Yoga Teachers Association Blog Posts

My Yoga Journey, Archetypes and Healing with Susan J. Wright

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:16:21 GMT

In the times of my greatest struggles yoga has been my dearest friend, intertwining its warm and gentle hands as I have breathed and hiked, foot by foot, along the rocky, uphill path back to myself and life’s purpose for my soul.

I did watch Richard Hittelman on TV when I was five, and later Lilias Folan, but my first real class was at Integral Yoga in NYC in 1978. I could only afford to go several times but the book I acquired at their center was my constant buddy for the next four years. Then I discovered Swami Shantanand at Wainwright House in Rye, NY, where I was a devoted student for a couple of years just prior to beginning my four decades-long adventure of study at Kripalu.

The inner exploration of yoga I began back then was an island shelter of balanced power for me and started with the Hatha postures encouraging my body to express a sense of wholeness and wholesomeness that was largely absent from my dysfunctional family of origin. I could feel connected to a strength of purity and goodness, a power greater than myself as I embodied Mountain, Tree, Eagle, Dancer, Boat, Bow, Bridge, Wheel, and bowed my head to my heart in Yoga Mudra and Head to Knee. The Shavasana, or Corpse, pose and deep relaxation I often experienced at the end of practice allowed me to have a few anxiety-free moments before returning to my battle with the aftermaths of childhood abuse. There was a much-needed first chakra (energy center at the pelvic base) healing beginning in my early practice, including grounding, security, and reclaiming the sacredness of my body.

Every time I practiced yoga some energy shifted in the direction of health and wellness. Even way back then I was bringing the spirit of these magnificent archetypes such as the steadiness and perceptual expanse of Mountain to the overwhelming chaos of my fear, left over from my childhood and evoked by my precarious financial life as a young massage therapist beginning my practice. I wouldn’t have been able to describe it as such back then, but the Spirit in each posture offered up a particular strength or virtue. I could receive the grace of this when I held the posture and let the energy resonate, immersing in sensation. When I released the posture, they were still with me somehow, somewhere inside, a Mountain (stability), Tree (balance), Warrior (courage), etc.

When I came to understand, through therapy and the women’s movement, that I had survived sexual abuse and my nervous system symptoms were related to that and not some harshly judged inherent flaw or genetic mental illness, I had a period of flooding with tremendous grief.

For the first time at age 23, I was compelled to begin every day with an hour-long practice so I could hold this strong wave of emotion that I awakened with each morning. Mats weren’t common yet so I would lie on my towel, engage with my beloved postures and cry. There were also deep emotions of shame that emerged that I had to process, realizing that perhaps the shame was not mine, as it was also becoming known that the culture most frequently blamed the victims in these situations. The shame might rather belong to the people that had violated me. Nevertheless, it had to be felt and released from my being and the postures supported me greatly in holding the process of discharging it. During this time, I developed acne on my face, perhaps my body releasing this shame and the toxins that were dumped on me. I engaged in healing practices including psychotherapy, massage, chiropractic, support groups, shamanic work, etc. My skin healed over time. The postures also became preparation for meditation. Swami taught me that I am the Shining Star of Awareness and Compassion, that dwells between my eyebrows, Ajna Chakra, and this truth allowed me an identity beyond the me who was traumatized. This was a great sixth chakra healing. There were moments in these meditations that I felt a part of Mother Earth and the Heavens, in bliss.

Another time I went very deeply into my practice was 10 years later, to prepare for childbirth. There were very few prenatal classes in 1994 and none that were local to me or at a doable time. I embraced the Goddess as an archetype to hold my pregnancy and childbirth. This posture and my growing relationship to the Goddess were healing for my second (pelvic bowl/emotion/reproduction), third (solar plexus/power) and fourth (heart/love) chakras, which had been wounded by abuse. I developed my own daily prenatal practice based upon encouraging comfort in my ever-changing body and to address what I knew would need support in happening during birth. I focused on breathing techniques to release tension so my worrying mind could get out of the way and let my body do what it had the natural wisdom to do. I focused on stretching around my pelvis which had been tight since I was a child. Open-hearted Warrior postures helped me build strength while allowing my pelvic floor to relax for the passage of my baby. I was able to have a beautiful natural birth, very healing for a woman with my history.

In the 30 years of my daughter’s life, I have taken many deep dives into my practice, including during my divorce from her dad when I embraced Vinyasa and the power of flowing from one posture to the next, to move through life and express (5^th chakra) flexibility in the archetypes I embodied with my changing roles as I breathe. Through health issues and battles for accommodations for my daughter’s different abilities I have had to be a strong Warrior at times, a Triangle of strength, the Tree she returns to, and the Eagle that supports the young bird in leaving the nest when she is ready.

In this workshop I hope to share my love of this ancient art and science and how we may all be supported by our Inner Guru, the dispeller of ignorance, as we embrace our multifaceted, archetypal, balanced magnificence through the power of our creative movements and multisensory imaginations, on our sacred journey.

Iyengar Yoga—A Nonexclusive, Transformative Method of Practice by Kim Peralta, C.I.Y.T lll

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:16:54 GMT

Beginnings

I first started studying with an Iyengar teacher (Mary Dunn) in New York City in 1985. At that time I was a struggling musician drawn to yoga mainly by its philosophical roots. I had been going to classes where a very different style of yoga was taught and no concrete instructions were given. Everyone just followed the teacher as best they could and no one was corrected.

When I began studying with Mary Dunn I had also begun conducting yoga classes of my own. I was thirty-four years old and those who attended my classes were very similar to me—athletic women in their twenties and thirties. My classes had no older people, no people with injuries, no “couch potatoes,” and very few men. They were young, female, physically fit, and full of energy.

Right away I noticed that my Iyengar teacher’s classes were filled with a much wider range of students. Seventy-year-old women who had never done much in the way of exercise were practicing right alongside professional dancers! Office workers who sat at desks all day, weight lifters, marathon runners, retired seniors, people of varying ages and lifestyles from all walks of life—all attended the same class. There were people with knee injuries and various hip, shoulder, neck, and chronic back problems. Under Mary’s guidance they practiced side by side and returned week after week, month after month, each improving at their own pace. Over time I witnessed their, and my own, transformation. We changed! Stiff people became more flexible. Flexible people gained strength. Older women learned to stand on their heads for five to ten minutes at a time.

I realized that my own teaching was missing something. My classes for some reason attracted only a small segment of the general population—as if they were all clones of me! The majority were excluded.

How do we make yoga accessible to everyone?

Forty years later, to this very day and in spite of its popularity, when the subject of yoga comes up in general conversation, “I can’t do yoga” remains a common remark. The idea that you must be young, female, and flexible to “do” yoga has taken a firm hold in the mind of the public, aided and abetted by advertising and the media in general. A multimillion dollar branch of the clothing industry has arisen which exploits this notion as the central premise of their advertising. “Normal” people do not show up in their ads. Instead we have slender fashion models advertising “yoga clothes” to convince a young, female public that they actually need these garments to practice yoga.

Given this reality, when so many are afraid to even attempt a yoga class, is it enough to say “Beginners welcome!”? When the actual teaching addresses the real needs of everyday people, then yes, it becomes a perfectly true thing to say.

How do we teach the general population? Older people? Stiff people? Flexible people? What is the difference between teaching a flexible student and a stiff one? What does each student have to learn in order to transform? How do we teach all of these different people in the same class and at the same time?

Yoga should heal, not harm—Ahimsa

Is it enough to tell a student with an injury to “be gentle,” “don’t work too hard,” or even “don’t do this pose”? Should we tell them to come back when their injury has gone away? Or can we give them a way of working on an asana so that they may practice it safely, without pain, allowing the injury to heal and the student to keep up with the class?

And what about the student who says they were injured by practicing yoga in the first place? No teacher wants to hear that! No matter how much we exhort our students to be gentle and no matter how gently we speak to them, if they are repeatedly practicing with a misalignment they may invite injury where there was none to begin with.

Is it possible for a student with an injury to practice safely and deeply at the same time?

B.K.S. Iyengar passionately believed that yoga should be for everyone. He believed that the practice of asana should be safe and transformative and he made it his life’s work to bequeath us a system that would do just that.

His method, developed over 70 years of practice and teaching, focuses on precise anatomical alignment of the musculoskeletal system and he invented props to allow people to achieve that precision when it is otherwise unattainable. This attention to detail helps the practitioner to work safely and allows the body to gradually transform. Everyone improves at their own pace, individual help is given as needed, and all start right from where they are. No one is excluded.

The four foundations of teaching

There are four main cornerstones of teaching the Iyengar method to beginners (including yoga practitioners/teachers from other traditions):

Demonstration: The teacher names the pose and demonstrates it to the class.
Instruction: The teacher gives step-by-step instructions to the class as they do the pose.
Observation: As the teacher instructs, she/he watches the students perform the pose.
Correction: Based upon his/her observation of the students performance, the teacher gives corrections and has the students repeat the pose.

The above applies to teaching just about anything that is method based, from learning to drive a car to learning to play a musical instrument.

I am grateful for the honor of teaching this upcoming workshop! I have raised many questions in this article which I will address in class. I hope to give students a taste of Iyengar yoga that will make them want to delve more deeply into the subject.

Sarveṣāṁ Svāgatam. Everyone welcome!

Breath as Medicine by Julia Zern

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 05:46:51 GMT

Our breath is a necessity for survival, yet most people hardly ever think about their breathing in their daily life. What if I told you your breath is the key to healing stress, trauma, insomnia, relationship, and work issues and even chronic physical pain that is caused by tension.

Trauma is really the root cause, and no trauma is too big or too small to address. The definition of trauma is something that occurred that was too much, too fast, too soon for our nervous system to process in the moment.

I found my way to breathwork during the most challenging time of my life, losing my husband of 20 years and the father of my three daughters, suddenly, unexpectedly, traumatically. My world as I knew it fell apart. After a few months there was a moment where I knew I had to take healing into my own hands or as I was about to discover, my own breath.

Conscious connected breathwork became the tool to clear a lot of the debilitating grief and trauma from my nervous system and actually begin to enjoy life again. Somatic breathwork is another name often used as this healing modality recognizes that our past lives in our body (Soma) and needs to be cleared from that place.

Though I adored my talk therapist and benefited greatly from the support initially, what I realized was you cannot think your way out of a trauma response. Cognitive approaches alone don’t work for triggers that activate your amygdala and brain stem—the survival part of the brain. Triggers can show up as fight, flight (avoidance), freeze (dissociation), or fawn (people pleasing), and many people feel unable to change any of these deeply ingrained patterns. Triggers are experiences that activate the past, that which was never resolved.

In cases of PTSD, the nervous system is so activated that it’s impossible to down-regulate and feel safe; the person is essentially frozen or looping in the past. This happens when we’re carrying unprocessed stress, tension, and emotions—when we’ve been unable to fully digest past experiences. The energy and emotion that was meant to move through us gets frozen creating density, stagnation, and disconnection. We get disconnected from the free authentic, expressive version of ourselves. This is where our breath becomes the medicine we so desperately need.

Our breath is the bridge between our conscious and subconscious mind. During breathwork we get access to the subconscious to clear out these old energies and emotions and can begin to rewrite the story. We can start to feel safe in our body again.

Part of the healing occurs in the coregulation of nervous systems because most trauma (if not all) is created between humans beings— what was done or at times what wasn’t provided for someone to feel safe and seen.

Good facilitation is about witnessing and listening and giving up the need to control or fix the outcome. Holding space is allowing somebody else to take up space and to allow for the energetic release to be completed and essentially close the trauma loop. We say the session begins when the session ends, during the breathwork session we oftentimes experience insights and revelations that we need to integrate after. It can bring clarity to how we want to move forward in our lives and live in a more aligned way.

Over time as we integrate these breathwork experiences our lives can shift in a new, more fulfilling direction, and we can see ourselves as creators and no longer victims of our circumstances. We become liberated through our own breath.

When healed, our greatest challenges can be what propel us forward and into our purpose, if we get access to the right modality to heal our core wounds. I’m so incredibly grateful to have found the healing power of conscious connected breath and to share it with others. This is why I recently created Somawave breathwork school, a heart centered, somatic breathwork method for modern healers, coaches, therapists, and wellness practitioners, to help support facilitators who want to learn to guide other humans back to themselves.

Healing happens in the presence of an empathetic witness.

—Bessel Van Der Kolk

Learn more at breathewithjulia.com.

Two Paths, One Source: The Life Force Energy of Jin Shin Jyutsu and Prana in Yoga by Julianne Roshan Dow

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:06:47 GMT

“My destiny is in my own hands.” — Mary Burmeister

Jin Shin Jyutsu (JSJ) is an ancient Japanese hands-on healing art that translates as “The Art of the Creator through the Compassionate Person.” Passed down through generations, JSJ harmonizes the body’s life force energy and is believed to be the precursor to Chinese acupuncture, sharing a similar physiophilosophy of wellness and energetic balance.

Just as yoga works with prana, chakras, and nadis, JSJ works with 26 Safety Energy Locks (SELs)—energetic vortexes along energetic pathways in the body that help regulate flow and harmony. Both traditions invite awareness of breath, energy, and alignment to connect body, mind, and spirit with Source.

JSJ balances energy through gentle touch on specific areas.
Yoga balances energy through breath and mindful movement.
Both bring us into harmony with life itself.

How JSJ Works

In JSJ self-help practice, we place our hands on combinations of SELs in response to our body’s needs. This simple “jumper-cabling” of energy pathways can help release blockages caused by stress, illness, injury, or emotional strain—restoring ease and vitality. For example, to ease general arthritis or stiffness:

Place your left fingertips in the outside crook of your inner right elbow.
Bend your elbow and rest your right fingertips on your right shoulder.
Drop your shoulders, relax, and breathe for two–five minutes.
As you begin to feel a gentle pulsing or streaming sensation under both hands, your body’s life force — prana — is moving into harmony.

JSJ can support a wide range of concerns including anxiety, depression, grief, pain, insomnia, migraines, mobility issues, nausea, tinnitus, and recovery from injury. It is also used in hospital and clinical settings to ease anxiety, pain, and nausea for pre- and post-surgical patients.

Experience It for Yourself

Join me to explore and experience The Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu and how it can be beautifully integrated into a yoga practice. Learn simple, powerful self-help tools to enhance your own well-being and that of your students — a true meeting of two ancient healing paths with one shared Source.

Learn more at www.juliannedow.com.

Your Vagus Nerve by Christa Rypins

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:55:02 GMT

There’s a lot of talk about the vagus nerve, but what is the vagus nerve exactly? How do you influence it to help your vagus nerve work better?

What is the vagus nerve?

The word vagus means vagabond —travels all around.

The vagus nerve is the primary nerve of your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system responsible for relaxation. It originates in the center of your brain and travels to every organ in your body sending information back and forth between your brain and organs.

When you are stressed and anxious, your organs are affected. But the vagus nerve cannot take action to calm your system, it can only transmit information between your organs and your brain and back to your organs.

This is where you as a yoga practitioner comes in! Because it is what you do, or do not do that activates the vagus nerve and calms your entire system.

You know that you can be quite stressed and practice yoga and teach yoga, and feel your entire system shift. Breathing and moving are two of the things that activate the vagus nerve.

Things that activate the vagus nerve:

Deep breathing

Stretching combined with breathing

Singing

All things you do in your own yoga practice! Yoga is already helping your vagus nerve!

In my Vagus Nerve Embodiment workshop, you will get a picture of the vagus nerve and learn three simple embodiment exercises to activate it. You’ll leave the workshop empowered with a clearer understanding of what the vagus nerve is, how it works, how to feel and identify the effects of your vagus nerve, how to activate your vagus nerve, as well as a relaxed and happy feeling.

Would you like to start your vagus nerve experience early? Your vagus nerve connects to your stomach. One of my favorite practices that calms my stomach and activates a sense of calm and fulfillment while eating is breathing while eating! I take a bite of food and consciously breathe while chewing the food. I recently started practicing with drinking—I hold the liquid in my mouth and breathe before swallowing.

Breathing while eating and drinking calms my stomach so I feel the food when it arrives to my stomach instead of later when I often feel a bit too full. As a result, I have lost weight without trying! The hardest part of breathing while eating is remembering!

I look forward to exploring and experiencing the vagus nerve with you on December 13.

Beyond “Just Do More Yoga”: Retrain Back Pain for Yoga by Dinneen Viggiano

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 01:51:06 GMT

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Yoga is the best thing for back pain,” you’ve also probably met someone who ended up feeling worse from it.

Here’s the truth: yoga is a powerful practice, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all cure for back pain. And yet, that myth keeps circulating, leaving both yoga teachers and yoga students confused about what’s actually safe, effective, and sustainable for various back issues.

If you’re a yoga teacher, you’ve almost certainly had that moment when a student whispers, “My back hurts… what should I do?”

The question hangs in the air like a test.

Do you tell them to skip forward folds? Avoid twists?

Or do you cross your fingers, cue the pose anyway, and hope it helps instead of harms?

If you’ve ever felt uncertain in those moments, you’re not alone. This is exactly why the Yoga Teachers Association of Hudson Valley is hosting Retrain Back Pain for Yoga on October 11th.

This workshop is about retraining how we can better manage back pain in the yoga space, so that teachers can lead with more confidence, and practitioners can move with less fear.

Why Yoga Isn’t Always the Answer (and Sometimes the Problem)

Let’s bust the myth head-on: yoga, by itself, doesn’t automatically heal back pain.

Yoga can build strength, improve flexibility, and reduce stress, all of which are important pieces of the back-pain puzzle. But if you’ve ever pushed yourself into a deep twist, a long yin hold, or an Instagram-worthy backbend only to feel your pain flare later, you already know: yoga done the wrong way can backfire.

The truth is, not all yoga poses (or breathing techniques) are back-friendly. Some can be downright provocative to an irritated spine or an already stressed nervous system.

The “deeper is better” mindset that often sneaks into yoga culture? It’s actually the exact opposite of what back-pained bodies need.

That’s where retraining comes in.

What You’ll Learn in This Workshop

In Retrain Back Pain for Yoga, we’ll cut through the myths and focus on what actually works for both teachers and practitioners alike. Here’s a taste of what’s on the mat:

Breathing that soothes instead of triggers. Not every pranayama technique is spine-friendly. You’ll learn which breathing methods regulate the nervous system and support healing instead of cranking up pain.
Safer strategies for common poses. Backbends, binds, deep twists, yin, all can feel amazing or aggravating, depending on how they’re taught. You’ll learn how to adapt and cue these postures so they’re safe for every back in the room.
The missing pieces yoga alone doesn’t cover. We’ll explore what yoga doesn’t always address—like how pain actually works in the body, why “stretching more” isn’t always the answer, and how strength, balance, nutrition, age, sex, bone health, and nervous system regulation all come into play.
How pain really works. Pain isn’t just in your muscles, it also involves your brain and nervous system. Understanding this makes you a better teacher and a smarter practitioner.

Who This Workshop Is For

This isn’t just a workshop for “people with back pain” (although if that’s you, you’ll get a ton out of it).

Whether you’re a yoga teacher who wants to confidently support students with back pain or a yoga practitioner looking for ways to move without flaring your symptoms, this workshop will give you practical tools you can use immediately.

Yoga can be part of the solution for back pain, but only when it’s taught and practiced with nuance, safety, and rooted in a smart, anatomical context of movement and injury prevention.

Why This Matters Now

Back pain isn’t rare. It’s the #1 musculoskeletal complaint in the world, and it shows up in yoga studios everywhere.

Which means if you’re teaching yoga, you’re already teaching back-pained populations even if your students don’t say anything.

The more we can grow beyond persistent myths in favor of smarter, safer practices, the more accessible and effective yoga becomes.

Yoga for a Healthy and Balanced Nervous System by Luke Ketterhagen

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 01:51:46 GMT

In today’s overstimulated and fast-paced world, nervous system health is more important than ever. Chronic stress, constant digital connectivity, and an unrelenting pace of life push our bodies and minds beyond their natural rhythms. Many of us are living in a state of chronic sympathetic overdrive—often referred to as “fight or flight”—without enough time or space to engage the body’s restorative systems. Fortunately, yoga offers a time-tested, scientifically supported path to rebalance the nervous system, promoting resilience, vitality, and overall well-being.

Understanding the Nervous System

The nervous system is our internal communication network. It has two main branches: the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous system, which includes the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS regulates involuntary functions such as heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, and hormonal secretions. It consists of two primary branches:

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which mobilizes the body for action (“fight, flight, or freeze”)
The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which supports rest, digestion, and recovery (“rest, digest, integrate, and heal”).

Health depends on a dynamic balance between these two systems. Yoga supports this balance by promoting parasympathetic activation and increasing nervous system flexibility—our ability to shift between these states smoothly and appropriately.

Yoga as Nervous System Medicine

Yoga is more than stretching or exercise; it is a holistic system that integrates movement (asana), breath regulation (pranayama), relaxation and sense withdrawal (pratyahara), and meditation (dhyana). Each of these components plays a powerful role in calming the nervous system and enhancing self-regulation.

Asana
Physical movement helps discharge excess energy, release muscular tension, and stimulate vagal tone—a key marker of parasympathetic activity. Gentle, mindful movement also re-establishes a felt sense of safety in the body, crucial for those recovering from chronic stress or trauma and helping to reduce anxiety and depression.
Pranayama
Breath is one of the most accessible and immediate tools we have to influence the nervous system. Slowing and lengthening the exhale, for instance, directly stimulates the vagus nerve, shifting us toward parasympathetic dominance. Techniques such as nadi shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) and ujjayi (aspirated breath) have been shown to lower blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels.
Pratyahara
Guided relaxation and the process of sense withdrawal brings a deep state of restfulness so we can heal. It is the combination of resting the body fully, relaxed diaphragmatic breathing, and training the mind to focus awareness in the body. Consequently, this practice can induce a hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep. The balance this practice has on the nervous system positively affects every organ and organ system.
Meditation and Mindfulness
Meditation enhances the awareness of internal body states and as a consequence allows us to recognize signs of stress and unhealthy habits. Regular mindfulness practice has been shown to increase gray matter density in the prefrontal cortex and decrease activity in the amygdala—the brain’s alarm center. This translates to greater emotional regulation and a more responsive, less reactive nervous system.

The Role of the Vagus Nerve

A central player in nervous system health is the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body. It connects the brainstem to the heart, lungs, and digestive tract. A well-toned vagus nerve improves digestion, reduces inflammation, and supports emotional regulation. Practices that stimulate vagal tone include humming, chanting, slow breathing, social engagement, and cold exposure—all of which are naturally woven into the yogic tradition.

Polyvagal Theory and Yoga

Contemporary neuroscience, particularly Polyvagal Theory developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, provides a framework to understand how yoga affects the nervous system. According to this theory, safety, connection, and coregulation are essential to healing. Yoga fosters this through the use of community (sangha), attuned instruction, and embodied presence. Group classes, even when done in silence, generate a shared field of safety and regulation.

Conclusion: From Survival to Thriving

In a culture dominated by performance and productivity, the invitation of yoga is radical: to slow down, breathe deeply, and listen within. As we practice yoga with an understanding of the nervous system, we move from mere stress management to nervous system literacy—developing the capacity to notice, respond, and restore balance from the inside out.

A healthy nervous system doesn’t mean we’re always calm or peaceful—it means we’re adaptable, resilient, and present. With regular practice, yoga becomes a daily act of rewiring our inner circuitry for connection, vitality, and wholeness.

I look forward to sharing space and practicing with all of you!

For more info, go to LukeKetterhagen.com.

Michelle’s Sound Healing World with Michelle Clifton

Tue, 13 May 2025 01:34:19 GMT

As soon as I struck a large Tibetan singing bowl that was sitting on my chest, I thought, “I had died and gone to heaven.” It was so relaxing, strangely comforting, and magical. That was my initiation into sound healing with bronze bowls. I was hooked. From that moment on all I wanted to do was invite everyone I met to experience that feeling of a vibrating metal bowl on their chest. It’s why I do sound baths and teach anyone interested how to play the sound bowls.

My path to Tibetan/Himalayan singing bowls is a long and winding road.

It all started when my childhood bouts of eczema became worse in my adolescent years. I was given cortisone cream by my dermatologist when both my hands became very broken out. Miraculously that did the trick. The rashes were tamed as long as I used the cream regularly. Many years later, as I was battling persistent bronchitis, a friend said, “You have been getting worse and worse cases of bronchitis each year. I suspect the cortisone cream is having a harmful effect on your immune system.” I realized that since first using the cream I had become allergic to cats as well as tree and grass pollen. I felt like I was always on the verge of getting sick. I also began having breathing difficulties and was diagnosed with asthma. So the next day I totally stopped using cortisone cream.

What happened next was a total surprise. My whole body broke out in rashes, from my head to my toes. Every morning when I awoke I had to take off my sheets, shake all the dry skin out of them, and wash them. I kept my entire body covered and wore hats so no one would see my rashes. I was a nervous wreck, itching and scratching constantly. My daily Iyengar yoga practice was the first thing that relieved my nervous system enough to allow me to get through the day. I gave up eating sugar and white flour products. I was introduced to energy medicine. Reiki helped calm my body. I continued on my healing path becoming a certified Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioner, licensed massage therapist, craniosacral therapist, and auric field healer among many other things.

One day a fellow therapist said, “I’m going to study sound healing. Does anyone want to do it with me?’ I had no idea what sound healing was but I said, “I’ll do it.” And that’s how it all started. Sage Center’s first year-long sound healing class was created for our group of eight Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioners. During the class a fellow student said she was studying with a man from India who taught Tibetan singing bowls and thought I would like it. I signed up for his next certification class and, as I put that first metal bowl on my body and played it, I was smitten. I now play sound baths on a regular basis and have been certifying students as a teacher/trainer for the International Academy of Sound Healing since 2015.

Besides learning a variety of techniques and healing protocols, I learned that in order for the body to heal the subconscious mind has to be onboard with the healing to restore health. One is able to access the subconscious mind (delta and theta brainwaves) in deep meditation and deep sleep. Delta waves are linked to deep, dreamless sleep and restorative healing. Theta waves are related to deeper relaxation and inward focus.

Playing my Tibetan singing bowls brings me to the most relaxed and healing place. This practice has calmed my nervous system and helped alleviate my eczema symptoms. These bowls were able to make sounds that restored healthy vibratory frequencies to my body, bringing body, mind, and spirit back into balance. This healing effect happens when our brain waves synchronize with the tones of the bowls. This is called entrainment. As this occurs, the parasympathetic nervous system is activated. The heart slows down, blood pressure lowers, the eye’s pupil size decreases, blood vessels dilate, digestive juices increase, muscles in the gastrointestinal tract relax, and the whole body begins to go into deep relaxation.

Michelle’s Sound Healing World workshop will introduce you to Sound Healing with Tibetan singing bowls.

Learn more about Michelle at sonicbowls.com.

My May Musings by Paula Heitzner

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:43:35 GMT

When putting together my workshop, I, of course, had to limit what its context would be because of the time constraint. However, so many thoughts and feelings inspired by my yoga practice came through.

Looking back, my earliest connection to yoga was all about improving my physical expertise for performing in dance. It proved to be a physical resource, but it subtly became so much more. The path of my thinking and feeling also shifted without my awareness. As I matured, along with familial and work obligations and responsibilities, I noticed a difference in the way I functioned. A beloved yoga teacher’s advice was, “If you don’t know what to do, do an opposite and you’ll get a different response and directive.”

Even though I was satisfied with this growth and consciousness, I also studied the latest western body–mind modalities: ideokinesis, polarity, bioenergetics, and continuum, to validate my deep love and respect for yoga and its benefits.

Yoga is! It cannot be categorized. It is an art, a science, a way of life, and an extensive comprehensive system able to lead one to the source of their own inner light and joy. The state of being happy is an innate part of life that is elusive most of the time because of the difficulties and challenges that this life presents. The practice of yoga offers us the way and means to connect with our own light and joy, and its philosophies show us how unhappiness is optional. Human frailties can be strengthened when we face our fears, make our own choices and decisions, and, with conscious awareness, practice appreciation and self-acceptance and recognize the importance of autonomy for our maturation. We learn from our experiences, whether they are good or bad ones, how we must adapt and adjust.

Yoga has been in existence for thousands of years, developed and refined by the practice of those who were aware of—and closely devoted to—the source of pure cosmic conscious energy. It was very long ago when the intrusions and distractions of life were minimal, and these cosmic connections led them to the direct experience of the energy of pure presence. This was their tutelage and instruction, and today we are able to employ the phenomenon of those teachings through our practice of yoga.

The age old questions “Why am I here? and “Where am I going?” often provoke deep thought when on the path to the higher energies. As a long-term teacher of dance, movement arts, and yoga, my curiosity about these questions is continually arising, leading to awareness on many levels that come from the knowledge contained within the moving body. These are but minute segments of many different aspects in the various depths within that open us to the answers we seek, even as we learn the body’s language, when the technique of communicating is in the form of sensation (pain) or unease (dis-ease). I hope to lead the practice to the deepest places within to discover the highest sources of consciousness and the rich wisdom we possess, enabling us to grow and reach for the light with trusted support from our very own being.

Doing an ongoing practice and increasing my connection to the principles and philosophies that arose as a result of this immersion has been a true blessing for me. I trust myself more, I am less fearful and I am more courageous, knowing that the tried and true wisdom is always available if you trust and seek it with your heart and soul—no ego!

Open yourself to the delight and joy that is always present within. These experiences also added a richness to my teaching abilities, that is still evolving.

My workshop carries this intention and hopefully it will be a gift of inspiration for all.

My Yoga Journey by Jason Ray Brown

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 03:06:23 GMT

I suppose that my path to yoga begins with my mother, before I even knew that yoga existed. As a kid, I remember sneaking into her room to look through her colorfully illustrated book about a beautiful blue man that was often depicted playing the flute. I later came to learn that the book was the Bhagavad Gita, and that the blue man was Krishna. My mother was a hippie-child in the 60s, and in addition to her revolutionary spirit she also shared lots of stories, wisdom, and insight with me from her explorations of Eastern spirituality. But it wasn’t until I moved to New York City in the mid-90s that I discovered the physical practice of yoga.

After graduating from Gonzaga University in 1994 with a degree in theater, I spent about six months in London working as an office temp and auditioning and acting in various fringe productions. In 1995, I made the big decision to move to New York to pursue acting. While on the one hand it was amazing to be following my heart, it was also very stressful! Acting classes and headshots were expensive, and no sooner then I’d find a decent job to pay the bills I’d have to quit that job in order to take a part in a show. So it seemed as if I was always looking for work and often in fear of how I was going to pay the rent. Looking for an antidote to the stress, I started spending time in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble, where I’d sit on the floor and read the books right there because I couldn’t afford to buy them. One day, I ventured a little beyond the self-help section and discovered a super small section of books under the category of “Yoga and Tai Chi.” There were only a handful of books there at the time, but one of them changed the course of my life completely.

Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, by Erich Schiffmann, was the first book that I ever read about yoga. The words on those pages spoke to a long dormant aspect of my inner being. I resonated with everything Erich said, and knew that I’d just discovered my new path. I started asking everyone I knew if they’d heard about yoga. Remember, this was before the age of the Internet so I couldn’t just do a simple Google search. But eventually I found someone that practiced yoga, and she recommended the Integral Yoga Institute (IYI) on West 13th Street. I started taking classes there regularly and fell in love with the practice. I became a vegetarian, gave up smoking and drinking, and did my best to live a yogic lifestyle. I attended teacher training at the IYI in the Fall of 1998, and started teaching at the IYI in January of 1999.

After graduating from IYI’s teacher training, I was hungry to learn more about yoga from different teachers so I started exploring other practices. I took classes at the Sivananda Institute, Jivamukti, the Iyengar Institute, and at OM Yoga Studio. I really resonated with the alignment-informed, slow-paced vinyasa style at OM Yoga (Cyndi Lee), and found myself practicing there more and more. I eventually enrolled in The Road to OM teacher training with Cyndi Lee and began teaching at OM Yoga in 2000. Shortly after that I traveled to the West Coast to attend a 2-week teacher training intensive with Erich Schiffmann, and it felt amazing to finally study with the teacher whose book so radically changed my life.

