The Practice: Yoga, Writing, and Tools for Sympathetic Magic in Echo Park
The Sunday Scaries aren't in the DSM, but for many of us, they're real. The dread of going back to work on a Monday morning after a weekend that went by too fast.
Let's end the weekend by moving, writing, and reflecting instead of doomscrolling the dread away.
You'll leave with a looser, stronger body, a few pages of insight, and a clearer sense of how you want to meet the week ahead.
For more than thirty years, I've been interested in the practices that help people feel more ease and awe throughout the day. One place that reliably helped me find my way was the yoga mat.
I started practicing in the early 90s and did my first teacher training in 1999. I've had many epiphanies while doing yoga and always wished I had a journal or some paper and pens next to my mat.
So I built the class I always wanted to take. I'm calling it The Practice.
Each class has the same basic structure. We open with a writing prompt, then move through a yoga flow tuned to the week's theme, strong enough to build heat and leave you looser than you came in. Talk therapy is part of what I do, but insight doesn't only arrive through words. Sometimes movement, art, music, or simply paying attention to the body can reveal things that thinking and talking can't reach. So in this class, we pause a few times to write or draw whatever comes to mind. And we close with a long guided rest, slower and deeper than a typical savasana. Think yoga nidra style. A real descent into equanimity you can carry into the week.
The Practice includes hands-on exercises designed to make abstract ideas more tangible. Over the years, I've made a collection of objects I call Tools for Sympathetic Magic: ceramic coffins and gravestones, parts-work bowls, a mental-health Jenga set, and other tactile ways of exploring inner experience. These objects give us something concrete to interact with as we explore each week's theme.
The Practice runs on a six-week cycle that repeats, so you can drop in on any Sunday. The themes move through grief and boundaries, getting to know your parts, mapping your relationships, planning how you'll care for yourself, finding the gray between all-or-nothing thinking, and noticing where you're trying to get blood from a stone.
It's for people who want to mix movement with insight and expression.
See what each of the six weeks holds (the coffins, the bowls, the blocks) and get on the list at ledamaliga.com/thepractice.
The details:
When: Sunday evenings, 75 minutes
Where: Echo Park Creative Psychology, 1555 Sunset Blvd, Ste C
Cost: $20, drop-in
Open to: adults 18+, no experience with yoga, art, or meditation required
Starts this fall, once the list fills
Get on the list at ledamaliga.com/thepractice, and we'll begin as soon as there are enough of us.
If someone came to mind while reading this, share it with them. A small practice like mine grows by word of mouth.
With love, Leda
