Then and Now

These photos are from 2005-2007 when I started teaching yoga and now ❤

Things have grown in general in the world of yoga during this time and there are a lot more teachers and ways to practice to choose from. Up until now I have pretty much always had as much work as I wanted while also raising a child as a single parent in a town without family to help with childcare.

It is new to me to navigate this aspect of presenting myself and my teachings to the public beyond word of mouth. Now that my son is 18 and planning on college next year I have more time and energy becoming available. I am considering what directions I will go in my own life as well as how to let people know why what I have to offer might be interesting amongst everything else out there.

I am wondering if any of you who have worked with me in the past would be willing to write testimonials about your experience? You could post them yourselves on LinkedIn, Denise Porter Kemp Yoga, leave a comment on the Testimonal page of this site orsend them to me personally. I will ask before I use your words in promotion.

If you prefer to be anonymous that is fine, I currently have a testimonial from a student in a substance treatment facility who wanted to share their experience openly yet also have their identity remain private. If you are open to including your name and even a photo to personalize the testimonial that helps, but just your true honest experience will work perfectly.

If you’d like to see what others have been saying already check out my Testimonials page.

Thanks so much for your time and support, even in just reading this message! I have put a lot of myself into this project over the years and hope to reinvent and keep it going now that I have more space to cultivate the potential and help it grow.

Yoga Playshops For Kids

Do you have kids or know anyone with kids and will be in the area of Loon Mountain Resort in Lincoln, NH next weekend? I will be offering three age appropriate kid’s yoga classes hosted by Viaggio Spa and Wellness Center in The Mountain Club on Loon.

 Yoga Playshops for Kids
Sunday, February 17, 2019

.• 9:30am – 10:00am 7-11 years $10
• 10:30am – 11:00am – 3-6 years, Mommy or Daddy & Me $10
• 3:30pm – 4:15pm – 11-15 years $15

My Background in Kids Yoga:

My first experiences with yoga for kids was when I was a child myself. My mother would practice yoga with my sister and I while listening to Saturday Night Fever in front of sliding glass doors so we could see our own reflection. We would dance and laugh and copy her, learning to be agile, coordinated and comfortable in our bodies while playing. We experienced that moving our bodies gave us energy and was fun! That has stayed with me throughout my life.
.
As I got older I began to do my own yoga practice, although I didn’t know to call it that. I enjoyed gymnastics but was not as interested in the competitive aspect so would dance and stretch and balance on my own. It was fun and it helped me find peace in myself and my body as I moved through the changes of adolescence. This has also grown with me throughout my life.
.
When my son was little we had our own “circus tricks” routine where I would lie on my back and fly him through a variety of flips and tumbles. As he grew we experimented with videos like YogaKids “Silly to Calm” which helped him learn the joy of movement as play and as body meditation. He went on to become a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and brings this meditative awareness with him as a confident and capable park skier to this day. He is now 18.
.
I have been teaching yoga since 2005 and have developed mixed level yoga classes for children at health clubs and yoga studios, age specific year long programs at elementary and middle schools, have had individual children private clients as well as spent quite a bit of time playing with yoga with my niece and nephew and the children of friends. I have led introductory yoga sessions for the seasonal program at Loon, teaching postures that complement both the physical and mental aspects of snowsports.
.
In our sessions at The Mountain Club I will build upon this past experience to create age appropriate practices catered to the students present, utilizing yoga postures, movement, dance and storytelling to engage our minds and bodies through the art of conscious play.
.
I look forward to seeing you there!
.
For more information send me a message, follow the link to the event or look under the events section of my website listed in my bio. To register contact Viaggio Spa and Wellness Center at spa@mtnclub.com or call 800-229-7829.

mural and photography: Christopher Oktavec of Okto Ink
assisted by: Taniya Toomey

Guided Meditation – Processing Experience and Sensation like Water

I thought I would share this as maybe it will help you clear your mind and body before you sleep. It is not really a video but a guided meditation, but so far with what I know a video is easier to share than audio. It is raw, not perfected or polished. I blow my nose, I have a cold, I sit up in a wonky way. It is taken from the end of a online Zoom yoga session with a private client. I have been wanting to share some guided meditations, when I teach it is pretty much all guided movement and stillness meditation. I don’t have a plan or use a script. I tried recording some with a script I wrote, and while I like what I said, it sounded like I was reading from a script. In this what I say is not exactly right, yet it sounds, at least to me, more authentic, albeit a little slow and with a stuffy nosed voice. I like it better than the script though. In 14 years of teaching it is the first time I have recorded myself and listened to the recording as a meditation for myself…I tend to be more ephemeral than documenting. I think it will help me get better at this to do this, record myself in real time rather than scripted and then experience myself as a student. It is fascinating. I am different on the outside than I am inside of me, it seems so far, and as I watch myself I have extreme compassion for this little woman that I am, in the same way I have compassion for you when I see you in real life. I will likely record a similar guided meditation and at that point perhaps delete this. Yet in the interim I am sharing what I have available and maybe it will be of interest to you.

Beyond Repetition

When I am feeling stuck in my mind and in the physical world I find it helpful to offer myself a pattern interruption by practicing doing things with my non-dominant side. Movement meditations like postural yoga and snowboarding are great for this.

With yoga, postures are typically practiced back and forth, stimulating and developing agility on both sides of the body, balancing out the dominance of either side. This can increase and reorganize the potential ways we habitually act and respond to circumstance. Instead of always repeating the pattern in one direction, we can move through it in the other direction too, adapting our prior experience to fit the specifics of the new situation.

It is beyond just being the opposite, as we are not fully symmetrical. In many ways the second side is like learning a separate yet related thing.

While snowboarding tends to be a one-sided activity, we can bring in this balancing, like a yoga practice, by switching back and forth which foot we have forward. At first the non-dominant side feels awkward, as we’’re doing something familiar but in a different way. Which potentially makes it feel even harder at moments then if we didn’t already know how to do it before, because we are expecting it to be the same.

It can take a bit of unhooking ourselves from trying to recreate the same experience on the second side, for although we already know how to do it on the dominant side, the second side has its own variables. When I let go of trying to make it the same, I can learn about what it actually is, and respond to that.

This can be practiced with any typically one sided activity, or any activity at all.

As we break our attachments to the familiar, creating a pattern interruption in the momentum of habitual repetition, we can learn to sense the nuances of each situation we encounter. Each moment informed yet not defined by our experiences of the past.