In 2002, I enrolled in the Swedish Institute of Massage Therapy. While I was initially only interested in learning more about the body in order to become a better yoga teacher, I ended up completing the entire curriculum and become a licensed massage therapist in early 2006. It was during my massage studies at the Swedish Institute that I discovered a passion for the study of functional anatomy. Believing that you teach what you want to learn, I started offering a series of anatomy courses for my yoga teacher colleagues that eventually became known as “Anatomy Studies for Yoga Teachers (ASFYT).” I taught the series using a couple of fantastic books by Joseph Muscolino, entitled Kinesiology: The Skeletal System and Muscle Function and The Muscular System Manual. Both of these books went far beyond what I’d learned at the Swedish Institute, and teaching from them took my own knowledge of human movement to new heights.

In 2008, I trademarked my own style of yoga called Zenyasa, which is essentially a slow-flow yoga practice that incorporates elements of Zen Buddhism, functional strength and conditioning, Tai Chi, and moderately paced vinyasa yoga. I opened the Zenyasa Yoga & Wellness Studio in 2010, where I and others offered Zenyasa classes, the ASFYT Series, Zenyasa teaching training programs, and therapeutic massage services. Sadly, we recently lost the lease on our little yoga haven, but I have plans to continue offering the ASFYT Series and Zenyasa programs in the months and years to come. In the meantime, I continue to offer private yoga and therapeutic massage services in upper Manhattan, Yonkers, lower Westchester, and at my home in Riverdale. The journey continues

Learn more at jasonraybrown.com.

Embodying the Esoteric Archetypes of Yoga with Judith Rose

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 02:28:06 GMT

My yoga journey began with a copy of Richard Hittleman’s book Yoga for Health, in 1971, the year that it was published. I was in recovery following a stroke I had sustained due to “a fatal illness” that I had miraculously survived, but barely. I knew very little about yoga, other than the fact that it sounded “exotic,” that it was developed in India, and that its name began appearing in lots of print. Directed neither by my mind (which was still quite jostled), nor by my feet (which were not yet very fleet), I took direction from a deep inner knowing that brought the book to me. I began exploring the readings and several of the poses, pictured in black and white, that were feasible for me to embody. This became a secret practice, hidden from view, that brought me newfound strength and the joy of deep accomplishment, as the rest of my life beleaguered me.

The same way Hittleman’s book came to me, my first Yoga teacher manifested, and I became a devoted student of hers from 1975 until her death several years later. Ever garbed in white during practice, graceful, lyrical, soft-spoken, yet deliberate, Gambi Maier, became one of my spiritual mothers. She had been a long-time student of Vishnudevenanda in India, and had been blessed by him to bring the stamp of his yoga to America.

A few years after Gambi’s death, I met Paula (Renuka) Heitzner, the yoga master who grounded my practice with an elemental foundation of wisdom and experience. I once wrote to Paula that each one of her classes is “a workshop,” “a study.” I remain grateful for her important presence in my life.

Aligning with my continuing quest into the depth and inherent potency of yoga, I trained and became certified in a variety of dance and movement arts. I was drawn, particularly, to the therapeutic potential of conscious movement work that had developed in the United States and in other parts of the globe, like Israel and Japan. I began to intuit coherent alignments between them and formulated the basis of my professional practice, which I named Vital Movement™. More can be learned about my work on my website http://www.judithroseVM.com.

I have been granted a wild and wide mind that continually looks for congruency within diversity, that is fascinated by the concept of the Zeitgeist, and celebrates synchronicities and other manifestations of Divine Choreography. I seek connections between things that, at first glance, do not seem similar. I love finding correspondences and “conversations” between the work of artists in totally different genres, locations, and time periods. This innate urge eventually led me to the writings, teachings, and drawings of Dr. C.G. Jung (1875-1961), whose psychological understandings spill into the worlds of science, art, music, movement, anthropology, and mysticism. I spent 10 consecutive summers in one-week immersions in Jungian work that bonded me intensely with Jung’s teachings, including his theories relating to Archetypes. Over the course of time, I sought archetypal parallels in the worlds of yoga and movement, and I began to categorize them and link them in choreographic flows that I named “Body Chants.”

In my YTA workshop,

we slipped into the body of Shakti as she peers into the mirror of creation, and thrilled to becoming Shiva as he launches his lightning bolt. We became magical moons traveling in the night sky, radiant Avatars illuminating the way home, and many other wild and wonderful embodiments.

Join us for Judith's workshop on March 8!

My Journey to Yoga by Nicolai Bachman

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:33:06 GMT

I was an introvert growing up and enjoyed quiet time with nothing to do. Maybe I got those genes from my father and grandfather, who were very philosophical. After college I worked in Rochester, New York, as a computer programmer. I took classes in Tae Kwon Do, then the softer styles of Tai Chi, and eventually was introduced to meditation and yoga, which I greatly resonated with. I was then exposed to Ayurveda as a natural, common-sense healing system from India, and it was then I felt drawn to everything from India. I was ready to seek out the best teachers I could find and study with them. In 1991 I quit my job and moved to Albuquerque to study Ayurveda with the renowned teacher Dr. Vasant Lad. While there, a Sanskrit teacher named Vyaas Houston came to Albuquerque and stayed at the place I was house-sitting. He was an incredible teacher, and I got to know him personally as well.

After graduating from Ayurveda school I spent the summer learning Hindi in Boston, then took a 6-week Sanskrit intensive with Vyaas, then traveled to India where my girlfriend and I spent a year trying to gain admission into a 5-year BAMS program at an Ayurvedic college. During this time I studied more Sanskrit with a very famous scholar in Varanasi (Vagish Shastri) and learned to read, write, and speak Hindi. Yet we were not able to gain college admission because we were foreigners. This experience in India, living with families, learning their language, and traveling the country, truly changed my life by pushing me to my limits and teaching me how adaptable I could be. Speaking Hindi allowed me to really relate to the people in India on a personal level.

Upon returning to America, I called Vyaas since I wanted to be around him and learn as much Sanskrit and yoga philosophy as possible from him. I became his personal assistant, office manager, and substitute Sanskrit teacher in the New York City area for 1 year, partly living at the Ashram where his Sanskrit guru resided.

I then decided to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico and get a Masters degree in Eastern Classics so I had some credentials on paper. There I met some wonderful teachers. The yoga teacher Tias Little and I became great friends and each other’s guru, learning from each other for almost 30 years now. He had a big influence on my career. I began teaching Sanskrit workshops locally and then nationally. I continued my studies of Veda and Yoga with Vamadeva Shastri (David Frawley), a wise, generous, and accomplished Vedic scholar. I also chanted the Veda-s and studied the Yoga Sutras with Sonia Nelson at the Vedic Chant Center in Santa Fe. I was so lucky to find three excellent teachers in Santa Fe and study with them for over 15 years, during which time I taught all over the country and wrote and published many audio CDs and books, as a parallel career to being a freelance computer guy. I met my wife Margo at the Vedic Chant Center as well. Sonia officiated our wedding there and we have been married for over 21 years now, with 2 children.

I followed my heart even when it seemed a very impractical thing to do. I feel lucky to have found a real passion for something—my “dharma”—that I chose to pursue no matter what. Seeking out the best teachers possible made a huge difference in my ability to understand the subtleties and complexities of yoga/vedic philosophy. When designing and writing my magnum opus (now titled the Yoga Sutras Desk Reference), I drew from everything I learned from my teachers, my own personal experience, meditations, and self-study.

Being a perpetual, eager, open-minded student has also been important. Even if I am the teacher in a class, the students are also teachers since their pool of knowledge and thoughtful questions teach me as well. My Sanskrit teacher in Varanasi shared his experience around his relationship with his guru. Once Vagish finally won a Sanskrit debate against him, his teacher shed tears of joy, knowing that his student had finally surpassed him and thus was more than capable to carry on the teachings. This taught me to support and encourage my students to be the best they can be, and to never compete with them—always cooperate and share with them as much as possible.

Join us for Nicolai's workshop on February 8!

Finding Relief from Chronic Pain Through Yoga by Lee Albert, NMT

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 21:17:56 GMT

Chronic pain is an all too familiar challenge for many individuals, impacting their daily lives and overall well-being. Whether it's persistent back or neck pain, tight hamstrings, sore knees, or inflexible hips, these ailments can create significant barriers both on and off the mat. But what causes this pain, and how can we find sustainable relief?

Statistics indicate that chronic pain costs the United States an astounding $650 billion annually. As a neuromuscular therapist with over 30 years of experience, I have witnessed firsthand that a staggering 80% of pain is linked to imbalanced muscles, often exacerbated by stress. This form of pain—known as musculoskeletal pain—can be debilitating, but there's hope. Yoga, focusing on balance and stress alleviation, has emerged as a powerful ally in the journey toward chronic pain relief.

Unfortunately, many individuals find that traditional Western medicine provides limited solutions for pain management. The usual approach involves prescribing painkillers, muscle relaxers, anti-inflammatories, or anxiety medications. While these may offer temporary relief, they typically only mask the symptoms rather than addressing the underlying causes of pain.

In most cases, pain arises from imbalances within the musculoskeletal system. Often, our discomfort results from misalignment or poor posture, factors that might not be immediately obvious. Even those who consider themselves to have good posture may have subtle misalignments that the untrained eye can easily overlook.

Recognizing and understanding these common misalignments is vital for crafting a personalized approach to yoga that enhances posture and fosters muscle balance. By doing so, practitioners can choose specific yoga poses that alleviate discomfort and prevent further complications. Tailoring a yoga practice to individual needs empowers practitioners to reduce pain and boost their overall vitality.

Embracing a comprehensive approach, we elevate overall well-being beyond mere symptom relief. The structured yet flexible nature of these classes invites participants to discover the powerful synergy between body, mind, and spirit. As students deepen their awareness of their bodies, they learn to listen to their unique needs, transforming their yoga practice into a profound source of healing.

If you're grappling with chronic musculoskeletal pain, consider integrating my suggestions into your routine. This holistic practice targets the symptoms and addresses the root causes of discomfort, helping you achieve a greater sense of balance. With dedication and the proper guidance, you can reclaim your movement, diminish pain, and enhance your quality of life—both on and off the mat.

My "Yoga for Pain Relief" classes adopt a holistic perspective on pain management. Together, we explore yoga's remarkable benefits for neuromuscular issues and overall health through targeted asanas (stretches), pranayama (breathing exercises), and meditation. These ancient practices are being rediscovered in modern times, backed by scientific research that reveals their countless advantages.

In my classes, I take my participants on a journey to discover:

the miraculous mechanics of the musculoskeletal system
the actual cause of most aches and pains
how to reduce pain and achieve better results from yoga practice
how to select the correct asanas to balance muscles and relieve specific pain
how to quickly reduce or eliminate stress and anxiety
how to integrate yoga into everyday life

I have trained thousands of people in my workshops, including MDs, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, and laypeople. They have all learned how easy it is to reduce or eliminate pain and how to achieve a greater sense of well-being when following my protocols.

Come join me on Zoom on January 11, 2025, as YTA hosts my signature class, “Yoga for Pain Relief.” Nagging injuries don't fix themselves, and pain medications only temporarily relieve symptoms. Take control of your health and integrate my ideas into your everyday life. You will soon find out how good your body can feel!

For more information visit LeeAlbert.com.

Join Lee on January 11 for Yoga for Pain Relief with the YTA!

Yoga for Recovering Addicts -- Seane Corn's Interview with Nikki Myers

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 04:06:43 GMT

In an interview for Yoga Journal conducted by Seane Corn (guest editor), Nikki Myers discusses her journey and how yoga fit into her addiction recovery.

Nikki Myers: It has been a big journey to reintegrate all parts of myself—to accept without judgment all the various experiences that make up my whole—and come to radical self-acceptance. I’m a drug addict. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a codependent. I’m the survivor of both childhood and adult sexual trauma. I’m a love addict. I’m a recovering compulsive spender. I’m a yoga therapist. I’m a somatic experiencing practitioner. I’m the founder of Y12SR. I am the mother of two living children and one deceased child. I’m the grandmother of five. All of this is true, and I say that with gratitude and grace. I’ve discovered that if I exalt one part of myself and diminish another, I create a separation that becomes a war inside me, and that’s the antithesis of yoga. Yoga is union, integration, wholeness. Until I accepted all these experiences, I was unable to achieve wholeness.

SC: How did you find yoga?

NM: Initially, in 1987, I found a 12-step program for my addiction recovery. During my first eight years in the program, I finished my undergraduate degree, and then I completed my MBA. I went on to work for a corporation in IT [information technology]. In 1994, on a business trip to Germany, I was served orange sherbet with champagne. I made a bad decision to drink the champagne. Back in my hotel room, I ended up drinking from the minibar like Denzel Washington at the end of Flight. I got up the next day and did what I needed to for work, but within a week I found my way to Amsterdam. I had been clean for eight years, but even in a foreign country I knew exactly who to become, what to do, where to go, and how to talk to get my drug of choice: crack cocaine.

I had little experience with yoga at the time. After Amsterdam, I got back into a 12-step program in Boston. It was then that a work acquaintance reintroduced me to yoga. At first, I practiced Bikram and then Ashtanga. My Ashtanga teacher taught yoga in an urban school, and when she went to India each year, I would sub for her. The school administrators would tell me, “When you leave, we have a two-hour window when we can do our jobs because the kids have a sense of focus.” I had personally experienced a calm from yoga practice; however, I got curious about how yoga made kids respond this way. I studied yoga philosophy with book recommendations from others, and started seeing all the similarities between yoga and the 12-step program. I made a decision to let go of the 12-step program, and thought a daily Ashtanga yoga practice would be my way of dealing with my addiction issues. I stayed clean for four years. Then I relapsed again in 2000.

SC: What put you on a path toward sustainable recovery?

NM: I realized I could not put the 12-step program, which gave me a cognitive base for recovery, in a separate box from yoga, which gave me somatic tools. I independently studied neuroscience, and received training in trauma through the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (traumahealing.org) and in yoga therapy through the American Viniyoga Institute (viniyoga.com). In 2003, I created Y12SR (y12sr.com), which combines cognitive and somatic practices for sustainable recovery, to offer to others those things that benefitted me.

Y12SR is based on the Yoga Sutra II.16, which suggests that future suffering can be avoided. The program is designed to give us tools to help avoid the future suffering that accompanies a relapse. The first part of Y12SR includes workshops to connect the dots between neuroscience, trauma healing, the 12-step program, and yoga philosophy. The second part is leadership training to teach people how to take Y12SR meetings back into their home communities to support addicts in recovery.

*Reprinted from Yoga Journal, September 2, 2021.

The Importance of Curiosity and Exploration by Lauri Nemetz

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:02:50 GMT

Science and yoga have roots in curiosity, which drives exploration and discovery in both fields. Scientific inquiry is based on wondering about the natural world. Scientists formulate hypotheses and conduct experiments to uncover new knowledge. The questions lead the way, and answers reveal themselves. A hypothesis might prove wrong, or an idea might be revised with further exploration.

Similarly, yoga encourages practitioners to cultivate a sense of curiosity regarding their bodies, minds, and spiritual experiences. One of my earliest meditation teachers used to tell stories of how we in yoga are scientists, exploring phenomena as practitioners test an experience. For example, the blue pearl (nila bindu) is where a tiny blue dot appears in one’s inner vision during deep states of meditation. It may be a neurological perception as the brain tries to visualize sensory information. Enough practitioners “see” the blue pearl to codify the experience.

In my current PhD work on Contemporary Human Anatomy Education, I am studying visual rhetoric, or how what we see in atlases or visual representations impacts what we understand. I started exploring anatomy from my movement background and with a desire to uncover different ways of seeing and understanding. While studying dance/movement therapy for a master’s degree in Baltimore, I explored yoga practice. It always felt like home. Soon after that, I moved with my husband to NY, and I began to explore even deeper with the Yoga Teachers Association and the wealth of yoga studios in NYC. At the same time, in the early 2000s, I was also beginning to attend anatomy dissections, as my movement therapy clients and yoga students did not look like the anatomy books but had unique variations in their bodies that I wanted to understand. I studied with several excellent teachers and soon taught as faculty in dissection labs, more recently branching out independently. I kept studying yoga throughout and teaching in teacher training programs, learning as much as sharing my knowledge. I don’t think we are ever “done” in either yoga or science explorations. As part of YTA, I was a board member from 2005 to 2014, from member at large to vice president, and then shared the co-president role with my friend and colleague Sylvia Samilton-Baker, who is on the current board. Part of the joy of belonging to this association has been the exposure to so many excellent teachers and styles of practice that continue to inform my work.

Photo courtesy Handspring Publishing, The Myofascial System in Form and Movement.

Fascial anatomy delves into the interconnected network of fascia, a specific connective tissue that envelops and supports the muscles, bones, and organs throughout the body. This fascial system forms a continuous web that links various body parts, and plays a crucial role in movement, posture, and overall function. It enlightens us about the intricate design of our bodies and fascinates us through its interconnectedness. Myofascial anatomy originates from the myo (muscle) and fascia, which are linked together in extended connection areas. This is similar to our understanding of yoga (yuj) as the joining or yoking of separate things.

As I work more in this area of anatomy, I enjoy serving as a communicator between scientists and all of us, as well as between our students and clients who want to feel their best to do the things they enjoy in life. The work in labs and lectures has also connected me to the far corners of the world, including Italy, Germany, Brazil, and many more. Both science and yoga are not just about learning but about continuous learning. They value observations, experimentation, and reflection to gain insights. By embracing curiosity, practitioners in both domains continually push boundaries, challenge assumptions, and strive for a more comprehensive understanding of the world around and within them, inspiring and motivating them to stay engaged in the learning process.

Photo of Lauri Nemetz, courtesy Handspring Publishing, The Myofascial System in Form and Movement.

More on Lauri and her upcoming schedules at www.wellnessbridge.com and on FB under Lauri Nemetz and Instagram under wellnessbridge, the.myofascial.system and anatomy_bridge

Lauri will have copies of her books (including The Myofascial System in Form and Movement) available at the workshop, at Amazon.com, or locally at Hudson Valley Books for Humanity.

Merging Movement and Meditation by Betsy Ceva

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:08:48 GMT

Who Am I?

I think the door to the room was behind me, but when I visualize this moment all I can see is Guruji sitting legs crossed on a small mattress, his back against the wall. A few disciples were gathered around him, and I sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, directly across from this small glowing man. Sri Brahmananda’s dark, darting eyes pierced me; they shot out light, or energy, or something electric that kept me focused. “Last life” he was saying to me with one hand raised, index finger pointing upward, “you were a famous dancer. This life dance will become meditation.”

In 1984 I was a modern dancer living in San Francisco when I met Sri Brahmananda Sarasvati. I began attending his morning and evening programs at an old Victorian on Folsom Street, home to the Yoga Society of San Francisco and Brahmananda Ashram. The first time I joined Guruji’s meditation, “Om Ko’Ham/Who Am I?” was the mantra of the day, written in white chalk on the blackboard. I was familiar with the mantra. It was one I had chanted years before as an overwhelmed college freshman. At that time, feeling so very adrift and out of my element, I had repeatedly asked plaintively to no one in particular, “Who am I?”

This was the essence of the Guru’s teaching: “Feel.” He would quietly instruct the disciples, “Who Am I?” and then he’d continue, hinting at an answer, “You are not your body.”

I studied with Sri Brahmananda whenever he was in San Francisco and at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, NY, when I visited my family in Connecticut. I learned about yoga philosophy, meditation, and the power of mantra. The dancer in me was inspired to do physical chanting and I started experimenting. I discovered what I called Moving Mantras.

My first Moving Mantra, “Om Ko‘Ham, Who Am I?” developed the choreographic techniques used in composing Moving Mantras—repetition, concentration on a single focus, and shaping words and moving them through the air and on the floor. As I practiced and performed “Om Ko‘Ham, Who Am I?” again and again, my life changed. I was asking the essential question, “Who am I?” with my whole body and I began to receive answers. At first, I used Moving Mantras as my own personal meditation practice, but soon I began incorporating Moving Mantras into my dance classes.

A series of sad losses brought me home to Connecticut in 1990. One day a dancer friend invited me to a yoga class in Nyack taught by Paula Heitzner. Paula’s kindness and caring kept me coming back. Her classes taught me a whole new movement vocabulary and the intense practice seemed to wring the grief out of my body. I attended Paula’s classes religiously three times a week, sometimes four, slowly stitching together the fabric of my torn life. Paula encouraged me to begin teaching yoga, so I did, and dance continued to evolve into meditation. Paula also introduced me to my spouse Charlene Bradin, and together we founded Birchwood Center for Yoga and Massage Therapy in Nyack, which thrived for over 22 years until COVID closed the studio in 2020. During the Birchwood years I designed and implemented our 200- and 500-hour Yoga Teacher Trainings, Gentle Yoga and Restorative Yoga Immersions, and continued to develop Merging Movement & Meditation Workshops.

Today my Merging Movement and Meditation workshops still include Moving Mantras, but also use ritual, simple but potent breathing exercises, meditative walking, subtle and full body mudras, repetitive movements layered with breath, and a gentle asana practice interspersed with moments of guided meditation to invite a tranquil mind.

Merging Movement and Meditation workshops are open to yogis at all levels and anyone who loves to move and meditate, no experience needed. Come to this class with an open heart and curious mind and move into that sacred, joy-filled place of oneness, the quiet space where you can feel, Who am I?

Om Shantih,

Betsy Ceva

Join us for Betsy's workshop on October 19, 2024.

Pathways to Healing by Loren Fishman, MD

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 16:14:43 GMT

After graduating from Christ Church, Oxford, in Foundations of Mathematics, a philosophical subject, it seemed to me the most related field was grammar: only language-users know numbers and they both have rules for well-formed expressions, etc. It turned out that the first grammar book was written by a man named Patanjali.

I resolved to go to India and learn Sanskrit. I was there only about three weeks when I realized the average three-year old would know more Sanskrit than I would ever learn, and this was just about that time that I came upon Mr. Iyengar’s book. The yoga stood head and shoulders above any I had ever seen. A few weeks later I went to his house, and after an electric meeting with him, stayed in a hotel for about a year and learned all this highly intelligent and righteous man could teach me. Among many other things, I learned that the same Patanjali had written the Yoga Sutra and was a physician.

Even then, I was using yoga to help substance abusers and those with orthopedic injuries in the “expatriate” community, but after returning to the United States for medical school, my interest in how yoga works deepened.

Curious stories attend each of the topics in this workshop. Risking a spoiler effect, the following descriptions show my pathway to healing.

Scoliosis

My first patient was a little bird of a woman, a hospital administrator whose yoga-teaching daughter had brought her from another state. She had a back curve above 100°, and was dying due to the constricting effects on her heart and respiration. I tried to slow down the progression, thinking perhaps we could stop it. After five months, I thought maybe I was fooling myself, but she looked better. A follow-up x-ray showed her curve to now be 68°!

Possibly 20 years later, my neighbor had a niece with scoliosis whom I treated successfully just about the same way. When she improved the neighbor, a Yale MBA exclaimed, “you’re a genius! The world must know about this!” That had never occurred to me but then I started recruiting patients to see if this was more broadly applicable.

Now I’ve seen all kinds of scoliosis and believe that it is based on muscular asymmetry in the vast majority of cases. I treat it by equalizing the muscular strength on both sides of the curve. Currently I’m doing an FDA approved study, using both yoga to strengthen the weak side and botulinum toxin to temporarily weaken the strong side. The results are so striking I’ve already published it, although I’m still accepting patients.

Osteoporosis

Just before leaving India I had a goodbye party for the Iyengar community in my rooftop rooms at the hotel. It was a great party and afterward, when I blew out a candle in one of the lanterns, I had a vision of Mr. Iyengar’s bones. Their strength and integrity made them glisten. They were not at all grisly, but rather strikingly wholesome and robust.

In my residency, another wonderful teacher, Edward F. Delagi, taught me Wolff’s Law—“The architectonic (basic support) of bone follows the lines of force to which the bone is exposed.” It explains many biological phenomena, including why we have that curious crook in our hip bones.

I put Wolff’s Law together with the vision on the hotel roof and surmised that yoga might help with osteoporosis. My friends said, “Loren, you’re crazy. Yoga for people with osteoporosis—you’ll break their bones!” So I did a controlled pilot study with my own patients after office hours. I used poses that put pressure on the hip, the femur, and the spine, the most common and serious sites of fracture, and not coincidentally, the ones measured in the DEXA (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) scan.

Examining the data one evening I found no fractures, no herniated disks, nothing but a few sore muscles. My middle son walked by my desk and asked me what I was doing. When I told him he asked if I was going to publish it. I said, “No, this is just to see if yoga is safe.” He said, “Give me the data.” Five minutes later he came out of his room: “Dad, it’s significant!” I went to do my next study on the subject, making 1000 discs and gave them away to interested parties. Eight years later it too was significant.

Rotator cuff syndrome

This time I was the first patient, having ripped my shoulder apart in what they called a massive tear. I could not raise my left arm. Even though I’m a doctor, it took months to get an appointment with the leading orthopedic surgeons. In the meantime, I missed some yoga poses so much that one day I stood on my head despite my injury. Maybe three minutes later my wife came downstairs and gasped, “Loren! What are you doing?” When I got up, I could raise my arm in a vertical position. And painlessly! This requires more explaining than we have room for here; it too will be a point of discussion in the workshop. And coincidentally, we just completed an NIH (National Institutes of Health) study with 167 patients: highly significant.

Mic drop

Superimposing these empirical results on the highly theoretical and spiritual practice of yoga was not difficult. Painlessly adapting yoga to medical ends is greatly simplified by Mr. Iyengar’s work perfecting the poses: they are elegant, physiologically relevant, and safe. What I will present is both the end of these troubling conditions for many people, and the beginning of the quest to refine and improve the yoga. We know the poses discuss in the workshop are effective, but there is no reason to believe that they are the only ones, or the best ones for the task.

Learn more about Dr. Fishman at sciatica.org or manhattanphysicalmedicine.com.

My Yoga Journey by aasia Lewis

Tue, 14 May 2024 13:36:36 GMT

I remember my fascination with yoga began with arm balancing and inversions: something about integrating the parts of one’s body and consciousness to move as a unit and defy gravity, while remainingtranquil hooked me to the subject. So I went to my first yoga class at a yoga/spinning studio in Toronto, Canada called Spynga. I know: what??? We would vigorously spin for 45 mins and do “yoga” at the end for 15 minutes on the bike, with the occasional instructor moving us to the mat. I quickly realized that class style was not going to satisfy my curiosity and transitioned to a classic yoga studio (Yoga Tree) a few weeks later and began my dedicated, almost 6 days a week, yoga practice. My teacher at that time, Karin, showed us the transition from sirsasana (headstand) to pincha mayurasana (forearmstand) to vrischikasana (scorpion), and I scoffed and rolled my eyes. Just the idea of performing that sequencing was laughable. I wrote myself off, as my body had no clue, no reference point on how to even begin ‘training’ to perform such a sequence. That was 12 years ago.

I find myself emotional as I write this: the way I dismissed my physical capacity because my mind couldn’t ‘comprehend’ the mechanics. So much of my life and the life of those I’m fortunate to serve have been filtered through a mind that is dismissive, doubting, and defeating. As someone who now practices sirsasana daily, transitions into pincha mayurasana joyfully, and occasionally can stick a vrischikasana, it saddens me to notice that if I listened to my mind all those years ago, I may have never come to the strength, integration, and equanimity that I now know and feel in my life and yoga practice. And it’s something I often have to remind myself and others about in my yoga and coaching sessions. The idea of non-attachment: not being concerned with the outcomes and committing to practice daily. “Practice and all is coming” as per Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.

One of my most impactful teachers would often say ‘the practice will meet you where you are.’ For a while, I was at the asana. I wanted to gain space, range, and dimensionality in my physical body. I wanted to inhabit every fiber, cell, and square inch of my human husk. This desire led to increased sensitivity in my being and naturally, my practice developed more subtle streams. I never quite fully delved into the other limbs of the 8-limb path as much as I did asana, and knowing those petals existed made them an accessible support when needed. Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, has especially allowed me to discover and open myself up to Greater Inspiration in unparalleled ways, including fleeting experiences of Samadhi (absorption). It also had begun to meet me in philosophical ways, although rather than feeding the socially conditioned split between mind and body, my life experiences led me to the practice of somatics, bridging the gap between sutra and asana. It was always my style to speak about the spirit while teaching asana, and in the last year, I feel I have shed a distinct covering on my soul, a layer of my self that was hidden beneath the voices of other educators and social constructs. I’ve come into my own, walking in a truth that needs no external validation, acknowledgement, or praise to be valuable and meaningful.

Yoga, alongside many, many other disciplines and practices, was one of my first entry points into the world of centering, integration, and harmony. It gave me a tangible practice that anchored my soul into my body. It gave me a sensitivity from pores to cells, mind to muscle. It gave me a resource for resilience, enduring life in a body that has experienced external diminishing since its inception. And as a teacher, it gave me an opportunity to witness other bodies, other beings, yearning for liberation via space, introspection, and proprioception.

It gave me a gift of a fullness of life. And I’m so honored to be a conduit in offering this gift to others.

Learn more about aasia at siaontheotherside.com.

Join us on June 8 for aasia's workshop, Quiet Channels: Creating a Steady Postural Base for Tranquil Asana.

Core Work Is More Than You Think by Jennifer Brilliant

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 19:47:51 GMT

I was teaching a private yoga session recently in which my student did great work to strengthen, stretch, and engage her body and mind. The work was challenging and fun. But at the end, after a few moments of relaxation in savasana, she sat straight up, dropping her head back slightly, and straining the muscles in the front of her neck to recover her balance. To me, it looked stressful.

I asked her to lie back down and took her through some steps for moving more smoothly back up to sitting:

Roll onto your right side, with bent knees, embryo-like, using your right arm as a pillow for your head.
Turn your chest and face toward the floor so that you can use both hands to press yourself up.
Let your head hang while rolling up to sitting from the base of your spine, with your head coming up last.

She followed my instructions and then asked what the point was.

This gave me a golden opportunity to share what I’ve learned and what I am passionate about—everything is core.

There’s not a lot of clarity about what core actually means. Some people use it interchangeably with abs and other people include more muscles in their definition. Some use it in a more metaphorical sense, to mean the center of the body. My view is that because the whole body is so interconnected, and everything moves out from the core to the periphery and in from the periphery to the core, you can potentially think of the core as including everything in the body.

My idea that the core is big, deep, and encompassing has come through years of working with my body.

As a young dancer, I sprained my ankles a lot. It was a chronic thing. One time, this happened in a ballet class. The force of landing a jump on a twisted ankle also broke my fifth metatarsal, a bone in my foot. After healing and physical therapy, Pilates was recommended to me as a way to become stronger and more physically organized. Pilates is an intelligent system of exercise using special apparatuses, designed to improve flexibility and strength through engaging the torso-stabilizing muscles of the abdomen and lower back. Since that intensive Pilates work so many years ago, I haven’t sprained an ankle again. How is it that becoming stronger in my core also made my limbs more integrated into my whole body, helping me to resolve the chronic problem of twisting my ankles? Maybe it's because the core and the limbs are so deeply interconnected.

Later as a professional modern dancer in New York City, I learned how to initiate movement from my core in a fluid way, by understanding the core as an area I could release and flow from as well as an area to work, integrate, and activate.

Realizing that my own understanding and experience of “core movement” is not universal has inspired me to create practices for my yoga students to make them aware of how their cores can be incorporated into every pose. After that private lesson where my student sat up in a way that didn’t engage her core, I was inspired to go back and dig through the sequence of poses and exercises we had done in order to find all the opportunities we’d had in the practice to incorporate her core, so that we could focus on them more in the future and she could develop a greater awareness of power in her own body.

