled for a 6 month training program and slowly worked towards becoming an instructor. Upon arrival in FH, Emily was baffled to find out that there was a great lack of yoga on the island and hoped to see more offerings in the future.

Emily taught private yoga lessons, mainly focusing in prenatal yoga and meditation healing for individuals’ psychological needs. Expanding her yogi-teachings, she instructed classes at both Lakedale Resort and Brickworks.

Here is brief bio on Emily today…

Emily Nicholson is a meditation and yoga teacher on San Juan Island. She is dedicated to guiding her students to uncover their radiant selves by connecting to, fortifying, and amplifying their life force. She holds both 200 and 500 hour yoga teaching certificates. She has studied yoga with Kathryn Budig and Gina Caputo, transformational breathing with Max Strom, and meditation and coaching with Gabrielle Bernstein to create a holistic offering of yoga, meditation, breath work, and empowerment. Emily is a regular contributor to Yoga International Magazine.

Contributed Photo

Emily gives us her thoughts on the power and importance of yoga…

“My practice of yoga and meditation is a gateway for me to explore my experience through a different lens. It keeps me strong, empowered, connected to my body and the present moment. Feeling good in my own body by moving, strengthening, and releasing stuck energy has vastly improved all areas of my life including relationships, focus, communication, and my ability to deal with challenges. These practices provide us with tools to live our lives from a place of highest good, meaning a place of highest kindness, love, connection, awareness, and happiness.”

Yoga/meditation student and healing enthusiast Emma Smith attended the meditation class as well. She says, “I thought her class broke down meditation into digestible pieces, and the tools she shared with us were straightforward and gave me immediate results of relaxation.”

During the interview, Emily informed me that “we have about 50,000-70,000 thoughts per day, and of those thoughts, around 70-80% of them reoccur every day.” We are creatures of habit and our thoughts reflect our beliefs. Meditation is a widely-used and immensely beneficial practice that promotes clarity in the mind and can decrease troubling mental phenomena such as anxiety and depression.

Lakedale sessions will begin roughly around Memorial Day weekend, with 2-3 classes per week, usually in the mornings. Emily hopes to initiate a 6-8 week course to explore meditation in May or June.

Contributed Photo

Emily has some unexpected and adventurous plans in store for her summer yoga programs. She wants to mesh other activities with yoga to create Yoga Adventures. Although this concept is only in its first stages of life, Emily hopes to take yoga to the water with yoga + paddle boarding, to the mountains with yoga + hiking, and hopefully to the vineyard for yoga + wine tasting. By mixing two activities, she aspires to offer something to bring people together in new, innovative ways that are not commonly found.

For a current class schedule, more information about her summer plans, or to learn about working privately with Emily, send an email inquiry to emilytru [@] gmail.com or on her Facebook page Root.Rock.RadiateYoga

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