Cedar & Breath Stand steady. Breathe first.

Live classes from Burlington, Vermont

Stand steady. Breathe first.

Cedar & Breath teaches standing practice and balance on a video call — nine classes a week, a published timetable, and never more than 14 people in the room so the teacher can actually see you.

A wide view from a hillside over forested ridges toward a long
                    lake and distant mountains.
Lake Champlain from the ridge. Most of us are practising indoors, in a kitchen, looking at a laptop.

Standing practice, and what that means here

Most of what we do happens on your feet. Warriors, the side angles, the standing folds, the balances. There is floor work in one class a week and none at all in the rest, which is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation: getting up and down off a floor is the part of a class that most often decides whether somebody comes back, and taking it out removes the question.

The pace is slow and the holds are long. A sixty-minute class here covers maybe twelve shapes, not forty. There is time to set your feet, time to find out what the pose is doing, and time to come out of it properly rather than falling out of it.

Everything is offered with a wall or a chair, every time, by name. Not as a modification announced once at the start for whoever needs it — as the version half the room is doing, including the teacher on the days her knee is complaining.

This week

The first four of nine. The classes page has the whole week, what each class actually covers, and the dates we are closed.

The first four classes of the week
Day Starts Length Class Format
Monday 45 min Wake Up Standing Standing
Monday 60 min Balance Hour Balance
Tuesday 60 min Warriors Standing
Wednesday 45 min Wake Up Standing Standing

All times are Eastern Time (UTC−5 in winter, UTC−4 from mid-March to early November). If you are reading this somewhere else, convert before you book — the start time is the start time, and we do not hold a class for latecomers.

Three poses to look at first

Free, with the chair version in the same box, because a chair version printed somewhere else is a chair version nobody uses.

A person standing on one leg with the other foot resting
                        against the inner thigh and both arms lifted overhead.

Tree

The balance everyone has heard of. Where the lifted foot goes matters far less than what the standing foot is doing.

A person in a wide stance with the front knee bent and both
                        arms extended level with the shoulders.

Warrior II

Wide stance, front knee bent, arms level. The pose that teaches you what your hips are actually able to do.

A person balancing on one leg with the torso and the lifted
                        leg both level with the floor.

Warrior III

The hardest thing on the page, and the one most worth doing with your hands on a chair back for the first several months.

Class packs

Classes are bought in packs. Nothing on this site renews, nothing is kept on file to charge you again, and there is no membership to cancel. A pack is a one-time payment and the credits sit in your name until you use them or until they expire.

5-class pack

$45.00$9.00 a class · expires 12 months from purchase

Enough to find out whether this suits you, across five weeks or five days — there is no rule about how fast you use them.

10-class pack

$80.00$8.00 a class · expires 12 months from purchase

Works out a dollar cheaper per class. Same expiry, same cancellation terms, same everything else.

Credits expire 12 months after you buy them. That is stated here, on the shop page, on the order page, in the FAQ and in two policy pages, because it is the term most likely to catch somebody out.

What a week actually looks like

People ask how many classes a week is the right number, and the honest answer is that it depends on what else is in your week — but here is what we actually see.

One a week is enough to keep the shapes familiar and is what most people settle on. A ten-class pack lasts about two and a half months at that rate, which is comfortably inside the expiry.

Two a week is where people start noticing things between classes — that they are standing differently waiting for a kettle, or that the second side of something has stopped being dramatically worse. A morning and an evening suits most schedules better than two of the same.

Three or more is plenty and is more than most people need. If you want to practise more often than that, the better use of the extra days is five or ten minutes on your own with one of the free pose guides, which costs nothing and does the thing that short frequent practice does well.

What does not work especially well is saving credits up and using four in a week. Standing practice rewards frequency over volume, and a fourth class in five days mostly produces tired legs.

What this is not

Stated near the top rather than buried, because a class that is wrong for you wastes your money and our time.

It is not a workout. It is slow, it is not aerobic, and if that is what you are after you will be bored within twenty minutes. It is not a route to inversions, arm balances or a fast flow — we teach none of them. It is not on-demand: everything is live at a fixed time and nothing is ever recorded, so a missed class is a returned credit rather than something to catch up on. And it is not rehabilitation. If you are recovering from an injury or surgery and want a practice built around that, a physical therapist is the right person and a group class cannot do it.

We also make no health claims, about balance or anything else. The about page explains why at more length.

Writing

What balance actually is, and why it wobbles

Three systems arguing about where you are in space, and what it means when they disagree. Why a wobble is information rather than a failure, and what practising a balance is practising.

12 minute read

The standing foot

Twenty-six bones doing the work, and the three points of contact that every standing pose on this site is built on. Plus why we take socks off.

10 minute read

Practising at home without a studio

What you actually need, what you do not, where to put the laptop, and how to deal with a floor that slopes, a rug that slides and a cat who has opinions.

10 minute read

An occasional note

When the schedule changes, when a new pose guide goes up, and nothing else. Four or five emails a year. No sequence, no course, and the unsubscribe link works the first time.

Used for this list and nothing else. See the Privacy Policy.