One by one, I unpacked the ways the core could be the focal point of each pose we had done. The idea was not to tighten the abdomen in every moment, but rather to find a range of relaxation and engagement originating in the core, as if the engine of the body resides there.

The Core and More

Your body parts are interwoven into one amazing, articulate whole. Your core is part of that interconnected whole, not something separate to isolate and obsess over.

There are more ways to work with your core than just tightening it. You can brace yourself in a protective mode, firming and compacting your abdominals. Some poses, like chaturanga, really do require an almost absolute and total muscular engagement of the whole body—including our core muscles. You can also relax and release your core muscles, letting your belly billow, like it’s a water balloon being filled. Do this when you want to “open” your hips—because tightening the low ab muscles, which are located very near the hips, might be counterproductive in that instance.

One of my yoga students read in a magazine that she should hold her belly in 70 percent of the time. When she told me this, I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of time.”

Just as there’s not one “right” way to do things all the time, there’s also not one part of our body that requires constant engagement and monitoring. Everything within our body is connected to everything else. So releasing habits of holding, especially in our deep core, can affect every cell in our body and give us greater range of motion. Facilitating different movement possibilities in our body is a good thing, like the flow of life itself.

When we realize that our core is inherently connected to every part of us, we can fully experience the balance of effort and ease, both anchoring—grounding downward by letting go—and ascending—lifting upward by engaging all of the muscular strength and energy of your body—beyond our usual reaches. To me, it’s fun to explore different qualities that originate from my core—the capacity for everything from infinite relaxation to maximal activation—and every stage between.

Learn more about Jennifer Brilliant at jenniferbrilliant.com, and find register for her May 11, 2024, workshop, Radiate and Return: Relating to Your Core, here.

Originally published on YogaInternational.com. Used with permission of the author.

My Path to Yoga by Doug Keller

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 16:56:21 GMT

I came to teach hatha yoga by way of the yoga of meditation and years of academic study of philosophy, both Eastern and Western.

In my studies of philosophy at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown and in my graduate work at Fordham University, I gravitated toward the senior Jesuit scholars whose excellence, open-minded intellectual zeal, spiritual fervor, and personal integrity inspired me to dig deeply into my own studies, particularly of the classical philosophers and Christian mystics, and treat them as a personal journey of discovery.

As I completed my coursework for my PhD and taught at several colleges, I was increasingly aware that I was looking for more than philosophical ideas and systems—I was looking for the experience itself that the mystics were talking about.

Midway through my studies at Fordham, I met the meditation master Swami Muktananda during his last tour of the West, and he gave me the connection, the practice, the awakening, and the understanding I was seeking.

With that, it was up to me to step through the door he had opened, not through concepts and theories, but through yoga. The next couple of years combined disciplined academic study with a deepening experiential practice. I halted my academic career just short of writing my thesis, and went to India in 1986 to practice yoga at his ashram and to offer my service.

I spent a total of seven years in the Ganeshpuri ashram, Gurudev Siddha Peeth, and 14 years of service overall in Siddha Yoga ashrams in the US and abroad, studying and practicing yoga, working in the kitchen and gardens, and teaching hatha yoga.

It was during my time in Ganeshpuri that I met John Friend while he was yet an Iyengar teacher who had come to study in Pune. We struck up a friendship, and I was able to practice with him when I came back to the states, study further with him, and assist in his classes, workshops, and trainings for the next few years.

This opportunity came to be combined with opportunities to train with other teachers as well, broadening my experience and understanding of the roots of modern hatha yoga practice—its different styles as well as its common roots.

Yoga

The time of my growth in the practice of hatha yoga was divided between individual practice at the ashram in India and opportunities to study with teachers and expand during time spent at the ashram in New York state. There I was able to study with other teachers and in a number of styles—but principally with Kevin Gardiner, who is a certified senior level Iyengar teacher.

Kevin was the most influential to me in my growth because of his deep insight into anatomy and physiology, his facility with precise instruction and demonstration, and the integrity with which he stays true to his chosen tradition, exploring its depth while exercising his own very individual and discriminating intellect, manifesting the heart of a yogi in his practice and teaching.

Yet because my own path was more closely tied to Siddha Yoga at the time, I was more deeply involved in the development of the Anusara system. John Friend shared with me the evolution of his thinking based principally upon the alignment teachings of the Iyengar system, and his synthesis of those teachings eventually manifested as the Anusara style of yoga he founded in 1997. I was one of the first teachers certified as an Anusara teacher by John Friend, and I taught in the Anusara style for over seven years.

As a consequence of Mr. Friend's process of consolidation of his system under increasingly limiting conditions, I chose to give up my certification in that style. This freed me to further deepen my study and understanding of the health-oriented wisdom of yoga, as well as explore the yoga tradition as a whole outside of the confines of the Anusara system.

Vision

In addition to teaching the postural practice of hatha yoga, as well as pranayama and meditation, I have chosen as my focus on sharing insights into what yoga has to offer as wisdom in the face of chronic pain and health issues, which is an evolving field that promises to be a vital part of the future of yoga.

The expansion of yoga beyond the practices taught in more ancient times is, to me, an expression of the freedom at the heart of yoga and of consciousness itself. This freedom was described in tantric philosophy as not simply liberation, or moksha, but Swatantrya—the freedom of consciousness to expand and create through its own inspiration.

Essential to this was an appreciation of our individual self as ahamkara—literally the I-maker. It is a term that recognizes that the self is a process of making, and this opened avenues for practices that sought a more healthy, integrated emphasis upon living a spiritual life within and accepting of the body.

This concept itself is something that has slowly evolved, and has arguably come to include modern yoga's emphasis upon health and well-being as part of the aim of yoga—which includes emotional well-being and a well-adjusted attitude toward the world that includes social concern.

I found the essence of this inspiration to be expressed by Swami Muktananda, who first initiated my journey into yoga: “God dwells within you, as you, for you. See God in yourself and in each other.”

Yoga concerns our own relationship to the self from whom we came, as well as our relationship to the self we are coming to be. It is deeply personal, experiential, and ultimately unmediated by any system of conceptual thought. The teachings of yoga simply provide us with the introduction to our own self—in both senses. To experientially realize that these two are not really separate is the essence of spiritual breakthrough.

That breakthrough is what the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (14th century) described as the breakthrough into our own heart, where the Divine most fully dwells. This is the teaching I want to share, along with the practices and means offered by yoga to support that journey.

Please join us for Doug's workshop on April 13, 2024, New Perspectives on the Feet. Note that there are separate registration pages for the Zoom and In-Person options.

If Your Yoga Teaching Is Not Functional to Begin with… by Kristine Kaoverii Weber

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:42:30 GMT

The other day I was speaking with a new teacher. She told me that she did a 200-hour training. “But when I got out there and started to teach,” she said, “I realized that what I had learned in my training was completely inappropriate for the people who were turning up for my classes.”

*Sigh* – I’ve heard this story way too many times.

My first experiences with yoga were slow and mindful in the ’70s and ’80s, so I was surprised when, after returning from living in Asia for 4 years, I went to a class in 1995 in New Jersey which was a fast, sweaty, thumping-with-music kind of workout. The teacher and her front row students could do all sorts of amazing things with their bodies – and those of us hiding in the back were labeled “beginners” (in a friendly enough way) and encouraged to work harder because, eventually, we’d get there too.

But, I would later learn, “You’ll get there eventually” isn’t accurate. Mobility is largely genetic and use-dependent—if your mom was Gumby, you’re probably golden, or if you were trained as a gymnast or dancer, you have some advantage.

Thankfully, very soon after that, I found some Viniyoga classes and in them, something that resonated with me and how I’d originally learned to practice. It also dovetailed well with the qigong I had studied. These classes weren’t easy, but they also didn’t feel out of my flexibility league or risky. They were intentional—I was confident in what I was doing with my body, and I felt like every pose had a purpose and there was a mindful, logical order to the sequences.

Clearly things have changed in the yoga world over the past 30 years. With a growing body of promising research and increasing recognition from health care professionals, yoga teachers are more aware that many people are coming to yoga for reasons other than flexibility or fitness, such as stress relief and the mental health benefits.

Which means yoga teaching is necessarily changing.

Recently, I’ve been hearing and reading about “functional” yoga. It’s a term that’s being used to describe more adaptable ways of teaching and practicing. Instead of creating goals around accomplishing poses, the idea is that you use asanas as a way to support movement in your daily life.

“Functional yoga” is an offshoot of the functional movement trend in the fitness industry. It’s being positioned as an alternative to “aesthetic” yoga practice, or doing asanas to create pleasing looking shapes. So instead of focusing on trying to do the pose “the right way,” you focus on how your body feels with the movement and how the movement supports your needs.

This, in turn, is meant to help you develop strength, flexibility, balance, and stability. Like other functional fitness training, functional yoga may target specific functional movements such as squatting, lunging, twisting, reaching, and bending.

And all this is great—because asanas should be functional. I’m a big fan of function.

However, I’m left wondering… If your yoga practice isn’t functional to begin with, what have you been doing to yourself? And, for teachers, what have you been teaching others?

Have the past 3 decades of yoga in the West been such a dysfunctional mess that now the consensus is that a new style of asana practice must be developed to counter the effects? In order to rectify the problems created by ignoring biomechanics and individual differences for so long?

The older I get, the more I enjoy and need asana practice, and I know many people who feel the same. It’s great that yoga teachers are working on trying to teach yoga in a more functional way. But if many teachers have been trained to teach a fundamentally dysfunctional practice, what is the scale of the harm that has been done? What is the scale of harm that is still being perpetuated by not focusing on the functional?

Recently I saw a video of a physical therapist saying, “We do too many forward bends in yoga, and so our hamstrings are weak, overstretched, and thin. And we do too many quad exercises in yoga, and so our quads are overdeveloped and tight.”

Which left me wondering, Who is she talking about when she says “we”? And what kind of yoga is she referring to exactly? What kind of yoga did she learn when she studied it? What kind of yoga does she believe everyone is doing?

The answer, of course, is the mainstream stuff. Which, it appears, fitness and movement professionals are now starting to call out as dysfunctional and to dismantle.

Of course, I feel empathy for people who’ve spent a lot of time and money learning to teach yoga that is not functional to begin with; however, the alternatives are out there—and they’ve been out there for a long time. You will have to chip away at the veneer that’s crusted over social media in order to find yoga that has always been taught functionally, but it’s there, mostly ignored or labeled “beginner” or “gentle.”

I always thought more functional ways of practicing were overlooked because they weren’t exciting, but who knows, it looks like functional may become the new sexy.

Please join Kristine on February 10, 2024, for Subtle Yoga: The Science Behind Slow, Mindful Yoga Practice.

Yoga from the Beginning by Beatrice Mattaway

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 02:12:16 GMT

It was the late 1960s, and I was living in Kamakura, Japan, where my parents were doing research for their degrees in Asian art history. Each Saturday, we would go to our local Zendo of the Sanbo Kyodan lineage, where Zen-Buddhist master,Yamada Roshi, resided. To prepare our bodies and minds for a full hour of this rigid and disciplined form of meditation, my mom had a local yoga instructor give us a weekly private class in our home, beginning when I was six years old.

Upon our return to North America four years later, my parents continued their spiritual quest, exploring numerous world religions and traditions, even moving us all into a commune that we later realized was a cult that they had to kidnap us from in order to escape!! Crazy times, for sure.

But between all this exposure to different religions and ways of thinking and seeing the world, the one thing that became solid within me was the knowledge that at the core, the true teachings are all the same. No matter the external package, the message is universal. And so it was with ease that I slid into Hindu philosophy and, more specifically, the traditions of Kashmir Shaivism, when I met my own spiritual teacher in my mid 20s. My on-and-off lifelong meditation practice became steadier, and I now had a sangha to study and grow with. I had been working as an actor in LA for a number of years, and after being cast as and playing the role of Amanda Krueger—the mother to horror icon Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child—I found that my opportunities suddenly became limited to horror films only, which was not at all the kind of work I had wanted to do. For that, and a few other personal reasons, at the height of my career I decided to walk away from it all, and I moved to an ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, where I chanted and meditated and did yoga daily and offered my seva working on their mobile hospital, where we would travel from village to village, serving the Adivasi population, providing basic medical care and nutrition, and my job was education through storytelling, with the aid of an interpreter.

I was learning all about the Yamas and Niyamas, taking wonderful yoga classes with world-class teachers, and blissing out on nightly kirtan, rising before dawn for sublime meditation, and chanting the Guru Gita. I also was undergoing so much Tapasya, as layers and layers of my outer shell was being annihilated. It was the most blissful and the most difficult two years of my life. One morning, I awoke to discover a deep transformation within me. I felt completely ready to dedicate the rest of my life to the seva I was doing and to commit to a monastic life, living full time at the ashram. I hadn’t spoken a word to anyone about this shift that I felt, but I just felt certain that this was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

But that very morning, seemingly out of the blue, one of the monks found me during breakfast and asked me to follow him to his office. Once there, he informed me that my guru had, just that morning, instructed him to “let me go.”

“What do you mean by 'let me go'?? Am I being kicked out?”

“It is time for you to leave the ashram,” I was told flatly. “You haven’t done anything wrong, but you can no longer stay here. You are to pack your things. You will be taken to the airport and sent to the ashram in New York, where you will have one week to find a place to live. Your time in the ashram is done.”

I was shattered. Shattered to the core. And New York? I had spent most of my young adult life on the West Coast and knew only one person in New York, an author I had met in the ashram in India. I rented a room in his apartment and found myself a temp job with a fortune 500 company, of all places. At its holiday party, I met the man who, two years later, became my husband. Fast-forward a few years and my husband and I moved to Rockland County, NY. We bought a lovely home and began to create a family. I was taking prenatal yoga at Yoga Mountain, and a few of the teachers suggested I take their teacher training program, and the rest is history. I received my 300- and 500-hour certifications there and opened my own studio, Willow Tree Yoga, in 2006.

For me, yoga is how I live, how I breathe, how I see the world, and how I move through the world. I am an extremely rough work in progress, with faults and blind spots galore, but I am forever grateful to the teachings and practices of yoga that have seen me through the death of my daughter (who died in my arms moments after her birth) and have given me the strength to go through my son’s three open heart surgeries (to rework his heart that is missing its left ventricle). Every time I sit on my mat and face a class of students, I am filled with gratitude for the incredible gift and honor that we, as yoga teachers, are given, to be able to share this incredible practice with our fellow journeymen on this mystical, challenging, and ever-sacred path of life.

So hum.

Please join us for Beatrice's workshop on chair yoga stretch on January 13, 2024. Note there are both in-person and Zoom-only options.

Align with the Divine: Yoga for Body, Mind, and Heart by Todd Norian

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 23:24:44 GMT

Align with the divine is a Tantric teaching that has incredible meaning and importance in life. Fate is what’s given to us. Destiny is what we do with it. In the Tantric tradition, we have agency, which means that we have the power to change our life and live our dream. We have the power to control our destiny.

The journey is always about the dance and interplay between our effort and grace. Like two wings of a bird, we need both effort and grace to fly. But so often we only flap the wing of effort. It’s all too easy to overdo everything, overdo relationship, work, taking care of others, eating. We get into cycles of overstriving that can leave us exhausted and depleted. Similarly, if we only flap the wing of grace, we tend to become ungrounded and spacey. We need the balance of both effort and grace to fly and glide through life’s ups and downs.

When we have the balance of effort and grace, the heart opens. The heart is the place in the middle. There are three spiritual chakras above and three worldly chakras below. When you live in your heart and follow your heart, you’re in the dance of life. Sometimes you lead and grace follows and, at other times, she leads and you follow.

When there’s a balanced coparticipation between your own effort and the universe, it leaves you glowing and thriving in life. This is Tantra Yoga. When you align with the divine, you’re aligning with your deepest essence. But so many of us get out of balance. Without a strong personal practice, when we go out of balance, it’s difficult to get back into balance. We can often stay out of balance for days, weeks, months, or even years. Consistent practice over a long time brings us back to balance very quickly. We want to learn how to teach from this place.

During the workshop on November 11, you’ll have the opportunity to come back into balance, let go of whatever is holding you back, and return home to your heart—to rest and digest and nurture yourself. You’ll have the opportunity to gain a deeper reflection of who you are as a spirit being and the life you’re creating.

As human beings, we are meaning-making machines. It’s not the experiences we’re left with that define who we are. It’s the meaning we assign to our experiences. We can either assign meaning that brings us down or lifts us up. As yogis and teachers, we want to uplift people. We want to support them to remove the veils that keep them small, covered, and burdened. And in order to give that to others, we need to do the deeper inner work ourselves. Yoga is a freedom, living in freedom, being free, and helping others choose to be free.

When you align with the divine, freedom begins to flow, windows of opportunity open up around you, and suddenly you’re in the right place at the right time.

There are times when I’m so aligned with the divine that I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. I’m able to see the perfect orchestration of my life and all of the events of my past, both positive and negative, that have brought me to where I am today. I’m able to appreciate the miracle of the moment and the miracle of this life.

This is what I call living in grace. It’s possible for all of us. As teachers we want to live from this place more and more so that we can become an inspiration for our students. We are the role models of balanced living, of living from the heart, of living and being the authentic experience of yoga! This is exactly what we’ll do in this workshop. It will be an honor to be with all of you! See you on the mat.

I’m really looking forward to offering this workshop for the Yoga Teachers Association of the Hudson Valley. Hope to see you there!

To learn more about Todd, visit ashayayoga.com.

From the Earth to Ether by Paula Heitzner

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:41:38 GMT

I am quite delighted to present my workshop, Empowered Embodiment from the Earth to Ether, and travel that long distance together with you on uncharted pathways. I have no thoughts or intentions of teaching any of you, my peers, anything new. We’ve all been practicing for a while and exposed to all forms of yoga through many different formats.

What I am planning to do is to share the teachings, inspirations, and intuitions that have arisen on my journey, grounded on Earth, and how my yoga practice encourages the physical form with its limitations to reach for the light in the Ether.

The age old questions “Why am I here? and “Where am I going?” often provoke deep thought when on the path to the higher energies. As a long-term teacher of dance, movement arts, and yoga, my curiosity about these questions is continually arising, leading to awareness on many levels that come from the knowledge contained within the moving body. These are but minute segments of many different aspects in the various depths within that open us to the answers we seek, even as we learn the body’s language, when the technique of communicating is in the form of sensation (pain) or unease (dis-ease).

I hope to lead the practice to the deepest places within to discover the highest sources of consciousness and the rich wisdom we possess, enabling us to grow and reach for the light with trusted support from our very own being.

The practice of yoga, during this workshop will remind us to seek balance,
not only physically, but to explore the techniques of inner balancing to help us through the challenges of our lives, at any time. The asanas (Tadasana, the Warriors, and Vrksasana) and other standing poses help us to ground, restore, and reclaim strength to empower our physical and emotional sense of well-being—to “stand on our own two feet” and to “stand our ground” with self-trust, dignity, and integrity.
The seated poses will encourage focus on our upper body and breath as we stretch and expand to reset our body’s connection with the self via the nervous system and the brain.

I will also attempt to travel back to the earliest of times when the ancient wise ones, attuned to the universal wisdom, began to extrapolate the information that influenced our current practice of yoga, and the understanding of our “instrument and vehicle” and what we can do to keep running smoothly.

There will be discussions, techniques, and practicalities to connect with the kinetic power we have to deepen the development and process of asana. Bring any props that you like to use for seated and standing postures…and questions you might have.

It is the long and arduous journey of a seeker, and our practice has proven again and again that it provides the opportunity to explore self-trust, truth, and transformation that leads to the next level that we prepared ourselves for and are ready to reach. It is never ending, but it makes life valuable and I would very much like to share my findings and how they presented themselves in my experience.
Please join me to walk this path together.

Yoga with Weights by Sherri Baptiste

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 09:00:00 GMT

A Stand-Alone System

Yoga with weights is neither yoga nor weight training, but a synthesis of the two forms of exercise. It’s a higher level of conditioning. Holding the weights in your hands and bearing the weights on your ankles fires and develops your muscles. The weights sculpt and tone your body. Meanwhile, as you strike the yoga postures, you develop flexibility and a conscious awareness of your body.

Yoga with weights adds another dimension to yoga. Because you’re supporting weights, the challenges that normally accompany yoga exercise—of knowing which muscles to flex and which to relax during an exercise—are made even more demanding. The weights stabilize the body and encourage you to feel the action of the yoga practice itself. The weight helps the muscles understand where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to do in an exercise. The result is a more intense, more exact exercise discipline.

Yoga with weights also builds body self-awareness. You can think of yoga with weights as a dialogue between your mind and your body. As you exercise, your brain sends a stimulus to a part of your body telling it to move in a certain direction. Then a signal comes back to the brain saying that the body part either can move or can’t move any further, and the brain sends out another signal asking the part of the body to flex or relax a little more. This ongoing dialogue amounts to a self-exploration of your body. In a very profound way, it makes you more aware of your body and enables you to extend the physical limits that your body is capable of reaching.

For the past several years, Sherri has worked with an elderly man who had polio in his youth. Her experiences with this man showed very clearly just how beneficial yoga can be to body awareness. Yoga was able to help the man so-to-speak reconnect the muscles and nerves in his body. He can now bend over, sit up, and walk with more ease, confidence, and coordination. His muscle strength, range of motion, and overall sense of well-being have improved physically and mentally. Yoga helped him rebuild the lines of connection in his body. It helped him restore and rewire what we call the nerve highways and pathways that had been damaged by polio.

Remember: Like traditional yoga, yoga with weight emphasizes correct breathing and an awareness of how you breath. This attention to breathing gives you a sense of calm relief, a feeling of grace, a feeling of steadiness similar to what you get from a traditional yoga workout. The addition of the weights brings the very physical feeling you get from weight training. You feel your individual muscles and you get the solid feeling that weightlifters get.

Finally, the addition of the weights makes you feel the effect of the yoga training sooner. The weights train the muscles where to be and where to go. In a beginning yoga practice, it sometimes takes a year for students to “get it.” It doesn’t take students practicing yoga with weights that long.

Should I have had some weight training?

You don’t need to have lifted weights before to study yoga with weights. The weights are only three to five pounds and are not difficult to get the hang of.

If you’re an avid weight trainer, you may have to unlearn one or two things before you attempt yoga with weights. Sherri can’t count the number of times weight trainers and big-time body builders have told her, “I want to come to your yoga class.” But they never show up. They’re intimidated by the yoga room and they never make it over the threshold because they’re not flexible and because they’re used to being the fittest, best athletes in the gym. Stepping out of your element and comfort zone is a challenge for everybody, body builders included. But the beauty of yoga with weights is that it benefits classic body builders in new and balanced ways, allowing them to reclaim full range of motion and flexibility while maintaining their strength. This is just the thing they often need.

One of the biggest attractions of yoga with weights is being able to lift weights and still maintain your flexibility. You can get the same muscular tone you get from weight training and work on your flexibility as well. You won’t get “bulked up” or muscle-bound, but your muscles will be toned, defined, and strengthened.

Yoga-with-Weights Breathing

If you’re new to yoga with weights, you may wonder why you have to pay so much attention to breathing. In every exercise, we tell you when to inhale and exhale and how long to inhale and exhale. In between exercises, we instruct you to pause for three deep and steady breaths. We have you focus on breathing because breathing correctly helps you to feel emotionally centered, physically stronger, and mentally alert. In the full-body workout, you use the complete breath (Chapter 4 explains what that is). Breathing complete breaths is a mindful practice that will harmonize body, mind, and spirit. It’s important to remember never to force a breath into your lungs; simply welcome a full breath to move in and out naturally. Breathing consciously helps you move safely as you exercise and connect to undiscovered areas of your body. The deep rhythmic breathing you do in these exercises also improves your circulation and de-stresses your mind.

Excerpted from Yoga with Weights for Dummies, by Sherri Baptiste and Megan Scott. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana, 2006. Available wherever books are sold.

Vision Improvement with Daniel Orlansky

Sun, 14 May 2023 22:07:52 GMT

Use the light that is within you to regain your natural clearness of sight. Seeing into the darkness is clarity. Knowing how to yield is strength. Use your own life and return to the source of life. This is called practicing the eternal.

~ Lao-Tzu

I began my journey to improve my vision after attending a lecture with Dr. Marc Grossman. He maintained that in many cases, vision can be improved by decreasing the “bad” and improving the “good”:

• Reduce factors that degrade eyesight (stress and physical and mental tension)

• Understand, apply, and integrate healthy habits of using our eyes

For myself, how to relax and energize the eyes became a practice of combining Bates Method eye exercises with insights from the Chinese meridian system, as well as stress reduction through yoga and qigong. Over the years, I’ve successfully reduced my glasses prescription by 50% and continue to see improvement.

Even if you don’t need corrective lenses, the exercises I review in the workshop will help you with tired eyes, computer eye strain, and other bothersome eye conditions. As yoga practitioners, I think we will find much resonance in understanding and applying the principles and practices of yoga to vision improvement.

Yoga as a Path to Better Vision

In a nutshell, as we relax and open the body through yoga we simultaneously relax and open the mind, and as we relax the mind, our vision, both inside and outside, is enhanced.

What does it mean, “inner” vision? It means our sense of self, our identity, our purpose, our “beingness” in the world. And “outer” vision? Our sight, our appreciation of color and form, the ability to perceive with clarity and vividness the beauty around us.

Basically, yoga works on three facets of the human being and has specific techniques for each aspect. These are the physical body; the energy body; and the mental body or mind.

The yoga practitioner seeks to harmonize these three dimensions of the human being and through doing this, achieve optimal health, happiness, and self-understanding; this would include optimal inner and outer vision.

Let’s look at these three dimensions individually.

Physical Body: The Anamayakosa

The physical poses of yoga, known as asanas, are designed to increase both strength and flexibility of the body, improve balance, and at the same time enhance circulation and energy flow, cleansing organs and other systems.

The poses that most benefit the eyes are:

Stretches for the head, neck, and shoulders. Releasing tension from the neck and shoulders not only improves posture but boosts vision by allowing more circulation of blood to the brain; the eyes are simply extensions of brain tissue.
Asanas that open the liver/gallbladder meridians; in Chinese Medicine these meridians are responsible for vision (again, both inside and out).

In the workshop, I will be teaching these beneficial poses.

Energy Body: The Pranayamakosha

All the breathing exercises in yoga are designed to enhance energy and oxygenate the blood, improving circulation while removing stress.

One of the most beneficial pranayamas for vision improvement is Kapalabhati, or skull-shining breath. Easy to master, this breath brings oxygen to the brain, and cleans the blood. It improves the oxygenation of blood in the body, which helps in better nourishment of all the structures of the eyeball, along with the nerves.

Another piece of the workshop will be including Kapalabhati with yoga eye stretches.

Mental Body: Vijnanamayakosha

The goal of yoga is union with the “divine,” which one could also call reality, or the Tao, the creative infinite, nature,“that which is,” or the Universal. In yoga philosophy, the Universal is said to exist in the space between thoughts, which is nonthinking, and in this infinite space, the truth of being is said to reside. This place of “no mind” is meditation.

Many advanced practitioners of yoga and meditation who can enter the “space between thoughts” report improved vision afterward. To quote Michael Hutchison from The Book of Floating, “As I went out into the world (after going into the state of no mind) my senses were extremely – almost unbelievably – sharp and keen. Everything I saw seemed to be beautiful and miraculous, and the colors of everything were extraordinarily rich and beautiful. I saw everything clearly as if objects had sharp edges around….Everything has become much sharper and clearer than it normally was.”

The takeaway is that external vision can be improved as one raises one's level of consciousness. In other words, deepening one’s meditation practice (ie, inner vision) can be a doorway to improving one's eyesight (outer vision).

In the workshop, I will be including a breath meditation practice that will benefit vision.

Vision Improvement and Practices From Other Systems

In addition to using the modalities of yoga as vehicles for vision improvement, I will be sharing Qigong exercises to benefit the eyes, as well as Chinese Eye Massage.

As was said by one Chinese sage, “From the base of the mountain, many paths. From the peak, only one moon.” My job as the workshop presenter is to guide you on some of these paths; our collective goal as we navigate the various paths up the “mountain” is the one “moon” of inner and outer clarity.

The Far-Reaching Benefits of Prenatal Yoga by Kelly Devi Swails

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 15:22:12 GMT

Prenatal yoga is one of yoga’s best kept secrets. Beyond the full range of benefits addressing the physical and emotional transformations of pregnancy, many do not know that the prenatal yoga class also includes key elements that are not found in regular yoga classes. Most importantly, these elements are beneficial right away, from the first trimester onward.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the aspects of prenatal yoga practice that make it so unique.

Building a Mom Community

Going through pregnancy, labor, and parenthood is momentous and the process comes with a plethora of physical, mental, emotional, and social shifts. This life-changing event truly deserves some support and acknowledgement that is not easily found out there. Fortunately, prenatal yoga is a perfect forum to allow moms to connect.

In prenatal yoga, time is set aside to ask questions, share resources, learn more about pregnancy, celebrate milestones, and make new friends. This is an invaluable benefit because prenatal yoga is one of the few places where moms-to-be can get together, practice together, and simply talk. I’ve found over the years that the connections made in prenatal yoga class are significant and often last for years to come.

Reducing Pregnancy Discomforts

Each trimester of pregnancy presents its own set of joys, as well as discomforts. Prenatal yoga is specifically designed to hone in on the needs of each trimester and to address the common discomforts experienced at various stages of pregnancy.

Since everyone in the class is pregnant, it is easier for the teacher to target specific issues and help students understand the physiology of pregnancy, which includes ways to manage discomforts when they arise. Specific tips on managing day-to-day challenges are also provided and can include: how to prop for better sleep at night, ways to sit more comfortably at work, positions for round ligament pain, engagements for improved pelvic stability, pelvic floor toning, and many other common pregnancy concerns.

More Easeful Labor

Studies indicate that expecting moms who practice prenatal yoga experience significantly less pain (Research Strategies for Normal Birth by Amy Romano and Henci Goer, Lamaze International, 2008) suggesting that prenatal yoga helps prepare moms for the demands of labor. Anecdotally, my own students often comment that prenatal yoga was fundamental in preparing them for labor and consistently report feeling more relaxed, informed, and confident for the birth process.

Perhaps this is because moms actually practice a wide range of mind-body strategies in prenatal yoga that are directly applicable to the labor room. These include strategic vocalization practices, propping techniques for better support during pregnancy and labor, pregnancy-friendly movements that increase the chance of optimally positioning babies for birth, and ways to reduce contraction discomfort through breath practices, guided meditations, affirmations, and comprehensive relaxation.

Breath Awareness and Deep Relaxation

Yoga is all about breath and relaxation. This is as true in regular yoga classes as it is in prenatal yoga practice; however, in prenatal yoga, moms dive more specifically into the process of breath and relaxation within the context of pregnancy and birthing. Training the body exactly how to achieve a state of deep relaxation (while also being in labor) takes time and consistent practice. This is just one reason why starting prenatal yoga sooner, rather than later, in pregnancy can be so helpful! Too often the practice of natural techniques for coping with contractions are not offered until the very last weeks of pregnancy, or even during labor itself. Fully embodying these techniques often takes more practice than just a handful of classes, and obviously labor is never a good time to learn.

Celebration of Pregnancy

Prenatal yoga class is a special time to engage in a beneficial practice for both mom and baby. The class is so much more than just yoga. It provides time for connecting with other moms, bonding with the baby, addressing the rapid changes of pregnancy, gathering resources, asking questions, having a laugh or two, and dedicating a time simply to slow down, breathe, and celebrate pregnancy in the company of other moms-to-be.

Prenatal students do not need any previous yoga experience to participate. I also encourage grandmothers-to-be to attend, as well as curious yoga teachers who just want to know what happens in this class. I look forward to seeing you on the mat!

To learn more about Kelly, visit yogadevi.mom.

