This is method worked for me last Sunday — in only ten minutes. I hope it supports you, too.
I woke up last Sunday morning with no plans, other than an evening visit to the local light show at Descanso Gardens with friends. Otherwise, it was an open winter break day filled with the gift of time: no work, no grading, no household chores — nothing but opportunities to…
Wellness is not a trillion-dollar industry with a single goal. It’s an ever-shifting process that should be accessible to all.
It might be the understatement of the century to state that wellness is hot right now. In 2018, the global wellness economy was valued at $4.5 trillion, and it’s growing every year, particularly alongside the seemingly never-ending multiple pandemics that include COVID, systematic racism, and structural inequities.
Of course everyone…
A series of semi-found haikus for my city
ocean’s breath hovers
moonlight and palm — a basin’s
tensile strength ensconced
this los angeles
this desert city of youth
and dreams and weird things
like trees that are not
trees, that have no wood or shade
but that call me home…
I’ve committed to (hashtag) Yoga Every Damn Day in 2022, and these are reflections on my first 10 days.
During most of the pandemic, from the very start of lockdown in March 2020, I did yoga nearly every single day. I was in the middle of my graduate program in Kinesiology with a focus on Integrative Wellness, and so I was in deep immersion in my studies — so…
A poem of gratitude for the gift of a tiny nest outside my front door
To the mama hummingbird
hugging her nest tight
under the waxing gibbous moon.
I promise not to get too close,
but I will bring the children by
in the morning.
We’ll tell them to whisper,
to tiptoe, to wonder in awe
at your spiderweb home.
They’ll understand that you are
watching…
And I may never get over it — because I care
My mom, who had been an amazing elementary and junior high teacher for decades, had always joked to me (repeating what she’d been taught):
“Teachers are just frustrated actors with a captive audience.”
When I first decided to become a teacher, I asked my mom how in the world I…
You tested positive. Or you’ve been exposed. But you feel relatively fine. And the walls are caving in.
It’s not just the five days, per the CDC guidelines, or the ten days per every other scientist on the planet, or the five days plus a negative test, per California’s guidelines, or not, per the CDC, or whatever updated protocol you’re following that defines your quarantine.
A poem for what is rather than what might have been
What was supposed to be a bed of calendula
and chamomile is now only nasturtium.
While I slept and while I stumbled —
the garden grew,
not as I had imagined,
nor wanted.
No spinach or kale.
Nothing to eat.
But we are not of another century
or of another place…
The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World
The book it brings me the most joy is, quite aptly, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, by his Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams.
Of course, his Holiness the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist monk and the spiritual leader of…
E. Katherine Kottaras
M.A. English// M.S. Kinesiology, Integrative Wellness. Contemplative teacher & writer. 🏳️🌈☮️🌴🍕 Chronic pain yields chronic hope. https://linktr.ee/ka