Breaking the Shame of Depression Compassion by Amy Weintraub

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:35:38 GMT

My beloved child, break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.

~Swami Kripalu/Vidya Carolyn Dell’uomo

How many hundreds of yoga classes did I teach, quoting my teacher at the end of each class, before my heart’s mind understood those words? Why did saying them to my students still bring tears to my eyes? Why, after years of meditation, therapy, and medication, was I still so mean to me? Before I began a daily yoga practice in the late 80s, no amount of meditation turned the volume down on that monster in my mind. Every one of us has an inner critic. Mark Twain said that if we talked to our children the way we talk to ourselves, we would be arrested for child abuse. I was particularly hard on myself in the 70s, after my marriage failed. Had anyone been listening to my self-abuse, they would have locked me up and thrown away the key.

My secret name for myself was “Amy Shamey.” Shame wasn’t just a thought or belief. It wasn’t just an emotion. It was a part of my physical being, a daily visceral experience that whooshed through my body, bringing waves of heat and a deep sense of humiliation and with it, grief. No amount of talking about it in therapy, watching it arise on the meditation cushion, or numbing it out with meds, touched the core of my self-hatred. Of course, my body image had a lot to do with it. I saw myself as chubby, unattractive, and clumsy, compared to my beautiful mother, whose expressive face appeared on the covers of pulp fiction magazines like True Confessions and Romance in the late 1940s. My body was not my friend. It had hair in places it shouldn’t. It had ungraceful hands. It had an embarrassing plumpness in the places that should have been lean and an embarrassing flatness in the places that should have been round. From this description, you might think I wasn’t pretty. We’re talking about self-image here, not reality. Pictures attest to my cuteness as a kid and my downright beauty in my teens. I don’t think my creative dance teacher would have tried to convince my mother when I was eleven to enroll me in a proper ballet studio with daily classes, if she hadn’t seen in me a grace and fluidity I couldn’t see in myself. But whatever the source, I hated my body and nearly everything else that went by the name of Amy.

So what changed? In the late 1980s I made my first visit to Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and took my first yoga class. I had been meditating since the early 70s, and had practiced a bit of yoga asana with a library book and some LPs made in the 70s by an American yoga teacher named Richard Hittleman. But it wasn’t until I was on a blanket at Kripalu for the first time, that a teacher invited me to listen to my body and accept it just as it was. It may have been during that first visit to Kripalu, that a teacher spoke the words attributed to Swami Kripalu but that were actually written by long-time Kripalu disciple and yoga teacher, Carolyn Dell’uomo: “My beloved child, break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.” I’m sure I wept on my mat, when I heard them, although I don’t remember. What I do remember is emerging from the class feeling a sense of spacious abundance, a touching into wholeness that I had never experienced before. In those moments after class, it didn’t matter what I looked like or what mistakes I may have made in my life. I had touched something deep within me that was absolutely perfect, just as it was. In those moments after class, there was nothing I needed to fix, no way I needed to change. I left Kripalu with a bag full of audio tapes to practice at home, as there were no yoga teachers in my town. I came back to my mat, day after day, sometimes struggling to get there with a head full of self-condemnation. And after every morning practice, of stretching and breathing and staying present to the physical sensations the poses evoked, I felt more at home in my body. I rose from my mat feeling at ease with the Amy who looked back at me from the mirror.

The self-judgment didn’t cease in the hours I spent off the mat, at least not right away. At first the daily whoosh of shame came weekly, then monthly, and then eventually, it disappeared altogether. The simple attention to sensation, the backing off from a pose when I needed to, the true listening and honoring of my body, began to change me in the most profound way. Compassion for my body was the first thing to change. I listened to my body’s needs on and off the mat, and a lifetime of suffering from constipation disappeared. I began to crave healthier foods, and without dieting, I lost weight. Eventually, when my inner critic attacked, I found myself talking back, instead of believing everything she said. When I rolled out my mat to practice, her voice fell silent. When I made a mistake or fell short of my own expectations, she always had something to say, but I didn’t necessarily believe her anymore. By the early 90s, I was teaching a workshop at Kripalu called, “Befriending Your Inner Critic,” leading others in exercises to find that compassion for themselves, including their shame parts and their nasty inner critics.

These exercises help bring more fresh oxygen and release old carbon dioxide from the lungs, enabling you to fully sense and be present to physical sensations. This sensory awareness is the portal into finding compassion for all your parts to outshine the weakening voice of your inner critic.

Defining Yoga: Agency, Liberation & the Wisdom of Interconnectedness by Anjali Rao

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 01:38:23 GMT

Yoga is samadhi, a state of union with the object of contemplation, states Vyasa. Yoga is collectedness, or samadhana, proclaims Shankara. Both of these ancient teachers are offering their commentaries on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the composition of classical yoga philosophy built on the dualistic notions of purusha (spirit/eternal/immutable consciousness) and prakriti (matter/primordial manifestation). While Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita espouses the value of being engaged in the world, stating that yoga is skill and equanimity in action, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras systematically codify how we can achieve liberation from our dukka (suffering) through citta-vritti-nirodha (focusing one’s entire mind-body-attention). The latter represents only one of the ascetic traditions in ancient India. Meanwhile we have the Tantric traditions, where there is a radical embracing of samsara, the world, and the assumption is that transcendence and sensory pleasure are not incompatible. All of the above have roots in Sanatan Dharma from the Indian subcontinent. Buddhism and Jainism, Sikhism, and Sufi lineages have their own interpretations, manifestations and philosophies of Yoga.

Yoga is thus a splendidly multi dimensional and multi layered collection of practices, encompassing various branches, cultures, and traditions. There are a few broad commonalities and themes that course through these teachings :

That we are all deeply, viscerally, and spiritually interconnected beings infused with atman/spirit/purusha/consciousness.
The practice of yoga is defining, discerning, and centering consciousness as a vehicle of transcendence from the phenomenal world.

In other words, the paths may vary, but there is a deep yearning within to expand our awareness, to evolve from our identification with the material realm, to release ourselves from physical-emotional-mental and spiritual suffering, to know and be in our truest essence, and to revel in our primordial nature, which is beyond the limitations of individual mind-ego and socio-cultural conditioning. Liberation (mukti or moksha) is thus the aim of yoga.

Through millennia, yoga practitioners have embodied these esoteric teachings in unique and authentic ways. Some have dedicated their lives in service to the challenges of the times. Some have shared their gifts of discernment, inquiry and logic, while others have radically connected with the divine through joyful creations of music, dance, and art, eliminating tremendous systemic obstacles of caste and gender in their path. While some of these thought leaders and change makers have caused seismic shifts in their spheres of influence and disrupted prevailing systems of oppression such as imperialism and patriarchy, folks who are known to this day, others have been erased or are lesser known due to the cooptation and appropriation of yoga by capitalism and colonization. These are our yoga ancestors.

Each of them have forged their own paths, leveraged personal agency, re-imagined their circumstances, and shed light on how one can overcome suffering, thus transforming their own life and creating ripples of change around them, indelibly impacting the collective. We can learn much by listening to their stories, their triumphs and tribulations.

We are living through overwhelmingly challenging times. Systemic and institutional inequities abound along with wars, a global pandemic, racial injustice, trans lives endangered, religious fundamentalism, and a climate crisis that seems insurmountable. Many of us who practice, teach, and study yoga seek to make a difference, and to have an impact on the community in skillful and sustainable ways. Our yoga practice helps cultivate clarity of thought and perception into our own internal lives, invite harmony in the ways in which we commune with the Earth, discern our positionality within systems regarding access or distance from power and privilege, and also learn from the triumphs and travails of the past.

Yoga unites the perceived polarities of inner psycho-spiritual work with the outer work of being agents of social and political change. The gift of yoga is in the agency it offers each of us in our quest for liberation, the transformation that occurs when we practice yoga on and off the mats. When we look toward the philosophical and spiritual wisdom, we can access insight into the functioning of our mind, our emotions and our spirit. When we practice svadhyaya (self study), we may begin to unravel why we do the things we do. When we practice vichara (inquiry), we may begin to be curious about our conditioning and the samskaras. When we practice viveka (discernment), we may look deeply into our positionality and know where we land in the world around us, our proximity or distance to power and privilege.

We can heal the rupture in our relationships by leaning into the wisdom of interconnectedness. We can hold each other accountable for perpetuating harm and co-create spaces of equity and inclusion. We can gain clarity in intentions and honesty about the impact of our actions and/or inactions. We belong to each other, each one of us as a part of the human family has a role to play. At its essence, yoga is meant to be lived and experienced, not merely taught or learned intellectually or practiced physically, but embodied in all ways.

From Accessible Yoga, Defining Yoga: Agency, Liberation & the Wisdom of Interconnectednes*, Writings and Press, Anjali Rao.

Yoga and Grace, by Deirdre Breen

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 11:06:24 GMT

Beyond learning and practicing poses and pranayama, yoga has emerged as a condition of being, rather than a practice. Perhaps for most of us we first discover or experience yoga on a mat and follow a teacher through a sequence of poses and awareness of breath. Indeed that is how I came to experience yoga. And like all lasting relationships yoga has evolved. Not only do I experience yoga on a mat, through pranayama and in meditation, yoga has emerged in my consciousness as a condition of being. While I am not always in a condition of yoga, I’m aware where ease lives, and when I suffer physically, mentally, or emotionally, I know I am not in yoga. What is different for me now is that I know that it is with a few spirited breaths that I rejoin yoga’s energy. No longer does suffering mean I’ve done something wrong or need an intense practice and an egotistical effort to become worthy of the grace of yoga. That’s not to say expressing the many, many tools that cultivate yoga are not of value…indeed we can’t get there without them because they illuminate and distinguish what is our true nature, and what is the ego seeking to overshadow our brilliance.

When I refer to yoga, therefore, I am referring to a personal and universal condition of union. The value in this union is a reduction of harm and suffering to self and others. When in yoga, kindness of mind reigns, gentleness in heart leads, and acceptance in body exists. Together the mind, body, and breath generate energy that already knows how it is to express, where it is to lead, and offers trust in living day to day.

So how did this all come to be? And does it mean I am always happy, joyous, and free? Yoga has emerged gradually over 15 years of study and practice—and I am not referring to perfect practice or perfect commitment. I am far from the imagined devoted yogi I thought I needed to be, wanted to be, and strived to be. Rather, I am an individual who has made peace with the flaws that come with being human. Those who know me likely hear me say, I am a bundle of blind spots, black holes, and moments of brilliance. It was the distortions of the ego mind that sought to control and bruise my sense of self that made me strive for the illusion of perfection. I can tell you the relief of not having to try so hard is an expression of grace. Yet, that doesn’t imply I have settled for an expression of mediocrity. Indeed, can you recognize it is the ego that poses those questions? The den of the ego again suggests an idea of perfection or mediocrity.

The answer to how this came to be is offered in the workshop I am privileged to present. I will introduce the living opportunity each of us has to anchor our body and spirit in a ritual that reflects what we can do and offer it to the potential of nurturing yoga within us—seeking to guide us in a life that radiates the light of our spirit, and shapes the true role of the ego mind—the service to the soul.

I hope my expression intrigues you, and I hope you will join me. I’ll be asking you to inquire into the illusions and challenges of living in your body and mind. I’ll provide a process to create a personalized practice that will address what the yoga in you needs to emerge and guide your life. Mudras, mantras, asana sequences, and pranayama meditations that will through practice dissolve the Samskaras, and allow the radiance of your true spirit to lead you forward. While this workshop is three hours, what you experience can last a lifetime.

Pursuit of Compassion by Judy Weaver, C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, MCLC

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 11:00:00 GMT

When I was asked earlier this year to contribute my perspectives about the pursuit of compassion for a veteran and fellow yoga teacher’s blog, I immediately said yes–followed by “OMG! What does compassion mean to me?"

Like the nerd I am, I googled compassion and the first definition was “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others or to suffer together and feel motivated to help.” Next, I looked up pity and found it means “cause for regret or disappointment or as a verb to feel sorry for the misfortunes of.” Finally, I looked up sympathy, which means “feelings of pity and sorry for someone else’s misfortune or a mutual common feeling between people.”

Diving a bit deeper into compassion, sympathetic pity means “kind condescension to another’s situation without action.” Wow, that’s barely a surface level connection to another human being’s situation, so there must be more to the meaning of compassion. Expanding my research, I found that the definition of empathy is the vicarious participation in another’s situation. It seems that compassion can mean feeling bad for someone’s situation and not feeling motivated to help–or it can mean suffering together and feeling motivated to help alleviate the suffering. So confusing! Compassion is either feeling motivated or not feeling motivated.

Clearly, I was missing something, so I began to think about applying this to real life when suddenly, the Oscars aired and the “slap heard around the world” happened. Like almost everyone reading this, I personally don’t know any of the players, but I think it still applies to this discussion. Broadening my outlook related to the players in this scenario I looked at their roles relating to my favorite ancient philosophical text, the Bhagavad Gita.

This is an allegorical battle between our internal and external selves resulting in the understanding that if you live your Dharma, there is no Karma. Dharma means "your true nature, purpose in life," and karma is the "fallout of not living your dharma." In other words, when you live your dharma there is no karma. My hope for those in our Connected Warriors world, veterans and active-duty service members and their families, is for them to truly embrace their dharma with self-compassion so they can reduce karmic outcome.

Let’s start with Jada Pinkett Smith; she was the insulted party. Watching her face as the joke was made, she politely smirked–but then her expression changed to anger when she felt she was being “dissed” for her disease. When I saw that she was deeply offended, I immediately felt empathy because I too have been made fun of because of the way I look (non-white SoCal gal)–I have walked in those shoes. With the lens of dharma, Jada is a bad-ass woman; she is an accomplished heavy-metal rocker, wife, mother, and actress and her response was dharma-appropriate being the source of a joke.

Now let’s look at Will Smith; he was the one who acted out because his wife was the subject of a joke related to her disease. After being horrified and rewinding the video because I couldn’t believe that what I saw was not a set-up, I felt pity for him–he clearly responded from his gut and not his thinking mind. Will’s dharma response was inappropriate to his role as a man, award-winning actor, husband, and father. His karmic outcome was his resignation from the organization that hosted the event. Self-compassion means that he was able to see that his actions were not his truth, and he is now committed to finding that truth so he can truly “show-up” in a way that supports his dharma.

Finally, there’s Chris Rock. His joke was the reason why the slap happened and once I realized it was not staged–I sympathized with him and felt compassion for his resultant action. He kept his cool and continued with grace under very trying circumstances. Chris lived his dharma as a comedian, man, father, and husband; he delivered a joke and maintained compassion for Will by continuing to do his job on stage as a presenter–no karmic rebound for him.

When I turn the lens back on myself, this scenario reminds me that our words and actions matter. Part of my pursuit of compassion is to get in front of myself and have a sense of how my words or actions will land on another before it happens. Self-awareness is the key to this ability, so you are not only aware of how you think and feel, but you take it to the next level and apply it to others.

So, a final view through the lens at what happened with Jada, Will, and Chris–can you step in each one of their shoes and feel compassion for the others, as well as self-compassion? Jada for being the object of a joke, Chris for being the recipient of the outcome of the joke, and Will for reacting to the joke without conscious thought. Now can you be truly compassionate to yourself and another person’s circumstances and go beyond mere pity?

My last question for you to live in in 2023: Does one nonmindful act define you and your future?

How Setting Boundaries Can Help You Find Balance* by Leslie Booker

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 02:12:08 GMT

When something was important, the Buddha made sure it was repeated over and over again throughout his 45 years of teaching. Upekkha, or equanimity—the practice of a balanced heart and mind—is one of those things.

Equanimity is a heart practice that cultivates a state of mind that does not allow one to be caught in the worldly winds of praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute.

Equanimity keeps us still in the midst of chaos, and is known to be the balancing factor in our faith, our wisdom, and our energy. It protects the heart from going into envy, the excitement of joy from becoming agitated, compassion from sliding into pity. Equanimity is a practice of a fierce heart. It allows us to go directly into the fire. Equanimity is not afraid; it does not back down. It stays present to whatever is arising without judging or reacting.

Creating tender boundaries

Equanimity is meant to be known and practiced while being engaged in “the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows” of being in relationship with other humans. In applying the concept to our interactions with others, I often think of equanimity as love + clear boundaries + tenderness without attachment.

Boundaries. A lot of us get caught up when we hear the word. We think of cruelty, of kicking someone out. But when you apply love and tenderness, boundaries can create an environment of social harmony because they let us know we’re all playing by the same rules.

I once worked in a community center that modeled radical hospitality–our commitment to creating an inclusive space for everyone who came through our doors. We were in lower Manhattan, near the site of the World Trade Center and just two blocks from Zuccotti Park, the encampment of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Our guests included Occupiers, folks who worked on Wall Street, tourists, people who were experiencing homelessness, high-school students and multi-faith leaders who would all converge in this 2000 square foot space at lunchtime. For this collective to co-exist, we had to come to agreements that allowed us to treat the space–and one another—with respect. When people weren’t able to do so, my boss would say: “I’m not kicking you out of my heart, but I’m kicking you out of the space today!”

Holding what is yours

The classic phrases of the Equanimity Meditation practice say that “all Beings are the owners of their karma; their happiness and unhappiness depends upon their actions, not on my wishes for them.” This suggests, “I care about you, but I’m not in control of the unfolding of events. I can’t make it all better for you.” It means that I can walk you to the front door of an AA meeting, for example, but I can’t go in and find recovery for you.

So many of us who work as health-care providers, educators, social workers, and in other healing and caretaking roles are conditioned and even trained to hold the hearts and suffering of others, when they’re simply not ours to hold. Equanimity helps us to know what belongs to you and what belongs to me. (And also what belongs to our ancestors, as we often carry their burdens on top of our own.) I can walk alongside you, but I don’t have to carry all of the baggage.

A commitment to the health of our community

As our global community navigates this time of transition—this is a place of, “done with that, but not quite ready for this”—we might be exploring how to emerge with grace as we heal from the impact of a period of collective trauma.

Finding a sense of equipose between our own mental health and our commitment to the health of our extended communities can feel like a balancing act. Equanimity allows us the space to find a sacred pause and to respond instead of react. It’s as if we’re able to slow down the world around us and to see the space in between—a space where we can bring in patience, generosity, and compassion for ourselves and for others.

Equanimity as a meditation practice

The first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. This includes the physical body, breath and what Buddhists call the “sense doors” of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. So in our formal meditation practice, it’s imperative to take time setting the body up for success so as we incline the heart and mind towards the subject of our meditation, the felt sense of the body can guide the way.

I will often take a standing posture for this particular meditation because of the strength, stillness, and power it provokes. One of the four classic postures (sitting, walking, and lying down are the other three), standing can also bring brightness to a sleepy or restless body. If standing isn’t accessible, holding the energy or quality of standing will offer the same benefit.

Feel the qualities of a mountain—strong roots, pelvic bone heavy, collarbones wide, crown of your head reaching toward the sky, while holding a softness and a tenderness throughout the rest of your body. Soft knees, soft belly, strong back.

Place hands over belly. Feel your belly expand into the palms of the hands as you breathe the breath in; feel your belly reach back toward the spine as you breathe the breath out. Keep exploring the breath this way, or allow your hands to release, fingertips reaching toward the earth, and exhale as if through the bottoms of the feet.

Feel into the stillness, the density, and the softness of the body, as gravity pulls the body toward the earth. Allow the earth to support you, as the breath might bring some movement or swaying to your practice.

In the silence of your practice, random thoughts, imagery, or planning might arise. Notice where these thoughts pull your attention.

Take a breath in. Without judging or manipulating the breath in any way, we begin to know our breath in its natural form. As you breathe the breath in, know that this breath is like this. As you breathe the breath out, know that this breath is like this.

And when the next round of thoughts arise—maybe there’s boredom or agitation—notice where they pull your attention. Know that it’s okay to open your eyes to bring some brightness to your practice and begin again. Soft knees, soft belly, strong back.

As you continue this dance of noticing where the mind wanders, feel into the body’s response to this thought: Is there a tightening in the shoulders, energy moving through the legs, sweating in the palms of the hands? Is the breath short and rigid?

Bring yourself to the present moment. What’s happening right now is that my body is remembering something that has already happened, and is in the past. What’s happening right now is that I can feel gravity grounding this body as it stands or rests on the earth. I am breathing this breath in, and I am breathing this breath out.

Allow this connection to the stillness of the body, or movement of the breath to be the anchor that brings you back to your practice when the mind begins to wander. As you continue to explore this practice, see if you can find the body coming closer to its center so you’re not living on the edges. Find a softness, and the capacity to stay.

*Reprinted from “How Setting Boundaries Can Help You Find Balance,” by Leslie Booker. Yoga Journal, July 22, 2022.

Gentle Somatic Yoga by James Knight

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 16:00:00 GMT

Gentle Somatic Yoga® (GSY) incorporates therapeutic sequences, called Somatic Movement Flows®, that can help relieve chronic pain, stiffness, and postural imbalances. These flows significantly increase flexibility, support recovery from injury, and also prevent injuries arising from repetitive movements of everyday life. Through a process of brain-to-muscle repatterning most people find beneficial results that are immediate and long-lasting. 

The main intent of Gentle Somatic Yoga is to educate people and empower students with practical tools so they can take charge of their own healing process. Through the process of unwinding from deep stress holding patterns participants return back to their natural state, which is peace and well-being.

In this three-hour experiential workshop, James Knight, founder of GSY and Somatic Wellness™, will introduce the key principles of Somatic Yoga designed to create a more integrated experience of body, mind, and spirit.

What makes this method different compared to other popular styles of yoga? Gentle Somatic Yoga does not focus on stretching.

In traditional Hatha yoga, asanas (postures) are often practiced with the intent to reach a “full expression and preferred alignment” of any given pose. In Gentle Somatic Yoga, however, it is more about having the attitude of discovery and exploration to explore the body (soma) from the inside out, on the level of internal felt sensation. In this experiential method muscles are re-programmed to their optimal length in a resting position.

This progressive method of movement incorporates Hanna Somatic Education, hatha yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, Core Energetics (body-oriented psychotherapy), as well as principles ascribed to quantum mechanics. GSY is dedicated to researching, pioneering, and facilitating the most leading-edge neuroscience in movement education.

Keys to Overcoming Chronic Tension and Pain

The cause of most muscular pain and stiffness is found in the brain. Oftentimes muscles stay contracted as if they were on “auto pilot,” despite our efforts to stretch, get massages, or have chiropractic adjustments. In Gentle Somatic Yoga, we call thisSensory Motor Amnesia.

Sensory Motor Amnesia develops over time for several reasons: repetitive body movements, injury, emotional trauma, and other stressful life experiences. When the brain forgets how to relax muscles, the muscles stay contracted and we feel muscular pain even when we think we are “relaxing.”

In this workshop, learn how to discover areas of Sensory Motor Amnesia to strengthen and integrate the brain-to-muscle connection. The more you can voluntarily control your muscles, the more choices you have in your body, and the freer you are through everyday movement.

This workshop is right for you if:

You or someone you know experiences chronic pain and other symptoms from an injury, disease, or condition, including but not limited to:

Neck, shoulder, back pain

Pelvic floor disorder

Sciatica

Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue

Headaches/Migraines

Sports injury

Joint pain

Muscle tightness, stiffness, or spasms

Poor posture

Anxiety

You want to learn nourishing movements for an everyday home practice to keep your health and well-being thriving.
You are a yoga teacher/therapist, bodyworker, or health care professional and want to learn new skills for your tool kit. These skills can be immediately integrated into group movement classes and/or one-on-one customized sessions.

What you will learn:

Seven-plus therapeutic and restorative sequences, called Somatic Movement Flows®, that significantly improve flexibility, enhance strength, reestablish better posture, and dissolve chronic pain
Evidence-based and heart-guided self-care/self-healing techniques to improve your immune system, reduce anxiety, and increase energy levels
New appreciation and greater understanding of the difference between the main technique in GSY called pandiculation, versus static stretching. Also distinguish the difference between wellness and fitness.
New skills for yoga teachers, yoga therapists, bodyworkers, or healthcare professionals to share with their students/clients in group movement classes and/or private sessions.

Please join James on Saturday, December 10, for An Introduction to Gentle Somatic Yoga: Repattern Muscles from Head to Toe.

The Essence of Bhagavad Gita by Devarshi Steven Hartman

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 09:30:00 GMT

The ancient scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, contains the wisdom of the ages. Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that in all his studies there was "nothing that compared to the Bhagavad Gita,” that "even Shakespeare seemed adolescent in comparison.” Explore why this ageless poem has been a guide for much of the world in how to attain true happiness and live a life in accordance with a loving, all-powerful God by your side.

The main concepts set forth in the Gita are guiding principles to live by. The Bhagavad Gita is the quintessential text on yoga—not Hatha yoga, the yoga of postures—but Bhakti yoga, the yoga of love. All yoga practices rest on the foundation of this fearless love and how to attain it, set forth in this scripture. All interested yogis and yoga teachers should be familiar with its origins and essential teachings.

In India, there are vast amounts of ancient texts containing the wisdom of the sages. The Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, and more are thousands and thousands of years old and expansive in their volume. It would take lifetimes to study all of these scriptures in total, but it is said that all the wisdom of all of these ancient yogic texts are contained in this one short epic poem. The Bhagavad Gita is a provocative discussion between Krishna (God) and Arjuna (the spiritual warrior), and we are fortunate enough to have the contents of this poignant moment put into writing for our study and practice.

The principles set forth in the Gita hit the core of our belief systems and challenge us about what we imagine the nature of reality is. In this discussion, Arjuna asks Krishna/God all the same questions you or I would ask if we had the opportunity to be in God's Presence: What is the purpose of living? How do I find my dharma/purpose? How do I live a “Godly“ life? How can I find happiness and contentment in this crazy world? Where do I go when I die? How do I guide myself every day through difficulty? All good questions that make for a very rabble-rousing, and possibly life-altering, conversation.

For me, the Gita is pure joy and delight. Easy to read and dripping with devotion, the words have been a soothing balm for my soul since reading it in my high school English class many decades ago. It was the catalyst for my decision to spend much of my adult life in a yoga ashram (spiritual community) dedicated to the art and practice of yoga. I delight in sharing it with others. Over 20 years ago, I authored an audio series on the Bhagavad Gita for Nightingale-Conant that continues to be a best-selling product around the world. Curiously, it sells well in India, Germany, England, and Australia, but very little in the United States!

I would love to share my passion for this scripture and its wisdom with you. I guarantee it will cause you to reevaluate at deep levels and create shifts toward more freedom and joy!

Join Devarshi Steven Hartman at his YTA workshop on November 12.

What is Yoga Nidra?* by Nya Patrinos

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 21:18:41 GMT

The intuitions received in yoga nidra enable one to find within himself [or herself] the answers to all problems. One’s true nature and integrity manifest, enabling him [or her] to live a meaningful and peaceful life in any environment. This is the opening of the ‘third eye’, which takes the consciousness beyond the conditioned personality with its tensions and complexes. No longer emotionally identified with the mind and body,

one’s entire being is pervaded with divine consciousness.

~Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Yoga Nidra is a term used for many forms of guided deep relaxation. Nidra in Sanskrit means sleep and Yoga means union, or single pointedness. The period of rest at the end of a yoga practice in savasana with guided instructions for progressive relaxation is often called yoga nidra. Some people refer to yoga nidra as psychic sleep. Today, yoga nidra is practiced by yogis from many different lineages. Nyasa yoga nidra is a specific multistep process for the integration of body, mind, and spirit. This multistep form of yoga nidra is based on the practices developed by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, the founder of the Bihar School of Yoga and disciple of Swami Sivananda….

The practice of yoga nidra is part of the tantric tradition. It is developed from an ancient practice, called Nyasa. Nyasa is usually defined as to place or to take the mind to that point. Nyasa can also be translated as imprinting, consecrating, charging, energizing, arousing consciousness, and imbuing. Essentially the practice involves infusing divine energy into one’s body or into the body of another. Nyasa is traditionally practiced seated. In Nyasa, first…the body part is named, then it is touched or visualized, and then the mantra is placed there. There are different variations of Nyasa. In Nyasa [one can place] deities, mantras, mental objects, [and] the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet on the body physically or mentally. There are many types of Nyasa, with varying degrees of complexity. Nyasa can be done externally using the tips of the fingers of the right hand to touch the parts of the body, or it can be done mentally….

On the threshold between wakefulness and sleep is a state of consciousness characterized by dream-like visions and unusual sensory occurrences. Psychologists call this stage hypnagogia, or the hypnagogic state....

During REM sleep (the state of deep sleep when we dream) the mind free-associates through thoughts, ideas, memories, and emotions. During hypnagogia one is conscious enough to be partially aware of the mind’s activity.

The hypnagogic state lasts a few minutes at most. One is in limbo between two states of consciousness. There are some elements of sleep mixed with some aspects of wakefulness. In yoga nidra we inhabit the hypnagogic state for an extended period.

During hypnagogia, scientists have observed the presence of both alpha and theta brain waves. Alpha waves are the dominant brain wave mode when we are conscious but relaxed, for instance when daydreaming or meditating. Theta brain waves are associated with restorative sleep. Usually, these brain waves occur only separately. The unique combination of alpha and theta brain waves brings the visions and sensations experienced in the hypnagogic state. The state is also marked by reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for planning and decision-making.

While in the hypnagogic state we experience a free flow of ideas and associations. Here the brain reviews and processes memories, thoughts, and feelings. Hypnagogia can be a rich source of creativity, ideas, and inspiration. It’s common for people to experience dream-like visions, static images, partially formed thoughts, sounds, flashes of color, insights, and sensations….

Granthi means "doubt" or "knot.” It can more specifically [be] defined as "a difficult knot to untie." Granthis are knotted areas of energy that block the flow of prana in the body. Granthis can prevent prana from rising up through the sushumna nadi. These knots prevent one from realizing their full potential. Granthis are barriers to freedom and self-realization.

Granthis are what keep an individual entangled in their preferences, desires, and fears. Both knowledge and action are needed to work out the knots and transcend their restrictions. In yoga nidra we can untie our granthis….

The increased body awareness fostered in yoga nidra promotes healing through the intervention of the mind into areas that it can now feel that it was once disconnected from. In yoga nidra, the mind reaches into areas of the body which hold memories, beliefs, and thought patterns that can be the root cause of illness, disease, tension, or discomfort. By bringing awareness to these areas, deep tensions that hold belief patterns in place can be resolved and released….The overall effect is the activity of the brain leads to the relaxation of the mind, body, and spirit.

Tips for Using Yoga Nidra

Experience live yoga nidra sessions.
Focus on one main teacher.
After you are experienced with yoga nidra practice move from one teacher to a variety of teachers.
Don’t overanalyze how you react—just experience the practice.
To supplement your “live” experiences, work also with recordings. Preferably start out with many repeated listenings to a single recording. Then branch out to a range of recordings and voices.
Once you have had some months of experiencing yoga nidra: transcribe a couple of your favorite yoga nidras and investigate the differences.
Practice yoga nidra where you mentally guide yourself.
Make recordings or your own yoga nidras—try them yourself and see how they make you feel.
Practice yoga nidra on yourself—using unspoken mental commands and your own recordings and those or your favorite teachers for many months before you consider using it with students and/or clients.
Be patient.
Love the process.

*Adapted from "Nyasa Yoga Nidra Teacher Training Manual," Nya Patrinos, 2021.

Yoga and the New Discipline, by J. Brown

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 16:13:41 GMT

The novelty of yoga has been worn down to almost nothing by a multi-billion dollar industry that cares little for its tenets, like the crumbling shreds of a shoddily made pvc mat from China. But from out of the ashes of craven images and advertising schemes, a new discipline is emerging.

Early on, just as the nineties boom happened, I found my way into to a niche that challenged some of the conventional wisdom that became standard in yoga classes. As the years have gone on and the industry has grown, a lot of that conventional wisdom I was originally pushing up against has been morphed by standardized teaching methods and data-driven business models. In the absence of the old rubrics by which yoga was once gauged, alternate criteria for teaching and learning yoga are being adopted.

Questioning power dynamics, inclusivity, and safety is the new normal.

Never before have I seen so much “bottom-up” sort of change in yoga. There was a time when protocols all came from the masters atop the disciple pyramid. And while some maintain that this dissolution of the original hierarchy of transmitters is where yoga has gone wrong, the fact remains that the majority of teachers are no longer looking for answers from on high. Credibility is no longer something bestowed upon you but is instead determined by the work you do and the inclinations of the yoga-going consumer.

Also, decades or more of sticking to unexamined directives and their related injuries have caused many to become disillusioned with the bill of goods we were once sold. Pain tends to be more convincing than the power of myth. And while those images of Tao Porchon-Lynch doing unbelievable poses at age 98 are still amazing, the three hip replacements she’s had along the way are seemingly more relevant than ever. Now that yoga has become so firmly codified as the emblem of a healthy lifestyle, the determination of its efficacy is being more thoroughly weighed against people’s actual experience and the rigors of science.

Teachers are expected to make students feel safe in ways that early innovators were not concerned with. Even those who consider this trend to be a detrimental form of political correctness are still having to make adjustments to protect themselves in the new climate. Of course, this is greatly complicated by the advent and predominance of social media, which has created new avenues for obfuscation and garnering market share.

Students are coming to yoga with an entirely different set of filters than previous generations.

Average newbee yoga attendees of today rarely arrive with any expectation of deep philosophical inquiry, or are even interested in yoga outside of its potential fitness benefits. Emphasis on the physicalities, and the creation of gym-style scaled yoga centers, have effectively compartmentalized and packaged classes into a sort of teaser, geared more towards enticing participation in lucrative trainings than providing instruction in any traditional sense.

Evolving scholarship has not only been laying bare an edifice of faith, but has coincided with the passing of Guru lineage holders and the falling pedestals of once powerful brand ambassadors. Impassioned yoga students of today would have a field day with the likes of BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois in their Yelp reviews. Harsh adjustments are becoming taboo, consent cards and trauma sensitivity training are the new fashion.

Where does the influence of the teacher end and the students’ self-empowerment begin? Is yoga a process of adherence or discovery, or both?

Most yoga teachers, on some level, were trained to tell people what to do. Most students expect this of their teachers. But, in absorbing all these shifts underfoot, sincere teachers are beginning to change what they are telling people. They are no longer comfortable with a continuation of the same shapes and cues that failed to lead to the heights they were promised. With external authorities stripped of some of their stature, practitioners have no choice but to resort to the discovery of their own devices.

Good teachers are still imperative. Everybody needs a little help sometimes. There wants to be a way for someone to invite a friendly, and hopefully informed, outside reverence when pursuing a process of self-healing and support. Regardless of the viewpoint that we subscribe to in yoga, be it of a more athletic , scientific, or spiritual bent, the proof is always going to be in the people. Like it or not, we just can’t get away with the same old shit anymore. Those rising to the challenge by providing an example of transparency and honesty, are the ones inspiring new generations of earnest aspirants to carry the torch forward.

The new discipline is inner-knowing. Teachers are only so good as they are conducive to a person no longer needing them. The veil has been lifted just enough that there is no pulling it back over our heads. Time has come for us to get clearer about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Effective yoga teaching is becoming less about imposing an arbitrary catechism on someone’s experience, and more about stirring the kind of inquiries that lead to students being able to make their own determinations.

Originally posted at J. Brown Yoga Blog on December 5, 2016.

What Yoga Means to Me* by Paula Heitzner

Mon, 23 May 2022 21:28:52 GMT

Yoga is known to be the ancient science of self-realization, uniting the body with the mind, urging us to look inward to discover who we really are. Growing up with the guidance of our loved ones who had our best interests at heart, to prepare us for acceptable socialization in the world, we were often times handicapped because we were urged to conform to outside opinions of who and what we could or should be, the beginning of our separation from self and obscuring one of our most healing resources, self-knowledge. Hippocrates, the father of Medicine, stated early on, “Know Thyself.” Even with the highest intentions they missed their mark, because the teachings created an imbalance and disavowed the importance of authenticity and autonomy. We learn fear: of failing, of making a mistake, of making a change. Becoming a creature of habits, patterns, and mindsets, we lose the capacity to be independent and strong in thought and action. These are attributes of Yoga, stressing the need for balance to create harmony within.

….Without a doubt, we can conclude that our practice is helpful in daily life as it increases our efficiency and productivity, working or playing, evoking emotional stability. One can also change their personality, making one better equipped to face the stress and strain of modern life. The synergy of balance and harmony between the mind and body makes one fit and healthy and is helpful when dealing with disease, which on closer examination reads dis-ease!

Hatha Yoga and the Asanas are much more than physical; besides exercising the muscles and joints that comprise the infrastructure of the body, they influence the physiological systems by toning the abdominal organs, stimulating the endocrine glands, and soothing the nervous system. Digestions, elimination, and circulation are also benefitted. Respiration and breathing are strengthened by the Pranayama practices and have a positive effect on each and every cell in the body improving the oxygenation of blood, lymph, synovial fluid, and the cerebral-spinal fluid, adding to the effectiveness and efficiency of all the systems. It is complex and should have the supervision and presence of an experienced teacher, on site, to offer the proper guidance to ensure that the efforts made will be fruitful for the practitioner. This applies and extends to our Hatha Yoga practices as well.

…Meditation and Raja Yoga….help to develop peace and tranquility, and the mental abilities of creativity, memory, and concentration, associated with sound brain function….The mind is not confined to the integrity with the borders of the brain and can entertain any truth it chooses for its own purposes. The brain processes and translates the contents of the mind’s belief systems…which can trigger nerve cell firing and chemical releases.

The mind can lead to dangerous places as we all know and can manifest dire results when unbridled.

Here is where meditation comes into the picture, uniting brain and mind to be an empowering and embodying force for the practitioner….My wish for you is to be truly inspired to make greater inroads into the scientific and philosophical body of resources that offers life changing possibilities, increasing and expanding the borders of our being.

*Excerpted from Heitzner, P. Yoga & You for a Year: From the Beginning to the End, pp. 88-90. Amazon KDP. 2020.

My Journey with Yoga by Jeff Migdow/ Prabhakar

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:13:17 GMT

It's 1957. The 6-year-old boy is outside in the dead of winter looking at the Orion nebula with his new telescope. He is alone, as no one else wants to come out into the Chicago winter wind. He can’t look for too long at a time as the freezing metal eyepiece burns his skin. He pulls back from the telescope and gazes into the magnificently clear night sky. He is drawn to the red shoulder star in Orion, Betelgeuse. He feels a pull up and toward this star and feels at the same time joy and pain in his heart. He feels his connection to all things but also his confusion around the sadness in the eyes and face of one of his classmates. In this moment he sees the boy’s face and feels not only his pain but the pain of humans in the world. Tears start to flow from his eyes, freezing as they stream down his face. He gazes into the soul of Betelgeuse and asks out loud, “Why can’t all people be happy?” And then wishes for the happiness of all beings. His first memory of the Oneness in both joy and sorrow.

It is now 1971. I’m outside on a cool autumn evening. I instinctively look up and see a group of stars, including a reddish star at the upper left. I feel a connection to these stars and a long lost memory begins to float into my awareness. What are these stars? What is this longing feeling? I have a fleeting image of a young boy looking at these stars in wonder and deep connection. “Was this me, was it in a dream?”

I walk outside late the next evening to look at these stars again, and I begin to hear the words of Orion, then Betelgeuse. “That’s a strange word,” I thought, and then a rush of memories flooded into my being. I was that boy gazing at the stars, loving Orion, the cosmos, living so fully, and praying for all people to be happy. What had happened to that full experience? Where had it gone all those years? Where had I gone?

These questions reopened me to my inner self and connection to life on a deeper level. The connection I had until I was 7 years old, when I became embarrassed to be free in my actions and thoughts and constricted myself into a typical American boy. Here I was 14 years later, reconnecting to that freedom of thought and wonder and connection to life, activated by my recent delving into the science and practice of yoga. I had discovered and read a copy of the Bhagavad Gita at the college library. I had gone to the library with a friend and was magically drawn to the yoga philosophy section. The wisdom of the Gita felt so profound as it touched my soul. As if I had read these words hundreds of times before, the wisdom of the Enlightened Self guiding the ego mind, the connection of all things within ourselves.

Yoga practice—yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, and the depths of meditation—taught so clearly in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, has brought a presence, richness, and openness into my life. It has led me to connect with wonderful people, find deep relationships and friendships, given me the confidence and clarity to spend my life earning a living practicing what I love: energy medicine, Reiki, and teaching all aspects of yoga all due to the knowing that the prana flow is real, more real than my mental concepts and judgments. It led me to living for 15 years at Kripalu ashram, where every day was a deep journey into life within and around me and to transition to day-to-day life in our cynical, materialistic culture. Through yoga workshops I have traveled all around the world, meeting people of many different cultures and connecting to yoga aspirants in an open, clear way.

I have deep gratitude for the practice of yoga and philosophy and the profound effects it has had on my life and the life of many of those I have touched—family, friends, colleagues, and, students. It’s the vibration that is opened through the practice of yoga/union that not only vibrates throughout my being but affects the world around me. The energy of light/love/presence that resounds and travels is palpable and has been a true blessing in my life.

My Life with a Dowel by Alison West

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 18:45:28 GMT

The first time I encountered dowels in the practice of yoga was on a very small scale—short dowels placed vertically inside an upside-down chair to help stabilize the base of the neck and inner shoulders in headstand in a class with my Iyengar teacher Kevin Gardiner many decades ago. I was instantly interested in the possibilities and began to explore with dowels of different kinds. Some were wider in diameter and much longer, others were slender metal dowels covered in a pleasant padded material, making for heavy but comfortable tools of practice that could also be used as weights; others were as short as those slender and short first dowels I had used but put to different purpose, for example, as spacers for the knees when working toward Lotus Pose.

As I began to work with dowels more regularly, I found that they could be used as “hard” belts, long blocks, seatless chairs, and more. In other words, all props share some similarities, but are also separated by significant and useful differences. And even within one kind of prop, there are variations of size and weight that can be exploited to good end.

Each kind of dowel has a character of its own. One of the things I love about a long six-foot dowel is its simple physical presence. Hold that dowel upright in front of you between the feet and you will perhaps experience a suggestion of lift, a sense of energy, almost as though it were an externalized mudra. Pull down on the dowel at chest height and it will cause your whole body to lighten and lift and become a tool for both spinal traction and joyful ease.

The dowel can be used to challenge range of motion or strength, or on the contrary facilitate a movement by offering a long lever arm or quieting support. If you place a long dowel behind the back and hold it in place with the arms, it will help reveal your true range of motion in a twist such as Wide Legged Pose or Prasarita Padottanasana. This aspect of the dowel as an instrument of proprioception is invaluable—knowing where you are in space and how your body is moving.

This tool of proprioception is fundamental for the therapeutic spinal work I do. The dowel is a powerful instrument in helping students sense their body in space and find a balanced posture and clarity in the work to bring relief, healing, and newfound strength and ease in both the practice and life. Indeed our entire yoga practice should radiate out into our daily life as a seamless continuum. Speaking of which, there are even dowels in daily life—canes, walking sticks, hiking poles, and so on. Try a Triangle Pose when out hiking, using one of your poles as a lateral support and enjoy the relief from movement in the sagittal plane for a few breaths to each side!

One aspect of the dowel that I delighted in discovering was how it could be used as a tool for massage either on its own or in conjunction with another prop such as a chair. When one is seated on a yoga chair for example, the chair can be a point of leverage for one end of the dowel, the other end rolling over the trapezius with more or less pressure. Place the dowel on the floor and the feet can be deliciously rolled over it.

In short, the dowel brings lightness and spinal traction, proprioception, muscle release through stretch and massage, range of motion, directionality, and challenge. As it supports it can move, or follow one’s movement, one end fixed, the other traveling with you as you enter and exit a pose such as Triangle Pose. Using a long dowel is ideal for this, with the dowel standing just beyond the toes of the externally rotated foot and the same-side hand placed high on the dowel or at shoulder height depending on range of motion in the hips and legs. It’s then possible to move into Triangle Pose with support and encouragement to avoid laterally flexing the spine as one lengthens into the pose. Support is offered throughout, allowing for an elegant exit from the pose.

Other movement traditions use dowels or sticks, sometimes called mobility sticks. Some are flexible and allow for different kinds of work. As always, where there is flexibility, there will be less stability. So each kind has its virtues. All are valuable and fun.

©Alison West, 3.13.2022. This article may not be reproduced without the author’s permission.

Alison West, Ph.D, E-RYT, YACEP, C-IAYT is the founder of Yoga Union and the Yoga Union Backcare & Scoliosis Center, now online. Her on-demand course, Yoga for Back Health for Yoga Journal, is available for download. She is currently writing her first Yoga book, Yoga for Backcare, which will be followed by Yoga for Scoliosis.

My Yoga Journey by Carla Stangenberg

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:41:07 GMT

In 1999, I had been practicing yoga for something like seven years. I was working a day job I didn't really like, and one day I saw a sign in the yoga studio where I was practicing (Om Yoga in Manhattan) that said "teacher training." I thought to myself, “That sounds interesting. What a nice way to deepen my practice.” So that's how I became a yoga teacher. It felt like a natural extension of my yoga practice—like I had to teach.

A few years before I was certified, I taught movement classes at a summer program at Northwestern University. I incorporated yoga into those classes, and it worked. Earlier, when I was in college at NYU, my movement teachers were incorporating yoga too, because they were all going to the same yoga studio, Jivamukti, on Second Avenue, where I was going. I followed their lead, and then I started teaching my friends. So I was teaching informally even before I got my certification.

My first real teaching job was in Forest Hills, Queens, in a continuing education program. There were about 30 people in the class; I traveled all the way there, I made nothing, nobody had the right props, but I taught. Then I taught at yoga studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I taught everywhere I could, as much as I could, sometimes as many as 20 classes a week. That was it. That's how you get good. Sometimes I feel like an idiot savant, born to teach yoga, but still you have to practice, practice, practice. Pattabhi Jois said, "Practice and all will come." Keep practicing and you will find out what you're doing, why you're doing it.

But the more I practice and try to perfect a pose, the more I realize that the practice is not so much about the pose but about what comes up in my attempt to do it. My perfection may not be a physical perfection but a perfection of understanding how to act in an effortless way, to do an action without a need for the outcome to be a particular thing. The Bhagavad Gita says: “Perform without worrying about the outcome.”

What comes up for me in my practice are the same things I see in my students. I get frustrated, angry, doubtful, self-conscious, and competitive. I feel all of those things and that's helpful, because when I get on the New York City subway, all those emotions are going to come up in me. If I have really incorporated my practice on the mat into the whole of my life, it won't be so bad because I will have already dealt with it in the privacy of my microcosmic universe of yoga practice. So I can say, "Give me my frustration, give me my anger, give me everything that comes up with attempting to do something that is impossible." What happens when I try? Everything happens. So then, I learn what it's like to try and succeed, what it's like to try and not succeed—all of this with quotations around it. It's just like every other day. But when I try mindfully, it's an informed day, a more intentional day, I'm not just getting bashed around by advertising and the newspaper, I have a little bit more of a hold on the reins and I also know that eventually the reins are going to disappear.

As you get older, you won't necessarily be able to do the same poses anymore. One of my friends, a beautiful yoga teacher, came to my class recently and said, "You know, I'm aging and I feel it. I can't do the poses that I used to do, and I need to be in a class where that's going to be okay." She was looking for a place where she could be with the group but be left alone when she needed to be left alone. It's the same situation we're all dealing with, which is that we're all getting older at the same rate. And this is not so dreadful. This is one of the recognitions that are probably going to set us free.

I think the practice gives you the route to how much effort is correct. And I believe that we all go through times of too much effort and times of too little effort. And we all have to go through that to find a place of balanced effort. I've had people tell me that they've taken two months off and they feel slothful, but maybe those two months will be the best of their life for their practice. Maybe it was too much, practicing for months or years, on the same schedule. You may learn so much from the two months off than you would have had if you just kept going. Every day is different. Some days we feel like a gazelle. Some days we're a bull in a china shop. With practices where the poses are always the same—such as Bikram or Ashtanga vinyasa yoga practice—maybe it's easier to tell what's going on with your body, what kind of day you're having. It may be a bit trickier for us who want to create new sequences from day to day.

But either way, it makes you feel alive. If you forget you're alive, do Warrior II for 10 minutes. If you start to fall asleep, metaphorically, yoga wakes you up. It sparks this life, helps us to see, “Wow, look at this body that I have.” And then, the practice is so deep that we say, “Wow, what about this yoga, and this philosophy and psychology?”

Starting yoga is like a baby tasting ice cream for the first time, we're so astonished—wow, that feeling, that taste. Doing yoga is like that. It brings out that innocent quality in us—even in the toughest cases, the most unhappy people, feel lighter. No matter what age you come into it, you understand that there's much to discover.

Adapted from an interview with the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

Find more about Carla at jayayogacenter.com or on Instagram.

My Path to Yoga by Shraddha Hilda Oropeza

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 22:03:28 GMT

Smile, breathe and go slowly.
~Thich Nhat Hanh

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s simple, direct guidance for meditation–for life, really–has shed light on the path from my introduction to yoga to the present.

That introduction came in 2000, a transitional year in my life for which I was seeking solace, peace, and meaning. In other words, I needed to breathe and go slowly. What began as a way to shift my energy and find solid ground has evolved into a holistic lifestyle.

I started practicing by watching Rodney Yee on VHS tapes in my living room. I moved through periods of Bikram and Iyengar practices in studios on both US coasts. Returning to Tucson, Arizona, where I grew up, I studied the Hatha yoga tradition in the lineage of Paramahansa Yogananda, earning my 200-hour certification to begin teaching in 2005, followed by a 100-hour mindfulness meditation training.

I found my yoga voice offering the Eight Limbs of Yoga at Mindful Yoga Studio in Tucson. I smiled, took a deep breath, and went slowly into entrepreneurship, opening Mindful Yoga just under 10 years ago as the only Latina-owned yoga refuge in Tucson.

Around the same time, I studied for and took the Buddhist precepts, adopting the Dharma name Shraddha, which in Sanskrit means deep trust and faith. Going from teaching at other studios to opening my own studio was, indeed, a leap of trust and faith.

The foundation of my yoga practice and teaching informs my studio and my teachers to offer a safe space for students to explore, heal, and transform their bodies and their lives. I guide students in a rhythm that allows them to move in harmony with their breath and to stay open to the moment. The focus is always on mindfully honoring the body and clearing the mind and heart for whatever comes along on the mat, and more important, off the mat.

As the Mindful Yoga Sangha grew over the years, so did my practice, my sense of confidence in my teaching ability, and a desire to expand into the larger realm of wellness. I undertook studying with teachers close to yoga’s origins, including Ganesh Mohan, a physician and Ayurvedic practitioner who directs Svastha Yoga Therapy and Teacher Training programs, and Saraswati Vasudevan, founder of YogaVahini training, therapy, and research center in Chennai, India. In 2016, I earned the 500-hour Healing Emphasis Yoga certification offered by Inner Vision Yoga in Phoenix, Arizona, and began specializing in yoga for cancer survivors, for first responders, for grieving, and for overall healing–physically, emotionally, and mentally.

As part of my goal of offering holistic health and wellness to the community, I earned certification with the Integrative Health & Lifestyle Program at the University of Arizona’s Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and a certification in craniosacral therapy, both in 2019.

All the while, Mindful Yoga Studio grew, surpassing 1,000 yoga and wellness visits a month with more than 100 classes, workshops, and private sessions in 2019. We offered a yoga teacher training, attracting 12 yogis for the 200-hour certified program. My practice and my business were graced with great blessings.

Then came the pandemic…. Smile, breathe, and go slowly.

We closed Mindful Yoga’s physical space, and I found myself back where I started yoga–in my living room, this time offering classes live via Zoom. The generosity of friends offering first one vacant commercial space and then another allowed us to reopen for small classes of socially distanced yogis. At its peak, Mindful Yoga attracted up to two dozen students to a class. Now, we are limited to eight yogis in person while offering the classes live via Zoom for those who choose to practice at home.

The revelation is that smaller classes offer an intimacy that helps create a more individualized practice. By my observation, that has helped our students to deepen their practice in a time when they are grieving personal losses and an overall loss of normalcy in life. Yoga’s focus on transformation of inner self is at the root of processing grief, and my students and I are doing that processing one asana practice, one meditation, one moment at a time.

Smile, breathe, and go slowly.

Shraddha Hilda Oropeza founded Mindful Yoga Studio in 2012 to offer a safer space for students to explore, heal, and transform their bodies and their lives. She guides students in a rhythm that allows them to move in harmony with their breath and stay open to the moment. She has a 500-hour Healing Emphasis Yoga certification and is trained in Yoga for Cancer Survivors, Mindfulness Yoga & Meditation, Yin, Restorative, and Hatha Yoga. Shraddha has been teaching since 2005 and has more than 3,000 hours of teaching experience. She was born in Sonora, Mexico, and has lived most of her life in Tucson. She is bilingual and has a Bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Arizona and a Master’s degree in Organizational Management. Shraddha is currently enrolled in the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine Wellness Coaching program. She is a certified craniosacral therapist.

The Evolution of PostureTweak by Al Bingham

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 16:02:58 GMT

I hated my first yoga class.

Almost 30 years ago, in a small Upper West Side studio, I was one of three people attending class and the only one who was both new to the practice of yoga and who also didn’t know the others in the room. Not only did I feel like an outsider, I also felt like a stranger to my body and unsure of how to establish the relationship with it that the instructor was suggesting.

And yet, somehow, something inside encouraged me to give the practice of yoga another shot - elsewhere and with a friend, the next time.

And thus my yoga journey has continued onward from there.

In the time since, my studies, practice and orientation to teaching have been informed by my takeaways from that first class.

I continually reflect on what it means to be welcoming and to be as clear as I can when offering fellow students a path inward. Simultaneously, I have tried to remain aware that, in the end, what leads a person forward is something beyond me.

Though I have enhanced my body awareness over time, my early struggles with asana have felt like a gift that keeps on giving, as it continually allows me to relate to others who feel similarly challenged to embrace their structural norms and/or their still refining sensory-motor awareness.

Long ago, I let go of the need to “present” perfect form; I was quick to embrace instruction to feel the breath and the experience of moving from the inside out, without regard to how you looked.

And yet, when I first began to orient my teaching towards encouraging people to move freely and confidently and to take whatever liberties they needed to do that, it was with the orientation to make things “better” or at least “not so bad.” Within that “fix-it” approach was a resistance to embrace what “now” was offering.

I hope that my current approach skews more towards inviting discovery and exploration.

The PostureTweak orientation that I bring to asana has its origins in the Viniyoga teachings (I completed my 500-hour training with Gary Kraftsow) and in the fellowship I completed in Applied Functional Science with Doctors Gary Gray and David Tiberio at the Gray Institute. Subsequent studies with senior faculty at the Himalayan Institute have refined this approach even further.

Among the many powerful takeaways from my time at the Gray Institute was the encouragement to ask each joint/complex what it needed and what it liked to do in order to be successful.

On the one hand, taking up that joint-by-joint conversation has shifted my sensory motor awareness and facilitated greater stability and ease in how I experience my body, but more than that, it has refined my appreciation for the energy (prana) within those joint spaces and of the broader space which holds me.

At the Gray Institute, I was surrounded by physical therapists, strength and conditioning coaches and athletic trainers whose bread and butter was working with professional and high performing college athletes. For these elites, refining their awareness of how the subtalar joint functioned (which is the space between the saddle-like bone called the talus and the horse it rides on, the heel bone, or the calcaneus) was the difference between their patient, client or athlete successfully refining their golf swing, their cut to the basket, their curve ball or how they lifted their grandchild… or not.

And, of course, all of those are wonderful objectives. And yet, to this day, Gary still marvels that what drives my interest in his work isn’t its ability to stretch or workout my students in smarter ways, but rather, that I’ve found in it, a pathway to something both incredibly subtle and also deeply profound.

I am honored for the chance to share this approach with you. Our experience will consist of both a joint-by-joint exploration in which we ask our joints what they need and what they like and also a practice which integrates some takeaways from that investigation. There will be time for your reflections and questions, too. And naturally, we will begin with “hello… and welcome.”

Al Bingham founded Encourage in 2013. He has been teaching yoga since 1995. Al has co-authored two books published by Random House, has been featured on the Yoga Zone DVDs, and develops yoga classes and programs for yoga studios, clinical settings and corporate environments. Al received his yoga training though Alan Finger (Yoga Zone) and Gary Kraftsow (American Viniyoga Institute). Al is also a 2011 Fellow of Applied Functional Science via the Gray Institute and a 1992 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, Al studies with the senior faculty of the Himalayan Institute and is a Certified Vishoka Meditation® Teacher. Al and his family live in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.

My Yoga Journey by Jovinna Chan

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 16:44:13 GMT

“The human shape is a ghost made of distraction and pain.
Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel, trying wildly to open, this image tightly held within itself.” ~ Rumi

My yoga journey got real the day I declared there was no purpose in life. It was sometime in December 2006, and I was at the lowest of the lowest. Depression wrapped its tentacles tightly around me and I couldn’t pull myself out. It was my dark night of the soul. Earlier that year, I graduated from yoga teacher training at Kripalu and I thought being a yoga teacher would provide some financial stability to support myself as a performing artist but I was wrong. The glory and inspiration I felt at the end of the training did not survive the harshness and hopelessness I felt about my life in New York City. My marriage was failing, and so was my career as a performing artist.

One night I woke up from a nightmare and couldn’t go back to sleep. I sat in bed despondent. My will to keep my marriage and career going finally collapsed and dissolved. It was like a magic show; it went poof and disappeared.

In April 2007, I got an opportunity to move into Kripalu as an intern to become a yoga teacher trainer. I took the position not because that was my dream but because I just needed a ticket out of NYC. Little did I know living at Kripalu and throwing myself into selfless service would ultimately save my life and sanity. I experienced much mercy and grace from the Divine in those eight years I spent there. Swami Kripalu’s teachings were the balm that nurtured my broken Soul and brought my Spirit back to wholeness.

Life at the Kripalu Center was full of magic and wonder. I was very lucky to work with many incredible senior teachers and staff to deliver the Kripalu experience. We worked hard, studied hard, and laughed equally hard as we built conscious and loving relationships with each other. I think one of the most striking experiences during my time at Kripalu was being able to bear witness to how devotion to love, selfless service and sangha gradually lifted me out of my depression. It took years, but I was finally able to swim side by side with depression instead of drowning in it.

There are five teachings that drastically altered my life and consciousness.

1. The value of self-observation with compassion.
2. The inquiry process.
3. Building trust in relationships.
4. Satya - Truthfulness.
5. The path of love.

Over time, these teachings became my values and building blocks as I developed the skills to transform my own suffering into precious gems of wisdom. The path of love has a special place in my heart. I remember one afternoon while I was walking in Babuji’s Garden at the Kripalu Center, I felt an immense feeling of openness and an acute clarity in vision and mind. Suddenly time stopped and I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of unconditional love. I kneeled and cried.

Weeks later, I met Dr. Satya Narayana Dasia, a renowned yoga master, and sat in one of his dharma talks on the practice of love. He asked the class “Do you know how to love?” Hearing his question was a light bulb moment for me. I realized I didn’t really know how to love. And I finally understood that on the path of Self-Realization, it is important and necessary to keep asking questions. Asking questions got me out of Spiritual complacency and the mindless regurgitation of Spiritual teachings.

Over the years, my yoga journey has taken me to many depths and heights. I have grown so much, and I attribute much of my successful relationships to these values that I adopted from my days at Kripalu. Above all, the subject of love became a forefront inquiry for me. Learning about love and how to love have been so humbling. And after 14 years of inquiry, I am still just scratching the surface. Love is as vast as the sky and ocean, and as mysterious as the night and the moon. I strongly believe love is the answer to our divides. I invite you to deeply inquire into love and I shall leave you with this question from the book True Love by Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Do you have time to love?”

Jai Bhagwan,

Jovinna

www.jovinna.com
https://www.youtube.com/c/jovinnachan
https://vimeo.com/jovinna

How You Start Doesn’t Matter…What Matters is That You Start by Luke Ketterhagen

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 11:39:06 GMT

My yoga journey began in a very unconventional way… as a punishment.

During the beginning of my senior year of high school I attended a party that served alcohol. Clearly a representation of pre-prefrontal cortex maturity . My dad found out and told me to go to bed and we’d talk in the morning. I didn’t sleep very well that night, but then I also thought since my dad was a yoga teacher and meditation practitioner that he may just say, "Luke don’t do it again." Boy was I wrong. In the morning he told me I had to turn myself in to my coach because I broke the team rules of conduct and did not follow through with my agreement with my coach and fellow teammates. It didn’t matter to him that a lot of my teammates were at the party and the parents of some of them bought the beer and collected keys from anyone who didn’t have a designated driver. He and my mom were “new” to this rural Wisconsin culture and couldn’t possibly understand the parenting required in “these parts of the woods.” I pleaded and pleaded for him to change his mind, because playing high school sports was really important to me. He wouldn’t budge. So not knowing where this may go, I told him I would do anything to not have to turn myself in. “Ok. I have a proposal,” he said. “Every morning before school for the remainder of the season meditate with me for 20 minutes. If you miss a day you will have to turn yourself in.” I took that deal as fast as I could, but little did I know what I was up against.

The first few days to be honest were torture on all levels. Physically sitting on the floor on a meditation cushion in a cross-legged position was extremely uncomfortable. As an athlete back then they didn’t teach flexibility. My hamstrings and quads were strong, but tight. My back hurt because all the strength I had developed from lifting weights and running sprints around the field or on the courts did not apparently do a great job of strengthening the deep muscles of my back that were required to sit in an erect position. Hmm… it made me wonder how I could be so strong and so weak at the same time. Mentally, 20 minutes seemed like an eternity. My mind was ripping and running every which way. Holding a train of thought or a focus on my breath as I was taught by my dad was laughable. Could my mind be any busier, noisier, and more disorganized? Psychologically, I fidgeted from anxiety of some nonsensical FOMO (fear of missing out) and constantly checked the clock from a case of utter boredom because at that moment I was so uncomfortable, I’d rather escape than tap in.

As the days turned into weeks and weeks turned into the middle of October—thank goodness football season is short—things got better, meaning less like torture. I started to enjoy the quiet I was feeling after the practice was done and sitting still was becoming something I could actually do for short periods of time. I didn’t miss a day and didn’t have to turn myself in. This was a total success because it was the only reason I took on this “punishment.” However, the balancing, nurturing, and healing inherent in yoga practice had created some other grooves…

Fast forward 1 year. I was sitting in my dorm room at Marquette University and ruminating about how stressed I was about my upcoming midterm exams. My anxiety was really messing with me. Then out of nowhere (or so I thought then ) I remembered how I felt after the meditation I had done with my dad. AND I remembered him sliding my meditation cushion under my bed. “This is here just in case,” he said as he pushed it way in the back. I grabbed it and sat down. Those 20 minutes were some of the most enjoyable I experienced. I saw my anxiety fall away and my mind catch the thread of peace and contentment that was somehow locked inside, waiting for a moment of quietude to come out and bless “my space” again.

The Connected Body: Perception and Compassion in Anatomy and Yoga by Lauri Nemetz

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 22:00:52 GMT

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

― Barry Lopez

I first began studying yoga back during my days in graduate school in the early 1990s, while I was training as a dance/movement therapist. I realized very quickly that my understanding and perception of the world were both expanding courtesy of my yoga practice. Seeing anything on a more profound level is similar to opening one’s eyes underneath the surface of a lake. Suddenly, the idea of what exists is extended. A whole other universe appeared, and a literal deeper understanding of what the world contains made itself known. Every area of yoga has allowed me entry into another place, whether it was the revelation of a well-executed pose or the world of meditation.

Similarly, deep diving into anatomy has given me a path into a different level of understanding and an ability to look at an entirely diverse and yet connected universe. I initially studied anatomy in the standard form of parts and pieces, learned the names of bones and muscles, and spent quite a lot of time memorizing from books, until I knew I had to learn directly from the body itself. While I was first wary of human dissection, I had to discover for myself some of the mysteries under our very thin layer of skin. I found the inner world was full of mountains, rivers, and valleys, just like our larger world outside. I initially planned to do only a few dissections as a means to enhance my knowledge, but I found I had some skill level and talent at dissection in showing a story. Since those early days, I have assisted and taught hundreds of dissections, and each body has been a gift of learning that I take back to the living.

Dissection is, after all, also taking a viewpoint on what structures to see and how to see them. The traditional words of anatomy become more interesting when one learns that many of the Latin and Greek origins used describe a picture, such as the coracoid process of the scapula--named for the crow’s beak shape--or that tuberosity described the shape of a bump that forms on a bone as an attachment point. As I dove further into myofascial anatomy, my interest shifted away from purely muscles and bones and toward fascia, a biological fabric of connection that traditionally has been ignored in many books, but is having a moment in the movement world. What I wanted to see reversed itself, and having additional names helped me see what I had missed previously, or simply hadn’t noticed due to a lack of awareness.

The choice I have made to be an anatomy dissector might seem an odd co-career for a yoga teacher, but I have always been interested in exploring the inner and outer world, which reflect each other in so many ways. I find that poets and anatomists alike ponder questions of form, beauty and perception.

The idea even of misperceptions and correct perception can be thought of in terms of the Sanskrit avidyā (“ignorance” or “incorrect understanding”) and vidya (“understanding”). Sometimes translated as “absence of correct knowledge,” avidyā is also categorized as a klesha, which causes human suffering. While we cannot avoid all suffering, we can learn to soften suffering through a shift in perspective.

In my own teachings, I often quote the Barry Lopez passage at the beginning of this article, because in dissection as well as in life, one can only ever know part of a story, of any reality. When I see someone on my table, I can guess at body patterns and surgeries that may or may not prove true as we dive deeper into the body form. However, I cannot know for sure if this was someone who was in pain or comfort, or what his or her own perception of his or her life was like. What is left behind is like a seashell--a beautiful remains of a life carved into shape, but not the actual existence itself.

Yoga and anatomy both have taught me compassion, and, above all, that we have to practice that compassion every single day. We all make daily mistakes in our perspective. The danger is clinging to avidyā, and professing to understand absolute ideas of knowledge. Science, like yoga, is questioning and curious and willing to be wrong. Taking time to focus on our perspective, and being able to change that in light of new ideas or knowledge, can help expand our ways of working in anatomy and in life.

Your Delicate, Blood-Filled Lungs by Tias Little

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 18:52:58 GMT

I like to say where there is breath, there is blood. When you breathe, your lungs and your heart together propel blood through your circulatory system into every nook and cranny of your body. When bright red blood irrigates through all bodily tissues, there is longevity and radiant health. A yoga practice helps to animate the breath and distribute prana (oxygen-enriched blood) throughout the body. By breathing we “pranagize” all of our systems.

Anatomically, your lungs and heart are inseparable. An elaborate system of vessels span the two organs so that if your heart were lifted from your chest cavity, your lungs would be removed too.

In terms of feeling, your lungs and heart are also interwoven. They are the primary repository for sentiment. Thus your lungs do not simply draw and expel air like Scottish bagpipes, but, together with your heart, they are the center for sentiments of tenderness and love. In Sanskrit this is called bhava. In states of bhava, feelings of empathy, spiritual rejuvenation, and kindness flourish.

Your lungs are impressionable, sensitive to emotion and feeling. Feelings, especially grief and sadness, imprint onto lung tissue. The impressionable lung is most evident in a child who is disposed to strong feelings such as laughter, crying, or screaming. Emotion passes quickly through the motile lung.

Lungs are extremely delicate. Airborne particulates such as the coronavirus, pollens, pollutants, and toxic chemicals can blotch the tender, spongy lung tissue. Lung tissue is light and fragile because the capillary membranes at the outermost tips of the bronchioles (the alveoli and alveolar sacs) must be fine enough to permit gas exchange into the bloodstream.

In yoga, we not only practice to expand our lungs but also to feel into the moods, mind states, and psychological pressures that manifest inside our lungs. Through meditation, pranayama, postural movements, and sound resonance, we develop greater sensitivity for our prana and become connoisseurs of the air that flows in and out of our lungs 20,000 times per day.

Tias Little is author of Yoga of the Subtle Body and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with his wife, Surya; his 17-year-old, Eno, and his pooch, Haro. Join him for his YTA workshop, Lifting the Sails of the Lungs: Yoga, Pranayama, and the Art of Breathing, on September 11, 2021.

The Journey Within by Paula Heitzner

Wed, 19 May 2021 10:13:17 GMT

These past 16 months, although difficult and challenging, have also presented
opportunities leading to creative exploration of situations and of the self.

My time in lockdown pushed me to write and finish a book that loomed in my
consciousness for over 35 years, and helped me rethink and refresh the teaching techniques that I've been using for over 50 years. It seems that everything I ever studied (ideokinesis, polarity, continuum, bioenergetics, Reichian therapy) about refining the mobility and health of the mind/body began to emerge from the deep recesses of my consciousness.

With very few outside distractions, I went deeper into the inner attractions that
were life enhancing, physically, mentally, and emotionally, reconfirming
what I learned early on from the masters with whom I studied (Iyengar,
Muktananda, Vishnudevananda, and Amrit Desai).

Please join me on June 12 for Practice to Empower Personal Possibilities, where I will share my ongoing process of finding peace and reconciliation with the integrity of the body. Each person will have the opportunity to encounter his or her own truths and voice.

In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from my book, Yoga and You for a Year: From the Beginning to the End.

Yoga is! It cannot be categorized. It is an art, a science, a way of life, and an extensive comprehensive system able to lead one to the source of their own inner light and joy. The state of being happy is an innate part of life that is elusive most of the time because of the difficulties and challenges that this life presents. The practice of yoga offers us the way and means to connect with our own light and joy, and its philosophies show us how unhappiness is optional. Human frailties can be strengthened when we face our fears, make our own choices and decisions, and, with conscious awareness, practice appreciation and self-acceptance and recognize the importance of autonomy for our maturation. We learn from our experiences, whether they are good or
bad ones, how we must adapt and adjust.

Hatha yoga is not merely physical activity. Because the physical is clearly so much more tangible when compared to the mental-emotional or the spiritual aspects of our being, it is the way to begin our journey. Working with our own body, as we do our asanas, helps us to open to those parts that will benefit from this attention. We tend to deny, diminish, or disown the parts of ourselves that are weak, resistant, or painful. Yoga helps us bring care, concern, and compassion for the self, helping us confront the blockages and traumas that interfere with our flow of energy and are so destructive to our well-being.

Yoga has been in existence for thousands of years, developed and refined by the practice of those who were aware of—and closely devoted to—the source of pure cosmic conscious energy. It was very long ago when the intrusions and distractions of life were minimal, and these cosmic connections led them to the direct experience of the energy of pure presence. This was their tutelage and instruction, and today we are able to employ the phenomenon of those teachings through our practice of yoga.

One of the great attractions of a yoga practice is the promise of flexibility. We all know that being flexible helps us to live with physical ease, comfort, and freedom. We experience this well-being soon after we engage in a serious practice, evidence of the body’s need for stretching and movement. But as we get more proficient on the physical level, we are led to examine more closely the reasons why our bodies seem compromised at a certain point.

This is the perfect time to introduce my acronym of YOGA:

Y—why, O—oh, G—God, A—again?

When we start to pay attention to this question, we begin our work, the
journey within. Our bodies store and hide in vulnerable places what we can’t, don’t, or won’t process and resolve, creating damaging energetic blocks that constrict our life-force and healing capabilities. Here is where the true flexibility of our practice begins.

Iron and Silk: Balancing Power and Grace by Nina Crist

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 10:43:35 GMT

Are there moments when you feel your strength isn’t supporting you physically, emotionally, or spiritually? Or times that you had excess energy and wished you had softened to allow for more ease for yourself and others, allowing for your inner grace to shine through? Life has a way of providing opportunities to feel into the depths of self whether we are up for it or not. The ancient teachings of martial arts and yoga help to navigate energetic ups and downs and inform one’s response to them, supporting a life of vitality and ease.

Yoga postures, pranayama, and meditation infused with martial arts are a profound practice to connect with your inner yin (passive) and yang (active) energies. We all possess the qualities needed to balance these energies as they flow in and out of our daily living. Whether there is an excessive flow of energy or a feeling of depletion, these ancient teachings offer guidance and tools to balance these energies along the journey of life. Each one of us is unique, while at the same time there are universal laws of energy that determine and truly dictate our way of being in the world. The practices of yoga and kung fu together offer a unique pathway to balance the inner energy that helps us move with more clarity.

As the the tides of life rise and fall, ebb and flow, the practice on your mat offers a greater depth of wisdom that can inform your actions and decisions in day to day life. These practices teach the universal principles of energy efficiency, such as redirection of energy and balancing yin and yang, and are reflected in how we manage our inner and outer environment. As you step back on the mat each day, your life experiences offer a greater depth of receptivity to the teachings nourishing and taking root within each fiber of your being. As the waves of life approach, yoga and kung fu reset the motor system and enable one to rise above and relax into a flow. Guided by breath, one can conserve energy and move more efficiently.

In life there are times when it is helpful to muster up strength and energy to move through a challenge and also times when finding ways to yield and harmonize with life is the wiser choice. These practices empower us to have the ability to see and recognize situations as yin and yang and fortify us with the ability to respond accordingly. Being with sensation and fluctuations of energy on the mat teaches us how to integrate these principles off the mat in everyday circumstances. Moving between yin and yang, we are always sensing and flowing to allow for balance, homeostasis, and abundance in our life.

Life is the ongoing dance of managing energy. Regardless of gender, we learn when it is time to draw upon our feminine energy of receptivity and gentleness, nourishment, and affection and when to increase our masculine energy of direction, commitment, determination, and kindness. This awareness gives us insight into what our best looks like and feels like so we can walk in the world with more confidence, ease, power, and grace.

My Journey with Yoga and Buddhism by Hunt Parr

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 11:47:26 GMT

“Let what comes come, let what goes go, find out what remains.” —Ramana Maharshi

This quote embodies so much of what practice means to me. For as long as I can remember, I have lived a life of movement and contemplation. I started professional dance training at a young age and got swept up in the joys of learning to use my body to express emotion, the pure athletics of big, dynamic movement, and the precision and care that classical ballet demands. I discovered I had a natural talent, and I left my small town in Alaska to attend a prestigious arts boarding school in Southern California. It’s there at the age of 16 that I discovered yoga. My modern dance teacher would use it as a warm-up for her classes. It may be hard to believe, but initially, I didn’t enjoy yoga. However, something was compelling about the practice and I decided right there, I wanted to learn more, and I stuck with it.

I moved to New York City to attend the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and, much like boarding school, yoga was a part of my daily training. I saw how much it helped me navigate the rigors of the professional dancing world, both mentally and physically. My teacher at Tisch offered me a spot in her first-ever yoga teacher training, and I accepted. It took me on a journey I could have never imagined.

I spent a decade dancing, performing, and teaching yoga. I taught anyone who would let me, in the tiniest studios in Brooklyn, to the biggest mega gyms of Manhattan. At one point, I had over 20 classes and clients a week, ranging from big-name celebrity students to a yoga therapy client in her 80s with advanced dementia. In 2012, I took my 500-hour yoga teacher training with esteemed teacher and yoga pioneer Cyndi Lee, and shortly after I began assisting her. We’ve had an incredible journey of teaching yoga all over the USA and filming for Yoga International, Yoga Journal, and Lion’s Roar Magazine.

In recent years, I’ve niched down into being a private practice specialist and yoga teacher trainer. I see between 10 and 15 private clients a week in NYC and have taught and directed both 200- and 300-hour yoga teacher trainings. I also coach and mentor young teachers on how to create a viable business as a yoga professional that is in line with their values.

I’m a certified meditation teacher and have spent a decade studying intensively inside the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I’ve taken refuge vows, attended over 20 retreats, and Buddhist philosophy informs every aspect of how I teach yoga and interact with the world.

For more about Hunt, visit huntparryoga.com.

Please join us for Moving into Stillness: An Afternoon of Yoga and Meditation with Hunt on March 13, 2021.

Why I Am Not a Dancer by Judith Rose

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 11:12:33 GMT

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. —John Keats, from “Endymion”

Very often I am asked why I place my work under the rubric of movement rather than dance. Let me respond to this by journeying back to a very early memory. I was barely seven. As the daughter of immigrants who arrived here blown by the fury of the time, I was raised with very little in the material stronghold. Toys and games were created from what was at hand, and culture seeped in only through the magic of the radio and the book. So it was especially magical when my father came home one day with two tickets to see the fabled dancer Maria Tallchief as the leading presence in The Firebird ballet.

I remember nothing about the intricate footwork or the imaginative choreographic design. Before me was the most famous dancer of the time, and somehow I was not watching her feet! I was riveted instead by something fuller, something deeper, something more magnetic than her technical prowess. Before me was a dancer whose eyes expressed as clearly as her toes; whose body and spirit were in a state of at-one-ment.

At some point during the performance, a mystical transfer occurred, and suddenly, I, too, sitting in the hard seat of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, experienced and lived the vital movement of the dance. Years later, I understood that it was this mysterious peak experience that served as the initial catalyst for a lifelong devotion to conscious movement work, using it as a tool for healing, evolution, and transformation.

My professional vision returns us to the organic patterns we used when we lived in intimate connection with the earth. This understanding lies at the root of the yoga and movement classes I design, choreograph, and teach. These kinesthetic motifs were innate to a life that once placed an ear close to the ground and lifted eyes upward to read the signs and signals of nature. They satisfy the body’s longing for movement that is pure, joyous, and essential. When we move with Beauty and Truth, we too are moved, and that is the gift that deepens the practice each and every time.

For more information about Judith’s teaching offerings, visit judithrosevm.com.

Making Yoga Truly Accessible to All by Dianne Bondy

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:38:25 GMT

It's 4:30 am on Monday morning, and I am sitting in LAX International Airport after a whirlwind experience at the first annual Accessible Yoga Conference (AYC). I am blissfully exhausted, relieved, and proud to have been invited to contribute to such an amazing event.

Only a few short weeks ago, I traveled from my hometown of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, to the sunny and gorgeous city of Santa Barbara, California. As I arrived at the Accessible Yoga Conference, I was greeted by my colleagues from the Yoga and Body Image Coalition, and together we embarked on an incredible journey that would expand my awareness of how yoga and diversity appear on the mat.

As the founder of the Yoga For All movement, my vision has always been to make the yoga world more inclusive. Yoga For All is aimed at creating a brave space for people in larger bodies, the LGBTQ community, people of every race and socioeconomic status, and those in differently abled bodies. Whether or not they are struggling with barriers in asana, these individuals all deserve to feel safe, included, and supported within the global yoga community. The founding principles of Yoga For All have evolved alongside my experience leading and teaching physical yoga practices within my local community and abroad. I've realized that there are many different barriers preventing people with large bodies, those of color, and other marginalized populations from practicing and embracing yoga. The barriers include financial accessibility, able-ism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and geographical availability. In response, Yoga For All began to focus on changing attitudes toward how we see ourselves, how we see each other, our ideas about what yoga is, and what yoga means to people on the margins of dominant culture. I believed we needed to demystify yoga and make it possible for all to feel welcome.

While at the conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Sanford, a man I have long admired for his role in creating environments of inclusivity in yoga. His teachings focus on the connection between the body and mind, regardless of what body you have. His message is that your body isn’t something that needs to be overcome. In hearing Sanford speak, I realized that I'd never heard his story in its entirety before, and I found myself profoundly moved. I felt connected to the power of his experience and what it means to feel like you don't belong. Matthew became a paraplegic at the age of 13, and I realized that many of his experiences mirrored my own experiences as a person of color living in North America. I had felt different too. His story also shed light on how our lives are often determined by how others view our differences as a burden, limitation, disability, or an "unfortunate" set of circumstances. It reminded me that we must consciously choose how we view our circumstances, and we must advocate for ourselves.

It reinforced for me the idea that we all want many of the same things. We want love and acceptance, and we want to feel our lives matter. We all feel love, anger, and disappointment, and we all have insecurities about ourselves and our bodies (regardless of what bodies we occupy). Our light comes from the same source. It is our bodies, external influences, and our experiences that make us seem different. At the end of the day, we all want to believe in something, be it science, God, or the power of the universe. We desire to connect to the miracle of this existence, even if we view it through different lenses.

At this conference, I felt included. I felt that I belonged. The Accessible Yoga Conference was a one-of-a-kind experience. It was about offering yoga to bodies with varying abilities and disabilities, and I was thrilled to witness a full range of bodies that we don't often see at mainstream yoga conferences. It also seemed that many of the people who attended had a deeper connection to the spiritual practices of yoga, letting asana take a back seat. For me, this was both new and refreshing. From my previous experiences at yoga conferences, I had grown accustomed to seeing mostly young, thin, and flexible Lululemon-clad yogis drinking fancy coffee and exploring advanced asana practices. Because I don't fit that cultural mold, I often feel like an observer at mainstream conferences. But at this conference, I felt included. I felt that I belonged. And it seemed to me that others would be open to a new perspective on yoga teachings. When I first spoke with Jivana, the conference’s founder and visionary, I explained that I wanted to share a Yoga For All class that was full of positive and playful energy. I also wanted to create a supportive environment where everyone could share their personal practice experiences. And while my intention to be as inclusive as possible at the AYC (and as a yoga teacher in general) had long been set, the more practitioners I met and the more I listened to their stories, the more I began to feel that my initial understanding of what "accessible yoga" looked and felt like was changing (and drastically) since first pitching my class to Jivana.

My class was billed as Yoga For All. But as my time to teach approached, I started to ask myself: Was it really for all? Was I ready and equipped to offer something for someone in a wheelchair? Fortunately, I got the opportunity to find out. Rev Rudra, a powerful human being in a wheelchair, arrived willing and ready to share his authentic self as a participant in my first AYC workshop. Rev is a self-realized yoga practitioner, which means that he knows his body better than I (or any other yoga teacher), and he is not afraid to make his yoga experience individual and unique for himself. He connected with his wheels as an extension of his body. His forward folds included a bolster on his lap. He moved with grace and awareness from his chair to the floor. It was amazing to watch this person so connected to his body in a way that was hard for an able-bodied person to truly understand. I was excited to see him enter my space. He did his practice, and he added dimension to class. His poses were beautiful and made me see asana in an entirely different way. Whenever I share a yoga class with students, be it in a local studio or at a large yoga conference, the most important thing I ask them to do is to create their own experiences. It is important to me that students come as they are, use what they have, and do what they can. I never want to single out anyone, or to use a student as an example without their permission. My goal is simply to allow each and every individual to feel included and free to explore their experience of yoga as it unfolds.

I want to create an inclusive space for all. I want to encourage fellow yoga teachers, and our students, to look at our yoga spaces and begin asking: "Why is there a lack of diversity here, and how do we create more? Why are we so afraid to take different approaches to teaching yoga? How can we create classes that help people feel safe? How can we make yoga more socioeconomically and geographically accessible? How do we create classes that invite and celebrate different cultures? Can we be okay with offering a brave space for people of color to practice?" The recent backlash in Seattle around POC classes shows that we are not willing to listen or help people when they tell us what they need. We have yoga for large bodies, women-only spaces, men-only spaces, yoga for children, prenatal yoga, and yoga for older adults. Why are classes for POC so threatening? I have watched people build their confidence in specialized classes, and my experience is that they do move outward to other classes once they feel empowered by the practice. When more people feel more comfortable with yoga, the more specialized classes won’t be needed any longer.

We need to create space and time for the difficult but important conversation on yoga and diversity. Growth happens outside of comfort zones. Engaging in a meaningful way with people who are different from us changes our perceptions of each other and the world. As individuals who practice mindfulness, we simply must walk our walk.

So, as I sit here and reflect on my experiences and all of the insights I gathered during my time at the AYC, I have begun to realize that Yoga For All isn’t just a progressive asana class. Instead, it is a conversation about how we each step into our personal power—as we do a little asana along the way! Yoga For All is about making yoga more of an internal practice, rather than an external one. It happens by confronting and accepting change, supporting each other in the practice of yoga, and embracing the power that comes from sharing our personal stories.

I want to thank all the practitioners, supporters, and conference organizers behind the Accessible Yoga Conference for being true game-changers. Thank you for allowing me to share my vision of accessible yoga and for teaching me about the lessons all around me as we venture to create a yoga experience that is truly accessible for all.

Growth continues, for all of us.

The Five Elements in Yoga and Ayurveda by Colleen Breeckner

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 12:27:56 GMT

Nature possesses a qualitative energy through which we can either expand into wisdom or contract into ignorance.
—David Frawley, Ayurveda and the Mind

Seasonal rituals are created to aid our bodies in adjusting to seasonal shifts in temperature, moisture, sunshine, and diet to make these periodic transitions smooth. We achieve this by shoring up the immune system through a combination of nourishing practices that are individually applied based on deficiencies or excesses in any of the five elements in the body. The five elements are earth, water, fire, air, and space.

Earth (prithivi) rules the lower body. The primary areas are the feet, thighs, and knees with relationship to the hips and sciatic nerve. Connecting to the Earth through the four corners of the feet honors the four directions, thereby setting a strong foundation.
Water (apas) rules the hips. The area of focus is the hips, sacrum, and psoas, and water is seen in the secretions and digestive juices, mucous, and plasma. When aligned in this area, it brings fluidity and flow to the body. Without fluidity, this area promotes “stuckness” and uncoordinated movements.
Fire (agni) rules the navel. The primary areas in practice are the core, lower back, and diaphragm. Itlies in the grey matter of the brain, retina (perceives light), digestive fire, metabolism, and enzyme systems. The organs of transformation can be transformed by heat, metabolism, digestion, and assimilation. Fire can give you the power to direct, power to change, ability to absorb, take in, and let go. Alignment of the torso is essential for enhancing the effectiveness of this element.
Air (vayu) rules the chest. The affected areas are the shoulders, lungs, and heart. Air can be seen in the pulsation of the heart and breath in the lungs, sensory movements, and nervous system. The area of contraction and expansion allows for the ability to freely express oneself. Tightness in the neck affects this ability, therefore the application of good shoulder alignment promotes the freedom of air through the throat.
Ether (akasha; space) rules the neck. The affected areas are the throat, forehead, and mental field and the spaces in our bodies, for example, the mouth and inner ear. Space governs the idea of creating space in the body and mind, personal space, and boundaries. It controls the regulation of our emotions and passions. It is the primary area of governing spiritual progress. In physical practice, we enhance the efficiency of the element ether through the application of skull alignment.

Balancing the five elements in yoga is called Tattva Shruddhi, which is the process of integrating our felt experience. Creating balance between these five elements brings the body back to harmony.

Ayurveda is the overarching structure by which specific yoga asana is prescribed. Ayurveda is the tradition from which the art and science of sequencing and breath practices are informed. Both meditation and yoga asana are key aspects in Ayurvedic lifestyle practices.

While meditation has the ultimate goal of enlightenment, for the everyday householder meditation has additional goals of increasing sexual vitality, mental acuity, and overall radiance. Life force (prana), radiance (tejas), and vitality (ojas) are the measuring sticks by which Ayurveda assesses physical and mental well-being.

Prana is the vital force that maintains the respiration of the cell and is the flow of intelligence in the cell. Prana governs all higher cerebral activity and the biological functions of the other two essences. Prana is carried by the fluids in the body and is the vital energy we take in not only through foods but through liquids and breathing. It is responsible for enthusiasm and expression in the psyche without which we suffer from stagnation and depression.

Tejas is the intelligence of the cell. It is the essence of the heat we absorb, not only through our food but also through the skin, where we absorb sunlight. Tejas is fed through visual impressions. It governs mental digestion and absorption, without which we lack clarity and determination. Tejas has subtle energy and heat; we rise because of tejas. It helps us get to a transcendental state; without it there is no awakening. Tejas unfolds the intelligence to burn past life karma. It is the light of your true nature that burns brightly.

Ojas is the essence related to vitality and immunity. The pure essence of the bodily tissues (dhatus), ojas is a protoplasmic, biological substance—not a romantic concept. It is our natural resistance to fight infection. Ojas must be strong to avoid invaders or chronic illness. It is influenced by the power of agni, which determines digestion and the quality of assimilation. Ojas is fed through the sensory impressions of taste and smell. It provides psychological stability and endurance, without which we experience mental fatigue and anxiety.

An experienced practitioner will examine an individual through the Ashtavidha Pariksha, which includes the examination of pulse, eyes, urine, stool, skin, tongue, voice, and build to determine the state of prana, ojas, tejas, and the distribution of the five elements.

Yoga asana has the goal of creating physical health and mental equilibrium. Ayurveda seeks to nurture physical vitality and mental clarity to allow for living life to the fullest.

Ayurveda, like all good medicine, is both an art and a science. Science is based on laws and requires scientific uniformity of symptoms and treatments. Ayurveda looks to uncover the deeper causes of disease, including but not limited to thoughts and behavior. Thoughts and behaviors can solidify into bad habits and lead toward preventable illness. Ayurveda assists in uprooting them at their cause.

Because the habits and behaviors that lead to illness vary from person to person, treatment in Ayurveda differs from person to person. Though there may be uniformity in certain treatments, dosage and carrier substances will vary by constitution. The prescriptions consider the following variables: time of life, time of year, state of imbalance, individual constitution, and ability.

For example, fall is a challenging time for people of a vata (air + ether) nature, but harmonizing for people of a kapha (water + earth) constitution. Individuals will benefit from practices that consider nature (dosha) and other variables. Generally, we can apply seasonal recommendations to suit the needs of the larger majority of practitioners then work individually in more complicated situations.

Fall and winter govern the elements air and ether, in winter most people benefit from a slower more grounded yoga practice that emphasizes rhythm and support. The diet should be oily, nutritionally dense, fresh, and warm. Extra sleep and a longer savasana are essential to supporting vata. Scents should be grounding such as sandalwood and rose, as well as daily abhyanga self-massage with appropriate oils and herbs.

Seasonal practices incorporated into a routine provide immeasurable support that becomes undeniable overtime.

For more information about the five elements and Colleen’s teaching offerings, visit colleenlilayoga.com.

Expanding into the Heart of Winter with Jillian Pransky

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 12:23:17 GMT

Nature is replete with various rhythms and cycles—day follows night, night follows day, seasons come and go. Similarly, there are biological rhythms to our bodies, minds, and emotions. When our inner world is in sync with the natural cycles around us, we feel a sense of harmony and well-being. When we are disconnected in this way, our stress and discomfort increases, we grow discontent, and our vitality diminishes. Yoga and Ayurveda offer us an array of simple tools to help keep us healthy and at peace through honoring and connecting us with the wisdom of the season.

Winter is nature’s time of hibernation, retreat, and contraction. As winter’s cold, wet, dark, and heavy qualities increase around us, they grow within us as well.

Winter demands that we move inward for rest and replenishment, just as the earth stops producing in order to build a new reserve and be bountiful again in spring.

However, balancing with the winter cycle is an art that usually requires some extra loving care as these shorter darker days can leave us feeling a little "heavier." Even the most stable of us can experience the winter doldrums or the all-out blues. Many healing systems look at this normal reaction to the season as helpful and healthy, as it helps us stay put long enough to more deeply recuperate all of our systems. However, while honoring this down time, we need to ensure we don't grow listless in our body or mind. A main tenet of yoga and Ayurveda is that "like increases like.” Therefore, to prevent winter’s contracting elements from "weighing us down," we need to equalize by creating warmth, lightness, and openness in our yoga practice and lifestyle.

Slow-flow yoga and expanding restorative postures (think goddess pose) are a great way to warm the body, create circulation, encourage elimination, and cultivate inward awareness and receptivity—without expending unnecessary energy or depleting ourselves. We can work deeply and mindfully with while not "spending" precious energy reserves. Personally, at this time of year, while keeping up with a morning mindful movement practice and evening restorative, I also draw a bit more on my Metta practices to create a feeling of emotional warmth and wellness.

Lastly, while most of us are experiencing less movement "out and about" in general during these current pandemic conditions—and even while we may be feeling a bit of cabin fever—keep in mind that overexerting, overstimulating, or any kind of over-effort in a yoga practice or physical exercise is not in harmony with a winter healing routine. Think more like the qualities of cinnamon rather than hot sauce right now—keep things steadily warm rather than kicking up temporary spikes of fiery hot. When you take good care of yourself in the cold season, you’re creating benefits for both present and future. How you nurture yourself throughout the winter will dictate how you bloom in the spring.

Winter is a slow, inward, quiet season, not a time of expansion or energy spending.

Chogyam Trungpa reminds that this cycle of down-time is essential:

There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

Mudras: How They Can Help Us Heal by Deirdre Breen, AHC, NBC-HWC, Master Yogi

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 11:19:18 GMT

The marvelous world of mudras is a mysterious one at first glance. Yet with a bit of guidance and information, the mystery is unraveled and their powerful gifts for health and healing become clear.

Mudra (/muˈdrɑː/ [listen]; Sanskrit: मुद्रा, IAST: mudra) is defined as a "seal," "mark," or “gesture" and originated in India. It is used in the ritual of yoga, uniting body, mind, and spirit. This article references the mudras created with one or both hands, yet there are mudras that involve the whole body (asana).

Let’s see how mudras work and how they can open a path for personal healing. It is my intent that yoga instructors become aware of how mudras support the teachings of yoga asana and meditation.

To begin, it may help to think of a mudra as a recipe, and as with all recipes, there are ingredients, instructions, and outcomes. The ingredients are elements of matter: earth, water, fire, air, and space. Just as the natural elements are present in mudras, so are the physical elements present in our bodies. For example, earth expresses as bones, muscles, tissues, and organs; water expresses as blood, tears, urine, synovial fluid, and lymphatic fluid; fire is your temperature of 98.6ish, which fuels the process of metabolism; air is the breath; and space … well, it is there in your cells, your joints, and hopefully, on occasion, between your thoughts.

Additionally, there is the ingredient of prana, delivered to us through breath as expression and movement of the life force. This movement is known as the prana vayus. Prana’s movement reflects the five directions: north, south, east, west, and center.

In any recipe, once you have the ingredients, you must follow the directions, usually in a sequence and with specific times needed to produce the desired outcome. These aspects are as important as the ingredients themselves. Anyone who has attempted to bake a cake from scratch knows that just having the ingredients, even organic ones, doesn’t guarantee that what comes out of the oven will be light, fluffy, and moist. So too with mudras.

An example: Let’s imagine that you’d like to learn a mudra that could help you digest information, food, and emotion and calm your nervous system at the same time. While that is a tall order, there is a mudra that delivers those outcomes.

Achala Agni Mudra: the gesture of steady fire for optimal digestion

Source: Joseph and Lilian Le Page

Let’s first look at the ingredients. The natural elements, discussed earlier, need to express in such a way that the fire element is not too high and not too low. Therefore, in order for this to happen, the air and earth elements need to supply the fire with steady and reliable fuel. Water also needs to be on hand to balance this dynamic. Plus, there needs to be space for all this to take place. The Achala Agni Mudra does just that.

Then there are the instructions: How does the prana need to flow to deliver and support an effective and safe fire?

In this mudra, the hands, fingers, spine, and breath work in unison and focus fire, the great metabolizer, providing heat for transformation and purification. It may sound too good and too easy, and yet I am confident that with skillful use and respect, anyone can learn this mudra and produce this outcome.

So how does this mudra also soothe the nervous system? Well, it’s all in the prana. A safe, effective fire is one that is contained and centered in a designated place, for example, a fire pit or oven. In the human body, fire’s locale is the center of the body, between the rib cage and pelvis. Its heat metabolizes food, its warmth is circulated through the blood, and its light glows upward to the eyes and brain, producing discernment and clarity. Think of it this way: If the elements are not in balance—the air (wind) moves too fast and is undirected (air pushing fire around) and water is deficient causing dryness—then our bodies would align with a fire gone rogue. (Millions of acres and thousands of people are living the devastation of fire uncontrolled.) Yet when fire is contained, we are mesmerized by it and we gather around and relax and settle. Our nervous systems are calmed.

Mudras are powerful tools for health and healing. While this article hopefully provides a light introduction, mudras require respect. They are not picked up willy-nilly and applied on the run.

For more about this mudra and several other mudras that can support a life that is responsive, compassionate, and purposeful, please join me for my YTA workshop on November 14.

Aging Gracefully Takes Hard Work by Tao Porchon-Lynch

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:48:20 GMT

Let us will ourselves to live our life, not by empty words, but the radiance of meaning them and believing them. Our smile lights up our body with health.

~Tao Porchon-Lynch

No matter how old you are, let nature be your encyclopedia. Recycle yourself. The same thing will happen to us as we breathe in the breath of life; as with the four seasons, in winter everything looks dead, but the life force is in the midst of reactivating nature and spring returns. Your mind doesn't tire with mental thoughts of what you can't do, but take a break and breathe and the renewal season will respond to it and start a new cycle.

Know there is no such thing as "age." Tune in to the power of the eternal and feel the beauty of life. Nothing is impossible. You revitalize yourself with every breath you take.

Don't be submerged with tons of thoughts you never do. When you wake up in the morning, start the day and know it's going to be a good one. Don't get involved with anything negative.

Believe the power within you can be felt in the way you think and see life. There is always a positive answer to the way we live. Believe that all the power in the universe is right inside you. Don't procrastinate. Don't live for tomorrow.

Tomorrow never comes. One minute after midnight is already today. Don't let fear clog your thoughts or negative thoughts to invade the mind. Know that even in the worst calamity something good will come of it. Don't say I can't do something. The verb can or cannot doesn't exist. There is no such thing as can or cannot, only the verb to be able. Know that all the power in the universe is right inside of you. It is the doer and you are the instrument. So know there is nothing you cannot do.

Know that with each day the sun brings the dawn of recycling and renewal into the world. Let nature be your guide, your encyclopedia, and feel the wonder of living as you breathe the breath of life...the breath of the eternal.

People talk so much about getting older and they allow it to affect them. I don’t think about age at all. There’s not enough time to think about it with all that I accomplish in a day. Live and know that tomorrow never comes. Live for the moment!

I search within myself for the power of creation and inner energy radiates the eternal life force, and I don’t get tired.

Know whatever you put in your mind materializes. Do not think negative thoughts. Stagnant muscles cause stagnant minds. Don’t procrastinate.

Know the secret of life dwells within every breath we take. Live, live, live. Don’t waste your life restricting it. As dawn awakens nature and makes the darkness and ignorance of night fade away, let your body feel the freshness of the energy of a new day. There are so many wonderful things to do and so little time to do them!

Much of the development of my own life has been in experiencing the wonder of nature. Know that it gives us the clues to living. As for my own life, I have used these wonderful laws of nature to recycle my body. Then spring bursts forth and the dawn of new life appears throughout the world, bringing the new fruits of food, life, and energy into our lives. As I listen to my heartbeat, a new journey brings into my life a higher level of consciousness. The joy of living each day. I feel the dance of life.

Dawn awakens nature and makes the darkness and ignorance of night fade away. Let your body feel the freshness of the energy of a new day. There are so many wonderful things to do and so little time to do them!

One feels the life force alive within us and we know everything makes us believe in the renewal force inside of us. Dance, for it will open up the door of freedom from fear and the fun of knowing that we can do things we thought were impossible.

Reprinted from the June 2016 YTA newsletter

Reflections on Tao Porchon-Lynch by Renee Diamond

Sun, 31 May 2020 22:32:18 GMT

Tao passed away peacefully at the age of 101 on February 21 of this year, surrounded by loving friends. She did not have immediate family or blood relatives, but she had a very large organically grown family that grew from her communities of yoga, ballroom dance, the Wine Society of Westchester, and the Rotary Club of Hartsdale. The Yoga Teachers Association is part of that large family.

She did not want a funeral or burial ceremony of any kind. It was painful for all of us, set adrift in a sea of grief and loss with no place to mourn together or celebrate her extraordinary life and contribution to the world. Then COVID-19 came to town shortly after, and we were awash in a blur of incomprehensible circumstances.

I feel tremendous gratitude for the YTA in making this tribute to Tao possible. There couldn’t be a better time to gather together to find joy and inspiration. It will be a joyous afternoon honoring her life and also the formation of the YTA a little over 40 years ago, when Tao joined a group of bold pioneering women who galvanized and began this organization.

Tao’s life story is astonishing, from the unusual circumstances of her birth and her childhood growing up in Pondicherry, India, accompanying Gandhi in the Salt March, to her aunt’s vineyard in Provence, France, where she participated in helping the Jews escape from the Nazis, to her work with the French Resistance and wartime in London during the Blitz bombings, and finally arriving in Paris after the war to become a couture model. She had not yet reached 25!

Her life course from Europe to America, from Hollywood to Hartsdale, to her later years receiving Guinness World Record awards (two!), along with numerous international honors and worldwide acclaim, will be presented in photographs and stories.

Tao never sought fame or glory for any of the ways she served in the world. Her simple life as a yoga teacher is equally as impressive as anything she has done in her life for its humility and selflessness. Tao was, above all else, a humanitarian.

And so we gather on Saturday, June 13, to honor Tao for her achievements and inspiration and for reminding us that the selfless path we have all chosen as yoga teachers is a prodigious one.

Following the audiovisual presentation, we will have a yoga practice following Tao’s methodology and beliefs and highlighted by one of her beautiful meditations from her Reflections recording.

Yoga for Pain Relief by Lee Albert, NMT

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 10:00:55 GMT

Do you or your yoga students struggle with tight hamstrings, sore knees, back pain, or hips that won’t open? Is your stress making you sick? Do you feel anxious and find it difficult to relax and be calm? Is there an effective way to deal with these conditions through yoga? There sure is.

The focus of this class is yoga practice for well-being and pain relief using modern yoga.

The ancient yogis believed that a regular yoga practice could help with all aspects of one’s being. Since our lifestyles today are quite different from that of the ancient yogis, we will benefit by culling the traditional yoga practices that will most benefit our needs in the twenty-first century. The information I present is suitable for those new to yoga and for those who have been practicing for many years, both students and teachers. This material is for those who want to be able to achieve even better results from their yoga practice and for those who are struggling with certain poses and conditions. It is suitable for all body types.

In the May workshop hosted by the YTA, we will discuss the powerful benefits of asana (stretching), pranayama (breathing), and meditation, especially as they apply to neuromuscular conditions and the general health of the body, mind, and spirit. These tools of the ancient yogis are making resurgence in our modern world as science is confirming their many benefits.

In the final analysis, most pain is foundational, resulting from imbalances in the musculoskeletal system. We are in pain because we are misaligned, or “crooked.” We have poor posture as a result. Even if you think you have good posture, you probably don’t, as misalignments are often not obvious to the untrained eye. This class will teach you how to identify the most common misalignments and to develop a quick and simple approach to better posture and muscle balance which will help with many painful conditions in the body.

By incorporating this information into your practice and teaching, you will be able to more precisely choose the poses best suited for your current body conditions and those of your students. Yoga should not be about performing poses but rather selecting the poses that will most benefit current body conditions. Not all yoga postures are suitable for all individuals. Depending on postural imbalances, one might need to avoid certain poses until the body is back in balance. The information I am presenting will help identify these imbalances, explain how current poses might be causing or contributing to pain, and show you how to develop a yoga practice that can achieve the right balance for yourself or your students. The result will be less pain and more vitality.

Western medicine has few interventions for the musculoskeletal pain and stress often caused by our modern lifestyles. Typically, doctors prescribe painkillers, muscle relaxers, and anti-anxiety drugs. These can often bring some relief, but they are only treating the symptoms rather than the root problem.

Selecting the correct asanas (poses) for your particular musculoskeletal condition requires some knowledge of anatomy and muscle imbalances. Knowing how to deal with the stress and anxiety in our daily lives requires some knowledge of the mind and body. These yoga solutions will help you alleviate the root causes of your conditions.

I have trained thousands of people in my workshops, including MDs, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, and lay people. They have all learned how easy it is to reduce or eliminate pain. They all have learned how to achieve a greater sense of well-being when following my protocols.

This class will take you on a journey so you can discover:

the roots of yoga, and how traditional yoga differs from what we practice today

the miraculous mechanics of your musculoskeletal system

the cause of most aches and pains

how to reduce pain and achieve better results from your practice

how to select the correct asanas for your and your students’ conditions

why people get hurt practicing yoga and how to avoid injury

how to stretch

specific yoga flows for pain relief

guidelines for achieving superior results

the many benefits of pranayama and meditation

how to quickly reduce or eliminate stress and anxiety

how to integrate yoga into everyday life

Supporting Ourselves and Each Other During a Crisis

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 10:30:02 GMT

As we find ourselves following the same patterns of increased social distancing due to COVID-19 that we've watched communities around the world go through, we want to be a source of support for our members and community.

We're posting here member studios and teachers who are offering online classes—some free, some free for now, and some paid—as well as other small businesses and organizations that are doing what they can to support their communities during this time.

Feel free to post in the comments other service providers and businesses that are supporting customers during this time so that customers can support them in return. We will keep adding to this list as we can.

In addition to the below, we can try to support our local restaurants, which are still open for takeout or delivery for the time being, and gift certificates can be bought for many items and services. And remember to reach out to neighbors, friends, and family who may need help coping during this time. In addition to the scary health climate, increased social isolation can be tough for some to handle.

Keep deep breathing and stay well!

YTA Members offering online classes
Birchwood Yoga Center
PranaMoon Yoga
Willow Tree Yoga
Yoga Culture

Business and organizations offering socially distanced services

Most libraries have digital offerings that can be checked out remotely; some, like the Ossining Library, are offering tech help by phone or e-mail. (You can also call just to chat.)
Feed the Birds is offering delivery service within Croton-on-Hudson for orders over $20, or back-door pickup for others.
The Village Bookstore in Pleasantville is offering delivery service for orders over $25 and within 10 miles.
Bella Maiya Day Spa in Briarcliff Manor is offering at-home massages.

How I Fell in Love with Mudras by Deirdre Breen

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 12:33:24 GMT

Mudras were a mystery, and one I didn’t think I was “allowed” to explore. I thought they were only used by the “Grand Poobah” of yoga and, therefore, I didn’t touch them (pun intended) until … well, I am getting ahead of myself.

At my March YTA workshop I hope to save others from the unnecessary delay in discovering the support available in reaching for mudras in daily life. As the saying goes, having a relationship with mudras has made all the difference in my living. So, if you have any curiosity about mudras, I invite you wholeheartedly to join me! (There’s a mudra for wholeheartedness, did you know that?)

I first reached for the assistance of mudras as a teacher, not as a student. I was creating a curriculum for an Ayurveda and Yoga Study Group to help yoga teachers and students better understand how these ancient twin sciences can help balance our dosha and access our vital life force. As a health coach, yogi, and Ayurvedic health counselor, it is my job to support clients in creating a personalized approach to meet their individual health goals. Providing accessible and efficient tools are crucial aspects of my work and mudras help my clients and I succeed.

Ayurveda is the first whole medical system of our world with lifestyle as a founding principle. The study course I was designing included an assessment process to teach individuals to know their dosha and recognize the signs and symptoms of imbalances. This of course is crucial to avoid the disease process that follows chronic imbalances. Mudras are very useful tools to rebalance the elemental matrix. When we consider that in the palm of our hand we can influence our heart rate; in the tips of your fingers we can adjust our thyroid; or with a snap of our fingers ignite our digestion—the power of the mudras, while not as transformative as the breath, run a close second to the tools we carry with us.

No matter where we are or what we are doing, we can almost always assume a mudra to calm our anxiety, secure our boundaries, fortify our immune system, or get energized. As I designed the study course, the mudras were teaching me! I discovered they have a consciousness of their own, and like benevolent spirits guiding, they taught me to reach for them. I don’t like to say use them, because just like a friend, we don’t want to use anyone, but rather I appreciate them and relate to their qualities.

In my daily living, I balance my dosha, which usually means keeping vata in check with kurma mudra. This reduces vata’s forces of wind so that my systems don’t dry up or whip my thoughts around hither and thither like leaves on a windy day. I also engage samana vayu mudra before every meal to optimize digestion; I reach for pala mudra before a difficult conversation to calm anxiety; and I always seek pruna jnanam for discernment when making important decisions. I have a holy host of powerful forces at the ready to assist me in meeting life with a stable and confident posture. Until of course I can’t, as Dr. Suess says in Oh the places you’ll go, “…you’ll move mountains kid, except when you don’t, because sometimes you won’t!” And then there’s a mudra for that—despair and depression can be met with nonjudgmental support and the uplifting qualities of vajraprandama mudra.

As the practice and teaching of yoga evolves, She, our beloved Mother Yoga, remains steadfast and true. Her yamas and niyamas are our anchors while her sister, Ayurveda—the first lifestyle medicine—offers her tridoshic philosophy to guide our daily bread and breath. Yoga teachers are more sophisticated and are exploring beyond the physical stretch of asana and into the subtle body. We are hungry to understand how asana, pranayama, kriya, mantra, mudra, and meditation influence our subtle bodies; and how the subtle doshic forces of prana, tejas, and ojas guide the expression of their physical counterparts of vata, pitta, and kapha. These biological forces govern all life on earth; the wind, the rain, and the fire. Our ability to respect and cooperate with them is a great need.

We’ve seen how the forces of vata (wind) blow the fire element to devastating effect, for example, in Australia, California, and Brazil most recently. And we’ve seen how the earth’s instability (150 earthquakes across the globe in 2019) threatens our most fundamental needs of shelter, food, and a sense of belonging. While I can’t guarantee mudras will save the world, I can provide a comprehensive overview of them. Perhaps with this introduction the living gifts of mudra can enter your life, offering their handy access. And while you may not love them as I do, you will certainly come to appreciate them and one day may even find yourself telling a family member, friend, or student, “You know, there is a mudra that could help you.”

Learn more about Deirdre at deirdrebreen.info.

Yoga Nidra and Restorative Yoga, by Mona Anand

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 18:34:38 GMT

What Exactly Is Yoga Nidra?

I was first introduced to yoga nidra as a teenager in Mumbai, India, and the stillness it led me into had a profound impact on my practice and my teaching.

Yoga Nidra is a guided auditory meditation technique practiced lying down in savasana. In Sanskrit, nidra means sleep. Yoga nidra is often referred to as the sleepless sleep because it induces a state between being awake and being asleep known as the hypnogogic state in which the mind and body deeply relax. This powerful state on the threshold of being asleep and being awake can be used for many purposes that include deep relaxation, releasing memories locked in the subconscious and unconscious, and creating an expanded state of consciousness.

Yoga Nidra’s roots lie in an ancient tantric technique called nyasa in which practitioners held their awareness on different parts of the body and through concentration and the chanting of mantas were able to bring more consciousness to different parts of the body. We use a variation of nyasa in yoga nidra to move our awareness through the body in a particular order and to create a circuit of energy through the brain that allows us to enter the hypnogogic state.

Yoga nidra is highly adaptable both in length and purpose. It can range from just a few minutes to an hour-long practice depending on the purpose and time available. Most practices are between 15 and 40 minutes.

Why I Love Restorative

The impact restorative yoga has had in releasing stress and tension for me is very personal.

About fourteen years ago I had a bout of serious asthma attacks that were life-changing. I was continually in and out of the hospital and put on high levels of cortisone for an extended period that created extreme anxiety and panic attacks.

I started practicing restorative yoga, which was an integral part of my recovery. Restorative calmed my nervous system, relaxed my body, and released tension from my breath. The effects of this practice released the fear of future attacks.

No amount of trying to talk myself out of the situation helped because my whole system was stuck in a heightened state of tension and anxiety. I needed to learn to bypass my mind and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is exactly what restorative yoga does.

Why Restorative Is So Powerful

Modern life is fast-paced and filled with stressors that contribute to a constant level of low-grade stress that we're often unaware of. This continuous state of sympathetic nervous system arousal has led to many modern-day illnesses such as asthma, cancer, heart disease, and stress disorders.

Restorative yoga provides the prefect antidote to stress because it creates a supported pause. By completely supporting the body and being still for extended periods, the breath, the mind, and the nervous system begin to calm.

Different restorative poses can be used for different purposes, though they all help to calm and quiet the nervous system. There are poses that open the breath and lift our spirits when we're feeling depressed, poses that are supportive and nurturing when we're feeling anxious, and poses that target specific parts of the body where tension accumulates.

Restorative yoga releases tensions on physical, mental, and emotional levels. Since our bodies store all our past experiences, when we let go of the holding in the physical body we often have strong emotional releases. The suppressed emotions and past experiences locked in the body bubble up to the surface and are then released.

One of the advantages of a restorative practice is that it can be applied universally to everyone. People who aren't physically able to practice asana, such as the elderly and physically challenged can reap the benefits of deep relaxation and energetic rebalancing.

Restorative Yoga and Yoga Nidra

When I started teaching adults I included yoga nidra at the end of every class. Most students didn’t know what it was at the time but they kept coming back for more. One of my fellow teachers advised me not to include yoga nidra in classes in New York City. My colleague said students would get frustrated and leave because New Yorkers couldn’t slow down, but the opposite happened and people came back for more. It’s exactly what we need in NYC but we often don’t know it. I found that adding yoga nidra at the end of the practice was very powerful because the restorative postures led students into a place of deep stillness which when followed by yoga nidra induced an even deeper state of surrender enabling the release of past experiences locked in the subconscious and unconscious.

I’ve now been teaching my restorative/yoga nidra workshops for the past 12 years. I've worked with Alan Finger to develop a nine-step approach to yoga nidra called "Mona Anand's Ishta Yoga Nidra."

I design yoga nidras for different imbalances such as insomnia, depression, and anxiety. I also design yoga nidra practices for chakra and dosha imbalances, which I teach in restorative/yoga nidra workshops. I am currently writing a book with Alan Finger on yoga nidra and the chakras.

To learn more about Mona, visit monaanandyoga.com.

Welcome, 2020 by Paula Renuka Heitzner

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Here we are, beginning a new year and a new decade, certainly an auspicious time! We look forward with great zeal and optimism, as we rightly should, to how we will manifest, at long last, that which will help us to experience greater fulfillment.

One thing I learned from the years that have passed is that the promises and resolutions put forth at the time of holiday excitement dismally slow down and dim as the energy stabilizes. In fact, the old habits and patterns that were to be changed for the better might even alter to become more fixed and stuck.

I would like to share my personal experiences of the last two years that have enriched and changed my practice of yoga. As we all know, because of our interest and involvement in yoga, with its philosophies and all-encompassing teachings, we have a head start toward those changes we desire. At the first YTA retreat at the Himalayan Institute led by Luke Ketterhagen, one point he made resulted in a major physical shift for me resulting in greater freedom of thought. The refinement of Mula Bhanda by using the image of how an octopus travels toward the surface of the sea changed my existing point of view, thus allowing my mind to be more flexible and my physical body to use the strength of the pelvis more efficiently.

At the second YTA retreat at the Himalayan Institute with Todd Norian, another simple teaching resulted in greater stability of the shoulder girdle, with the supported expansion of the rib cage permitting more activity for the breath to enhance the function of the heart and lungs. The teaching of simply moving the head of the humorous bone back brought greater alignment to the shoulder, the rotator cuff, the neck, and in the embodiment of the rib cage over the pelvis.

At this time I am choosing to embrace these teachings, as well as those that continue to evolve through my practice, to enhance, brighten, and strengthen the "now" which ultimately becomes the future. This is my New Year's resolution. We have within us all the joy and light we seek and through our practice, the means to intuit our path and to be inspired as we integrate these teachings for our own greater good.

Make sure your "list" includes attending the monthly YTA workshops that are held the second Saturday of each month at Club Fit in Briarcliff. See the exciting lineup of workshops and presenters below and on our website. And keep in mind the third annual YTA retreat!

Yours in yoga,
Paula Renuka Heitzner

What Is Yoga? by Ingrid Bacci

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 16:43:12 GMT

Some of us come to yoga in a quest to resolve problems with pain, to reduce stress, or to explore our fascination with the body. Others come as part of a spiritual journey, in a quest for greater meaning and personal transcendence. Still others come to yoga seeking emotional balance, freedom from negative emotions, and liberation from a karmic inheritance. Because yoga is a profound discipline, wherever we begin our journey, we eventually find ourselves addressing all these dimensions of healing: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

I was introduced to yoga in 1975 when I was a young professor of philosophy, through the renowned philosopher Mircea Eliade’s classic book, written in 1936, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Yoga, as Eliade described it, is the pathway to direct knowledge, or the ability to liberate ourselves from illusion. But if ultimate wisdom and the freedom it brings is the goal of yoga, why and how must we use the body to get there? What is it that we are looking for through bodily exploration, beyond greater strength, stability, focus, and alignment? And why can bodily self-awareness lead us to the truth with a big capital “T”? The challenges I faced in my own life led me to explore those questions. The answers to those questions all revolve around one thing: the body is the seat of what is unconscious ourselves. What lies beyond consciousness includes both our restrictions and limitations (all the forms that ego takes), and our higher self. The path into the body brings what is unconscious to light in order to let go of what binds us and become free.

My own life took me out of a purely intellectual journey as a philosopher and into intensive somatic self-exploration. In 1976 I began to suffer from severe chronic pain. No amount of hospitalization or conventional medical care helped me. Over the years I came to realize that my dis-ease was the result of a combination of factors: on the physical level, scoliosis and a tight ligamentous structure; on the mental level, a hard-driving, self-critical type A personality; and on the karmic level, buried emotional conflicts dating to infancy and before. I was tied up in knots, and it was my body, not my mind, that was showing me that.

I spent years studying meditation with an Indian spiritual teacher, all of which helped. Then I discovered the Alexander Technique in the late 1980s and its study opened the door to a complete change in understanding of who we are and how to heal. The Alexander Technique is a specific approach to learning how to identify and release unconscious physiological tension. While this tension is physical, it affects every aspect of our being: our thought processes, emotional reactions, and so on. You can’t change those thought processes or emotional reactions more than marginally through mental analysis or psychotherapy, because ultimately the body rules the mind. FM Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique, showed that all of us carry excess physiological tension all the time, and demonstrated that this unconscious tension underlies physical disease, as well as mental and emotional stress. He developed ingenious methods for helping people identify, observe, and release this tension. The consequence of putting your primary attention on noticing, feeling,and releasing physiological tension is that life as a whole becomes increasingly effortless, the mind becomes more peaceful, perception becomes more accurate, health improves, and it becomes easier to stay detached in the face of life’s bumps.Does this sound like yoga? It is. It’s not the same as yoga, but it shares a lot of yoga’s ultimate aims. It just uses different tools, a different terminology, and comes from a different culture.

The path into the subtle body in yoga is the path into more and more refined sensation and perception. It’s a path toward effortlessness. We move from the grosser to the subtler sensations and perceptions. As we learn to do this, we are increasingly able to release negative karmic issues, tied to heavier and grosser sensations (being more tamasic or rajasic), and move toward lighter, more expansive and sattvic states. This process of refinement can only happen if we make effortlessness—softening and letting go—more important than achieving, being right, or any other ego issue. The deeper we move into refined physiological sensation, the more we let go of outer compulsions and reactions. The commitment to the exploration of lighter and lighter states of being is a very important aspect of higher yogic practice. This is a process of ever subtler physiological awareness.

The quest for effortlessness, with everything it implies, both mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, has been a guiding force in my understanding, study, and teaching of both the Alexander Technique, craniosacral therapy (which I have practiced and taught internationally since 1994), and yoga. It has also been the focus of my three books on self-healing: The Art of Effortless Living, Effortless Pain Relief, and Fear-Less Now.

The practice of yoga extends far beyond our workout on the mat, in which most of our attention is on strengthening, stabilizing,and expanding the body. As yogis, we all seek to release our own samskaras (grosser physical, spiritual, and emotional restrictions) and become more attuned to our more refined, sattvic selves. And this is a process that takes place every moment of every day. The conscious pursuit of physiological effortlessness, which is identical with deepening peace, can be a great adjunct to the yogi’s journey, and can help deepen one’s understanding of the core meaning of ancient yogic practices.

Lions, Tigers, Elephants—and Prana! by Sandra Anderson

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 11:37:04 GMT

From Asana to Samadhi: Exploring the Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Just as lions, tigers, and elephants are gradually controlled, so prana is controlled through practice. Otherwise the practitioner is destroyed.
—Hatha Yoga Pradipika 2:15

How well-trained is your inner lion-tiger-elephant? This verse from the preeminent hatha yoga text, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, suggests that we all have a beastly inclination in need of taming. This is probably not news to you; most of us know our inner lion-tiger-elephant all too well! It’s the part of us that wants what it wants when it wants it, regardless of the consequences. It’s the blind instinct of life: the powerful drives of hunger, fear, sex, and sleep. It’s our inner two-year-old stamping her foot and refusing to share her cookies, eat her peas, or go to bed on time. This untrained lion-tiger-elephant resists any efforts at discipline or restraint. Unregulated, it rampages blindly through life, driven by instinct and habit. From the yogic point of view, we are acting out patterns laid down in the unconscious mind, spinning on the wheel of karma, mindlessly squandering prana, our precious life force, on worldly affairs without making an attempt to realize the purpose of life.

However, the verse also implies that although we have inherited a beastly side, we have also inherited an inner-wild-animal trainer. In other words, we have the inherent capacity to control prana and regulate the life force that animates our body and mind. This trainer has intelligent self-awareness, and serves as an inner locus of control that is not thoughtlessly driven by unregulated passions, selfish desires, fear, or greed. Our inner trainer has discrimination, intention, and purpose. Our inner trainer has the capacity to train the exuberant pranic force and create a harmonious, enjoyable inner world.

Now the question becomes: what kind of training, and how do we train ourselves? As for what kind of training, here’s a hint: The verse appears in the chapter about pranayama practice, in a text on the practice of hatha yoga.

As for how: Prana gradually comes under control with practice. Perhaps that reminds you of what Patanjali tells us right up front in the Yoga Sutra (YS 1:14): “That [practice] becomes firm only when done for a long period of time, with no interruption, and with reverence.” He’s explaining abhyasa, the “ardent effort to retain the peaceful flow of the mind free from roaming tendencies.” Bringing prana under control reins in the wild-animal mind, roaming under the spell of its habits and instincts, but mastery is achieved only with sustained, uninterrupted, reverent practice.

Like instincts, our individual karmic samskaras can be deeply ingrained in our unconscious mind. It takes time and consistency to create positive new habits that are just as strong as our undesirable old habits. This is true of training elephants and tigers, and it is true of training our mind. Patience is required in training wild animals, and that is just what is needed in working with our inner lion-tiger-elephant. Patience means having reasonable expectations, avoiding condemnation, staying the course in the face of setbacks, and cultivating commitment for the long run. It also requires having faith in the practice and in the process of training. Faith, or shraddha, develops from knowledge and understanding, from our own experience, and from confidence in the experience of those who have gone before us—the lineage and tradition of teachers and practitioners who have shared their accomplishments and their methods. Without faith, doubt undermines our dedication and consistency of effort.

Finally, practice with reverence. Have respect for the inner lion-tiger-elephant and its enormous strength and power. After all, our animal nature is also an expression of the divine, worthy of our respect, and essential for our life here in the phenomenal world. The Sanskrit word sevita, translated in this verse as “practice,” has connotations of protection and preservation, as well as pursuit and practice. We must be firm and consistent in practice, yes, but we must also feed and protect our inner lion-tiger-elephant self. Think of it this way: Love and serve your teeth and claws, and they will love and serve you.

And now we come to the consequences of not training ourselves. “The sadhaka (practitioner) is destroyed,” reads the last stanza of this verse. At the mercy of haphazard experiences, instinct, social conditioning, and deep-seated distorted perceptions, the untrained mind creates enormous stress in the mind and body, and so we fall victim to distress, sorrow, anger, and disease. Untrained, the pranic force runs amok, exhausting our vitality in the pursuit of worldly and instinctive desires. We suffer; we die in ignorance; the practitioner is destroyed. The great gift and promise of yoga is that we can bring the wild animal to heel. Then our passions, in the service of a greater intelligence, operate joyfully and harmoniously at every level of our being. Our vision begins to clear, and we realize that our life’s beastly inclinations and all—is emanating from the source of divine consciousness, eternally pulsing in the depths of our heart.

Republished with permission from himalayaninstitute.org

Alison West's Journey to Yoga

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 10:55:11 GMT

My interest in scoliosis was fueled both by my own right thoracolumbar curve and my mother’s severe scoliosis, generated by having her left arm braced overhead for the first six months of her life. A boyfriend’s scoliosis is what originally brought me to yoga itself. I was looking for something that might help him with his back. Together we started yoga classes in Munich.

When I returned to New York, I continued my studies, slowly making it my career path, and went on to train with both Elise Miller and Bobbie Fultz, the two Iyengar pioneers of yoga for scoliosis. I completed my certification in yoga for scoliosis with Elise Miller. I began anatomy studies with Irene Dowd in New York, and subsequently completed Gil Hedley’s life-changing six-day human dissection course for nonmedical professionals. I continued to study anatomy and kinesiology and developed new material for yoga for scoliosis. I also began using mudras, energy-channeling hand gestures that can deeply impact the body and mind.

In 2007, I cofounded the first and only dedicated yoga for backcare and scoliosis center in the world. There I conduct “Gold Standard” 200-hour Three-Pillars of Practice Teacher Trainings and a full 500-hour Mandala of Yoga Masters program and teach workshops and master classes nationwide, in Europe and in the Middle East. In 2011, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I opened the new Yoga Union and Yoga Union Backcare & Scoliosis Center, with both a dedicated Backcare Program and a full regular yoga program from basics to level 3-4.

I also became involved in the creation of Yoga for NY in 2007, the organization that represents all yoga studios, teachers, and students in New York State, when the state attempted to license Yoga Teacher Trainings. I was elected Executive Director and Chair of Yoga for NY, which succeeded in defeating this licensing attempt with a bill signed into law by then Governor Paterson. I went on to defeat the city’s attempt to impose a “class tax” on yoga classes despite the prevailing view that this would be impossible to accomplish.

My workshop for the YTA on November 9 will give the basic tools for reading a back and an understanding of the fundamental principles of action to help balance the spine, as well as the entire interconnected organic body.

Learn more at yogaunion.com.

Yoga and Qigong by Daniel Orlansky

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 10:45:36 GMT

From the base of the mountain, many paths. From the peak, only one moon.

While yoga has its roots in Indian Vedic scriptures, qigong grew out of the Chinese Taoist pursuit of longevity. For me, they are different paths up the same mountain; the goal of each is to improve the health of the body, to calm and clarify the mind, and to strengthen connection to the human spirit and humanity. These forms complement each other so well, that for me a synthesis of yoga and qigong as a practice has become the most potent combination for the improving my life and the lives of my students.

Looking at each system separately (and I know I’m speaking in broad categorizations), yoga has been described as the “union of body, mind, and spirit.” The physical practices of yoga are geared towards the cultivation of strength and flexibility in the body. As I see it, for the most part the postures of yoga are quite lineal, with straight lines and angles predominating. Alignment and precision are not only important, but required; to really “stretch” the body we need to bring sustained effort to opening the connective tissue in ways that do not injure. This requires correct technique, time, and skillful application of effort.

Qigong translates as “life energy cultivation” and utilizes practices that enhance the flow of life force in our bodies. The exercises often involve connecting breath with gentle, circular, flowing movements, bringing suppleness to the body and flexibility to the mind. It is this suppleness that allows the free flow of healing life force (qi) and connects one to authentic being. Through qigong practice the senses are cleansed, and the movement of energy is experienced as pure joy.

These two systems, yoga and qigong, are not at odds with each other. On the contrary, they are mutually supportive paths up the same mountain, from which the “one moon” can be seen in all it’s brilliance. Strength and flexibility through yoga (ability to hold firm) and suppleness (ability to hold yield) through qigong.

So, in the end, the objective is to meld the linear (expansion in all directions) and the circular (return to the source), creating a practice that improves strength, flexibility and suppleness. This brings balance to yin and yang, heaven and earth, sun and moon, male and female. Dancing with this “pair of opposites” brings balance to the whole being and connects us to all of nature.

For more about Daniel, visit yogaofenergyflow.com/.

My Yoga Journey by Ravi Singh

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 11:05:09 GMT

From the late '60s forward, I had the good fortune to study with many of the renowned yoga teachers who had come to the U.S. from India. Yoga felt incredibly familiar to me and totally in alignment with my path and purpose, but I always felt that something was missing, something as yet undefined. It seemed that many of the Eastern teachers assumed that Western bodies and Western psyches were somehow not quite ready for the truly authentic, unabashed techniques that would deliver us to unprecedented breakthroughs and bliss. That all changed when Yogi Bhajan unveiled Kundalini Yoga, which I encountered as a student at the University in Chicago in 1972.

Kundalini is a tantric path. Tantra means that the seen and unseen are interwoven. It also posits that desperate times (Kaliyug or the Age of Darkness, which we're in now despite the onset of the Aquarian Age) call for desperate measures (i.e., what works!). Kundalini Yoga is immediate, powerful, and potent. It's a gift to humanity from the saints and sages of the ages and lets us enter into the profound process of our unfolding in the context of life as we know it. Life is the crucible for our transformation process. But we need to approach life with a firm discipline and the willingness to take our yoga beyond our mat and extend it to everything we do.

I first met Yogi Bhajan in 1973. He was not like the swamis and gurus I'd met previously. He was more like Sean Connery in the Wind and the Lion rather than Ben Kingsley in Ghandi. What I learned from Yogi Bhajan was exactly what I'd always been looking for in my yoga journey: something immediate; something with some spiritual juice; and, most importantly, something that I could pass on as a teacher to help people deal effectively with all of the issues they invariably encounter.

For many years I was the only Kundalini Yoga teacher in Manhattan. I had a number of yoga centers and throughout the '80s and beyond I published books, videos, and DVDs. In the 2000s I met Ana Brett, who was a sub for the Vinyasa teachers at my studio. We soon merged into one unit and began to teach together. We recently published The Kundalini Yoga Book—Life in the Vast Lane, a 10-year project.

This year marks my 45th year of teaching. Yoga now in the U.S. is a bit bipolar. On one hand, it's trendy and silly (goat yoga, beer yoga, nude yoga…) and conversely it's evolving into something amazing. What I foresee is a Grand Synthesis of yoga styles that will be woven through the fabric of our culture and consciousness.

A Kundalini Yoga teacher is a spiritual teacher because Kundalini Yoga is all about spirit. When spirit is present we can live our greatness. The purpose of Kundalini Yoga is to give us the means to live lit up. What I see happening among many modern yogis is that people are sometimes losing sight of what's important. The key is to remember what the saints and sages have been telling us for 5000 years. Successful living means bringing our minds and emotions under conscious control. Also, we need to deal with karma before it deals with us. We need to live in a way that honors and gathers energy. Our chakras, nadis, nerves, and all bodily systems need to be aligned and purified every day. Every day we need to ingratiate ourselves with the self that never dies. Kundalini Yoga gives us the means to do all that every day so we can live the high life. Then our life can become our yoga and yoga can be our life.

I look forward to seeing all of you on September 14 at the YTA's kickoff for the 2019 season of workshops. You will experience a yoga workout, and we'll also be focusing on yoga tools for every form of modern malaise. These include: thyroid issues, addiction, weight loss, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, issues around menopause, adrenal fatigue, digestive issues, depression, insomnia ... and anything you would like to request a protocol for.

Increase your professional palette. Share in a powerful group energy. Give your life and practice an energy boost. Manifest destiny and heal the world!

To learn more about Ravi, go to raviana.com.

Healing Through Dance by Dan Leven

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 21:55:36 GMT

I just read a column for a newsletter that I wrote 9 years ago entitled Healing Through Dance. I had written it after my 53rd birthday ... Yes, that makes me 62 years old now. And the essence of what I wrote in that article still holds true for me today, that dance is healing.

In the article, I was sharing how some painful feelings were opening up for me in celebrating my birthday. Any of you know that experience, where celebrating your birthday brings up issues!?

A few days after that birthday, I was teaching at my studio and because of my struggles around my birthday, I had no inspiration to teach, nothing to give. Yet the music spoke to my spirit, and the pain I felt around my birthday transformed into the joy of dance.

So as I’m in my 60s, I still have the same joy through dance as I had in my teens!! I would have never imagined when I was in my late teens and discovering dance as a career path that I would be dancing like this at 62!

Not only that, I still feel as connected to the grace, power, and aliveness in my body—maybe even more so now than I had over 40 years ago. As I've cultivated more mindfulness and connection to energy within the body, it actually feels like I feel MORE joy and life force moving within me as I dance now. What a blessing!

What's the secret to healing through dance? My sense is that what makes dance healing is that it keeps our spirit young. When rockin' music is playing what do kids do? Yes, they dance! Put the same music on in a room full of adults and what do they do? They usually talk. Something has happened to the spontaneity of our spirit that we had as children and how our spirit was intimately connected to our body.

We can recover this lost connection of body and spirit. That's why I call Shake Your Soul "the yoga of dance." When our body and spirit return to each other—THAT is yoga! The key to recovering our spirit's youthfulness through dance can be as simple as putting on a piece of music that moves you and let it move you!

Honestly, that is a big part of it—trusting our movement instinct. Yet there is something even MORE wonderful when we have this kind of communion experience of our bodies and souls in a community of other bodies and souls. Dance, indigenously, was a community experience for the most part.

For me, the art of teaching a dance class that invites people's spirits and bodies to unite is in the linking of meditative movement disciplines like yoga and qi gong into the dance experience. This provides participants a direct connection to embodied spirit that can then find its way into the dance. Alongside this, I build in creative dance exercises into my classes, what many of us did as kids, like follow the leader.

We all need permission and support to reconnect to our creative spirits. We all get the encouragement to exercise, become more flexible, and increase muscular strength and cardiovascular health—all so very important. Yet what about the health of our being that IS about reconnecting our bodies and movement with our life force or spirit? How can we be disciplined in terms of building movement back into our lives but at the same time connected to the FREEDOM of our spirits that dance can bring us?

I invite you to answer these questions experientially through dancing with me at my Shake Your Soul workshop January 12th. It would be a joy and privilege for me to support you in uniting your body with your spirit through dance.

To learn more about Dan, visit leveninstitute.com.

How I Became a Laughter Yoga Master Trainer by Robert Rivest

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 23:52:59 GMT

My background is in the performing arts. I have been presenting comic mime, health, literacy, and stress management educational programs in schools, libraries, and theaters for over 30 years. In 2009, Mary Rives and Keith Carlson offered a Laughter Yoga session at my performing arts guild. I loved it. I felt great on the drive home and for several hours afterward. That night, I read online everything I could about Laughter Yoga and Dr. Kataria. I ordered and studied several Laughter Yoga books, CDs, and DVDs. I shared Laughter Yoga with everyone I met. I set up a number of friends that I would call and, without a word, simply laugh together to relieve stress.

In 2010, I took my Laughter Yoga Leader Training with Rebecca J. Foster and immediately set up a weekly Laughter Yoga club. I started offering classes in senior centers. I also presented free public awareness programs and mini-demos everywhere I could. I started including Laughter Yoga follow-along segments in my comic mime shows, health shows, and stress management programs. I did over 500 of these shows, sharing Laughter Yoga with audiences of 200 to 600 people at a time. From a desire deep in my heart to share Laughter Yoga with people near and far, I created several “Laugh Along with Robert” YouTube videos. To my surprise, they became very popular and increased my laughing audience worldwide by the thousands.

In 2011, I attended Jeffrey Brier’s Laughter Yoga Teacher Training and began leading two-day Laughter Yoga Leader Trainings and presenting Laughter Yoga in corporations, schools, hospitals, fitness studios, minimum security drug and alcohol rehab facilities . . . you name it. In 2013, I attended and assisted Dr. Kataria’s 5-day Laughter Yoga Teacher Training in Orlando, Florida , and was invited to Japan to share my style of Laughter Yoga. In 2015, I became a Laughter Ambassador and in 2016 I was trained and mentored by Dr. Kataria to be a Certified Laughter Yoga Master Trainer. I have taught over 30 Laughter Yoga Leader Trainings in the USA and Japan.

Personally, the real benefits of Laughter Yoga came when I committed myself to practicing pranayama and Laughter Yoga everyday. I have witnessed myself become more playful, joyful, generous, giving, friendly, peaceful. and relaxed. I am more present with my family and friends. I had a difficult/distant relationship with my father and in his later years he happily attended my Laughter Yoga classes. I believe it may have eased some of the symptoms of his Parkinson's disease. My younger sister occasionally attends my Laughter club and my older sister graduated from my first Laughter Yoga Leader training in 2012.

Mentally and physically, I am much healthier now. I get sick less often, can exercise more, and breathe more easily than ever before. In my early 30s, I suffered from several trauma-induced and stress-related illnesses including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and allergies. To heal, I practiced mindfulness meditation, Tai-Chi, Qigong, and yoga. Since 2009, Laughter Yoga has been a major part of my healing process and has helped to greatly reduce many of my symptoms.

Socially, things have opened up for me too. I am a better listener now and more understanding and compassionate. People everywhere are friendlier to me. I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of a social network of laughing, caring, Laughter Yoga friends all around the world!

Professionally, I am much more understanding of my clients’ needs and am able to “go with flow” with greater ease when "surprise" situations occur. Laughter Yoga has been exceptionally beneficial for me as a performer and speaker. It has given me tremendous control of my breathing and vocal quality. I am able to give more of myself and be of greater service. Laughter Yoga has helped me reach, and truly connect with, an even more diverse group of people, in an ever-widening circle of joy. I have cotaught with several Laughter Yoga professionals and look forward to more laughing partnerships in the future. The ripple effect of Laughter Yoga is amazing and very profound.

Robert Rivest is presenting Laughter, Expression, and Joy on December 8.

Find out more about Robert at robertrivest.com.

My Inspiration Through the Yogic Scriptures and Philosophy by Jeff Migdow, MD

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 16:32:31 GMT

One night while I was in college, some friends and I began discussing philosophy, reaction to the Viet Nam war and the military presence at our college, and if there was a common point between spirituality or activism. Our feeling was that spiritual practice is an internal process where we see external reality as an illusion, and activism is believing that only focused political action can create change. That night, we spoke into the wee hours. In the morning, my friend needed to stop at the library to work on a paper. I accompanied him and was drawn to the philosophy section. My body drew me to the yoga section—right to the Bhagavad Gita. I spent the next 2 hours totally enthralled in the Gita and felt as if I had read it many times before. What Krishna was teaching Arjuna was the conversation we were having the night before!

Arjuna cannot see a place for connection of spiritual practice and political action. Krishna teaches him that people can only be in spiritual practice if they act in the world in the moment from their truth and bring their spiritual knowledge into the human condition. This was so powerful for me; it showed me how I could deepen my spiritual practice by following my activist feelings against that war. This was the beginning of my true spiritual path and exploration. As I demonstrated against the war and the injustice and hypocrisy, I also began practicing yoga and meditation. I felt rather than demonstrating in anger that I was coming more from conviction and true wanting to shift my consciousness and that of the people I was close to.

The next semester I walked into a class on Eastern philosophy with my best friend. The teacher taught the basics of yoga philosophy eloquently, and I felt as if I was back in India learning outside in a field with a breeze, flowers, and birds. We could almost hear the birds chirping. The course turned out to be life-changing for me—studying the full realm of yoga philosophy from the Rig Vedas up to the words of Shankara. The depth of the discussions and their relevance in our day-to-day life was transforming as we explored the Gita, Yoga Sutras, Narada and Shiva Sutras, Vedas, and other ways to look at reality. The key here was that they all involved some type of physical or mental regimen that allowed me to experiment with various practices, from pranayama to chanting, asana, and meditation.

I continued to explore yoga and philosophy in college, making philosophy a minor in my program. I took yoga classes, taught yoga, deepened my outdoor pranayama and meditation practice, and chanted on the quad with some friends. I felt my consciousness opening and inner clarity deepening.

My medical education was tedious and often boring as most of the materialistic philosophy that was applied to healing made no sense to me. I was firm in believing in prana and an energy body by then and craved to learn about natural methods. My education was supported by my yoga practice. The postures kept my body healthy, as what meditation did for my mind. The lessons of the Gita and Yoga Sutras kept me feeling centered and in myself. When on call two nights a week, I used pranayama rather than coffee to stay awake all night, and I found it to keep me clearer and more relaxed than were the other students and interns. I was able to relax the patients and doctors around me. The practice had a profound effect on my belief in yoga practice and the philosophy of the existence of subtle bodies. I encouraged patients to relax, stretch, and breathe, resulting in my patients being released much more quickly from the hospital than patients not encouraged to do this.

While in medical school in 1976 I saw an advertisement about the Kripalu ashram and that the Guru and a few residents would be visiting Chicago. I attended the meeting and fell in love with the idea of living a yogic lifestyle while doing work that was uplifting for people and society.

I began to lead the Kripalu group in Chicago while in medical school, and later when I was in DC in 1979 during my internship. We spent much time studying the yogic writings and ways to integrate the teachings into our day-to-day life. This led me to meet some people who were being treated with homeopathy. I saw how they were helped medically in a nonviolent way and began an apprenticeship in homeopathy.

I moved into Kripalu in 1980 and spent most of the next 15 years there. It was a great training ground to learn more deeply about yoga practice, to study the yogic scriptures, and to teach them to other residents and students.

Since 1997, I have led workshops around the world on yoga practice, teachings, and lifestyle and how we can integrate the teachings into our lives and practice for greater health, vitality, and consciousness. I feel that my initial experience of finding and reading the Gita while in college was one of the greatest and best turning points of my life.

Jeff Migdow will be leading "The Practical Wisdom of the Yogic Scriptures" on November 10, 2018.

My Journey with Yoga by Jeff Migdow/Prabhakar

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 10:29:37 GMT

It's 1957. The 6-year-old boy is outside in the dead of winter looking at the Orion nebula with his new telescope. He is alone, as no one else wants to come out into the Chicago winter wind. He can’t look for too long at a time as the freezing metal eyepiece burns his skin. He pulls back from the telescope and gazes into the magnificently clear night sky. He is drawn to the red shoulder star in Orion, Betelgeuse. He feels a pull up and towards this star and feels at the same time joy and pain in his heart. He feels his connection to all things but also his confusion around the sadness in the eyes and face of one of his classmates. In this moment he sees the boy’s face and feels not only his pain but the pain of humans in the world. Tears start to flow from his eyes, freezing as they stream down his face. He gazes into the soul of Betelgeuse and asks out loud, “Why can’t all people be happy?” And then wishes for the happiness of all beings. His first memory of the Oneness in both joy and sorrow.

The next night I walk outside late at night to look at these stars again, and I begin to hear the words Orion, then Betelgeuse. “That’s a strange word,” I thought, and then a rush of memories flooded into my being. I was that boy gazing at the stars, loving Orion, the cosmos, living so fully and praying for all people to be happy. What had happened to that full experience? Where had it gone all these years? Where had I gone?

These questions reopened me to my inner self and connection to life on a deeper level. The connection I had until I was 7 years old, when I became embarrassed to be free in my actions and thoughts and constricted myself into a typical American boy. Here I was 14 years later, reconnecting to that freedom of thought and wonder and connection to life, activated by my recent delving into the science and practice of yoga. I had discovered and read a copy of the Bhagavad Gita at the college library. I had gone to the library with a friend and was magically drawn to the yoga philosophy section. The wisdom of the Gita felt so profound as it touched my soul. As if I had read these words hundreds of times before, the wisdom of the Enlightened Self guiding the ego mind, the connection of all things within ourselves.

Yoga practice—yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, and the depths of meditation—taught so clearly in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, has brought such presence, richness, and openness into my life. It has led me to connect with wonderful people, find deep relationships and friendships, given me the confidence and clarity to spend my life earning a living practicing what I love: energy medicine, Reiki, and teaching all aspects of yoga all due to the knowing that the prana flow is real, more real than my mental concepts and judgments. It led me to living for 15 years at Kripalu ashram, where every day was a deep journey into life within and around me and to transition to day-to-day life in our cynical, materialistic culture. Through yoga workshops I have traveled all around the world, meeting people of many different cultures and connecting to yoga aspirants in an open clear way.

I have deep gratitude for the practice of yoga and philosophy and the profound effects it has had on my life and the life of many of those I have touched—family, friends, colleagues, students. It’s the vibration that is opened through the practice of yoga/union that not only vibrates throughout my being but affects the world around me. The energy of light/love/presence that resounds and travels is palpable and has been a true blessing in my life.

Jeff Migdow will be presenting "The Practical Wisdom of the Yogic Scriptures" on November 10, 2018.

The Trouble with Tension by Christa Rypins

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:38:02 GMT

Tension is who we think we should be. Relaxation is who we are.
—Unknown

Tension is the underlying cause of so many pesky things: headaches, pain, injury, prolapsed organs, cardiovascular disease, crabbiness, low self-esteem, hamstring tightness, inability to feel, and collapsed arches—to name just a few!

The lucky among us discover yoga and meditation, which shifts our relationship with tension. The unlucky among us might find themselves in the above paragraph.

Take note: Unattended tension becomes pain.

As a professional figure skater doing four shows a day, five on weekends, seven days a week, I know a bit about tension. With years of that skating schedule, the tension turned to pain. I loved skating and performing so much that I ignored the pain.

Until I couldn’t.

After nine years of professional skating, I discovered yoga. Sometimes yoga helped relieve tension. Sometimes it made the pain worse. I couldn't understand why.

My own experience, mixed with the opposing information on poses and body position, coalesced into a search to understand the body. That search lead to modalities such as Somatics, Pilates, and finally the Franklin Method Imagery.

In the Franklin Method, we picture our own anatomy through “embodiment.” This practice causes tension to melt away and pain to disappear. It completely changed my neck, shoulders, hips, sense of myself, and in turn what I teach.

I begin every yoga class with a tension-relieving embodiment. This helps students feel more connected to their bodies. Tension melts away as they move through poses. The Franklin Method helps students move with more ease.

It is tension hidden in the deeper layers of the body that often cause the most pain. When the tension is released, the benefits ripple outward: reduced pain, ease of movement, and emotionally expanded sense of self.

Here are two warm-ups for deep muscles. Please practice them and share with your students.

Hanging Psoas Release

Obterator Internus Stretch

In Pelvic Power, my workshop with the YTA on October 13, we’ll use embodiment to picture and feel the bones of the pelvis. Tuning into bone rhythms is the fastest way to relieve tension and make pain disappear. The tension is replaced by vitality and pain-free living.

The format of the workshop is embody, practice, teach, repeat. You will leave the workshop with a clear picture of posture, felt alignment, practical tools, and pelvic empowerment. I look forward to being with you at Pelvic Power!

Learn more about Christa at intelligentbody.net.

Light on Ganesha: Remover of Obstacles by Todd Norian

Sat, 18 Aug 2018 22:14:35 GMT

The goal of all humanity is to free ourselves from the self-created prison of the mind.
~ Albert Einstein

Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity, is the most widely known and worshipped deity in the pantheon of deities of India. Ganesha has the head of an elephant, the body of a boy, and rides around on a mouse. He represents the lord of auspicious beginnings and is the great remover of obstacles. With belly-breaking humor, he reminds us not to take life so seriously. Ganesha's name is chanted at the beginning of new ventures to invoke blessings of grace and remove the obstacles to bring forth the most benevolent outcome.

The mouse is Ganesha's vahana (vehicle). It's what he rides around on. All of the Hindu deities have a vehicle, which serves as a metaphor specific to that deity. Ganesha's vahana is particularly important with respect to obstacles because have you ever tried to catch a mouse? If you have, you know it's impossible. Mice can squeeze through very narrow openings. They seem to disappear into thin air. Their skeletons are extremely elastic, which allows them to slip through cracks in the wall or floor without you ever noticing.

Ganesha rides around on a mouse for several reasons. The first of which is humor. I find it ridiculous and humorous that one of the largest animals on the planet rides on one of the smallest animals. Ganesha just wants to make sure you are laughing. Life is too short to be serious all the time. As a teacher of mine used to say, "Seriousness is the highest crime in the court of God." A great way to find your way back to your heart is through humor.

On a recent family visit, my sister and I were with my mom, my dad, and his wife. My mom just had back surgery and is recovering nicely. My dad is hard of hearing. It's always a stretch to be in a room with him and several people sitting around a dinner table. He has hearing aids, but he still can't hear that well. After yelling a communication to my dad three times, my sister broke out into hysterical laughter. Maybe it was frustration or perhaps exhaustion from trying to get through to my dad. Then she whipped out her iPhone and told us all about a “Saturday Night Live” skit about Alexa, the digital device that responds to your questions, similar to Siri on iPhone. Except this Alexa is programmed for "the Greatest Generation"—seniors. Alexa includes special features including the ability to respond to any name remotely close to Alexa, like Amanda, Odessa, and Anita. It also has an "ah ha" feature for rambling conversations. If you want to laugh, please watch this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

Ganesha's choice to ride on the mouse also represents humility. A mouse is considered one of the most lowly creatures. So why would such a great being as Ganesh ride on a mouse? Humility is a virtue of the heart. With humility, all egoism and the need to prove yourself or the need to be right is released. Your burden is much lighter. Also, Ganesha tells us that when you're humble, you'll always have friends.

The reason I like the most about why Ganesha rides on a mouse is because mice can always get out of tight places. Whenever you feel trapped by life or out of options, you remember that, through grace, there's always another way. Because Ganesha rides around on a mouse, he is never in his own way. The biggest obstacle most of us have is between our ears. You need to release self-limiting beliefs such as fear, anxiety, and doubt. This is what gets in our way most often.

What Ganesha is telling us is that no matter how big you think your obstacle is, you can always rely on the still small voice inside, the voice of your heart, to get you out of tight places.

Come join me in listening to your heart in this workshop and discover that the power to remove obstacles is already within you.

Namaste,
Todd

Todd Norian is the founder of Ashaya Yoga. Learn more at ashayayoga.com.

Celebrating Life with Tao Porchon-Lynch

Fri, 06 Jul 2018 15:51:04 GMT

YTA’s 2017-2018 season ended on a high note with the celebration of Tao Porchon-Lynch’s 100th birthday. In her inimitable style she took us through Sun Salutations and some of her signature poses. We celebrated her soon-to-be 100th birthday with snacks and refreshments and, of course, cake, as she graciously posed for photos and signed copies of her books. Even with the large group, Tao got to speak with everyone and offer her wisdom. She’s looking forward to next year when she will be back for another workshop. Hope to see you there!

Music of the Soul by Tao Porchon-Lynch

Tue, 22 May 2018 01:35:35 GMT

The inner reality is expressed in the breath of life.

It opens up a vision and we experience a conscious pulsating in our heart.

We experience the essence of yoga.

As we turn inwards, it sparks the life force moving it throughout the journey of our passage in this world.

We become aware of the eternal oneness between all mankind and all creatures on this planet, as the song of peace reigns throughout creation.

There is no place where it is not part of the universe and beyond.

From the smallest insect to a blade of grass.

In every atom reveals itself at one.

Part of all living creatures and nature until when the breath leaves the body and we return to the soil.

Physical activity no matter how great, does not bring this awareness.

But when we become tuned into this power, the breath of life, we are no longer divided.

No longer foreign thoughts or frontiers divide us.

No longer do we need passports.

We can share the wisdom of the Gods and know and believe we can live in oneness and peace, for it reigns in the hearts of all.

Don’t try to be on this or that pendulum, but feel the wonder bring it into your heart.

Alive, it furnishes this page of my life with the renewal of spring.

A tiny star in a night sky sparks an aura of life.

A truth without fences makes me tumble out of the past and opens the door to this wonderful energy. It spreads it within my innermost self and manifests peace throughout the whole world.

Q&A with Priti Robyn Ross

Fri, 04 May 2018 21:02:02 GMT

Q: Can you recommend some alignment cues for Warrior I? I have a hard time finding the right positioning for my hips—I feel awkward trying to square off and face forward while also being slightly twisted in my stance.  

A: The beauty of yoga is its intention to focus on the body as a whole unit while drawing your attention into the present moment. There’s permission and space to explore what’s right for your specific anatomy. As a teacher, I’ve seen many thousands of bodies practicing, and not everyone’s body is designed to be in the same alignment.

Warrior I can be practiced with the heel down or up (with the heel up, it’s called High Lunge in some traditions). In Kripalu Yoga, Warrior I is practiced with the heel up, so the feet are parallel and hip-width apart, allowing the hips to square forward more easily. The hips, pelvis, ribs, and shoulder girdle are all aligned, facing forward. Warrior I with the heel up is a bit more of a balancing posture, so you can put a rolled blanket under the heel to help with stability and balance.

If you practice Warrior I with the heel down, keeping your hips facing front, be aware of the torque in the back knee and ankle. Be careful not to force the back hip forward at the expense of an unhealthy torque in the knee. The ribs and thoracic cavity can rotate gently forward, even if the hips are not facing entirely square to the front of the mat.

Q: Can you recommend postures to improve flexibility in the hip joints?

A: In the hips, as opposed to the shoulder girdle, for example, the range of motion is less, because we need stability in order to walk, run, and bear weight. There are a myriad of ligaments and muscles surrounding the pelvic girdle, and these all need to be intelligently relaxed and opened in order to create flexibility in the hips. Think of the hips in all dimensions: anterior, posterior, lateral (front, back, sides), as well as all the surrounding areas: superior (above) and inferior (below) the pelvic region.

When we’re tight in the hips, it’s important to not only address that specific musculature by assessing weakness and imbalances in the hip flexors and hip rotator muscles, but also to examine the low-back muscles, abductors, and hamstrings. All areas affect the range of motion and flexibility in the hip joints. Sometimes one area is tight and another area is weak, so it’s important to strengthen as well as stretch the muscles in various postures to address specific issues.

You can explore Pigeon along with its modifications (supine and double) to open the hip flexors and hip rotator muscles. The Butterfly helps open the inner thighs and groin, and Low Warrior I stretches the hip flexors by gently pressing the top front thigh of the back extended leg forward. Postures that explore internal rotation can be helpful as well. Ultimately, exploring the full range of motion in your practice and addressing the body as a whole unit is the most effective way to address tightness in the hips, or any area of imbalance.

Q: When heading into Savasana, I have a hard time relaxing all my muscles. Any tips for the best alignment in what some call the hardest posture?

A: It’s good to understand that Savasana is a posture, not just an act of relaxation, so there are specific alignment cues that are used to support the body to begin to let go and relax. Classically, the legs are about 12 inches apart, with the hips naturally rolled open. The shoulder blades are relaxed down the back body, the shoulders relaxed down away from the ears, and the back ribs relax and broaden. The arms are about 10 inches away from the torso and turned outward to create a soft lateral rotation and opening of the chest and shoulders. The back of your neck is elongated and the weight of the head is released. You can use props to support your body—for example, a low, folded blanket under your head or a support under your neck, or a rolled blanket or pillow under the knees to soften the low back. You can place eye bags gently over your eyes to block out light and help you fully surrender.

The level of activity in class may determine how easy it is to relax into Savasana. A vigorous class lends itself to ending with a deeper rest for the physical body. When the physical body is relaxed, the breath and the mind will follow. In a gentle or moderate class, the teacher may need to guide relaxation a bit more. It’s also important that the teacher create an environment that lends itself to letting go, with comfortable room temperature, low lighting, and perhaps neutral relaxing music. You can do this for yourself if you’re practicing at home.

There are many relaxation techniques that can be guided to help you surrender into Savasana. A full body scan encourages each body part to become heavy and relaxed into the earth; in a progressive relaxation, you tense and release your muscles one by one. Or send your breath awareness throughout your body—inhale into your heart, then exhale down your arms and out your fingertips. Inhale into your belly, then exhale down your legs and out through your toes, letting your whole body sink into the floor with each exhalation as you let go with a soft sigh...feeling relaxed yet?

(Reprinted from Ask the Expert. Kripalu/Thrive: Explore Yoga, Health and Wellness, February 12, 2014.http://kripalu.org/blog/thrive/2014/02/12/ask-the-expert-alignment-and-surrender/ Accessed April 18, 2015.)

For Priti's blog post about the koshas, click here.

Learn more about Priti at LifeAsYoga.com.

May Words of Wisdom from Paula Renuka Heitzner

Tue, 01 May 2018 10:17:34 GMT

Dear All,

I think the month of May is portentous because it gives permission. We may enjoy more of nature; we may be more likely to energize with increased outdoor activities; we may lighten our spirits as we lighten our outerwear; and we may experience the burgeoning of mood and joy as we observe our landscapes, inside and out, burgeon with new life and growth, blossoming and blooming.

Our yoga practice gives us an added ability to experience and appreciate these life-enhancing subtleties. As our awareness deepens, we grow more astute to the feelings we encounter in the deepest places of our being, courtesy of the breath. We may also become aware of how our sincere practice can help us transition through the feelings, moods, and negative energies foisted on us by outside conditions, whether it be by the weather, work, or relatives. With this practice we can center ourselves, stand on our own two feet, take our space, stand our ground, and plant ourselves firmly in our own truth and light—just as we do when we introduce new growth into our gardens, whether they be in a pot on the windowsill or in the yard.

Yoga recognizes, as does every creative endeavor, the important need for grounding as the first step toward reaching any goal and the sense of fulfillment made possible from the strength of this support. It is critical if we are to extend our safe boundaries and expand to open ourselves to the unknown beyond our safe borders, to face fear with trust and courage. Yoga offers us a MAP (Mindfulness, Authenticity, Purposefulness) that we can use on this journey through transitions toward transformation.

May we all stand together and take to heart the permission May encourages for our greater good and attend YTA on the second Saturday of each month, through all seasons and regardless of any conditions. You may benefit from the investment made in those three hours.

Yours In Yoga,
Paula Renuka Heitzner

The Five Prana Koshas: A Potent Teaching Tool, by Priti Robyn Ross

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 17:45:24 GMT

We are looking forward to welcoming back Priti Robyn Ross, who will take us on a magical mystery tour of yoga through the koshas. Here is some information about the koshas from Priti to whet your appetite.

On May 12th, I have the sacred opportunity to share my passion about the Ancient Prana Kosha system, an in-depth exploration of yoga as the holistic system it was designed to be. Using this approach provides a practical yet profound map to navigate the odyssey of yoga.

The powerful Koshas provide a multidimensional tool for teachers to craft a comprehensive class design to guide their students though a universal journey of yoga as well as a potent map for students to find their way into the soul of their practice.

By utilizing the Koshas, the teacher and student can create a transformational experience that brings the practitioner into a dynamic equilibrium that results in vital health and awakening on all levels of their being.

Each layer becomes a doorway to support and direct the student to enter into a dialogue and communion with each layer of the Self. The teacher can then make a conscious choice as to which Kosha to emphasize during any stage of the class and provide an engaging awareness, focus, and language into a selected dimension to provide an experience that is needed to support wholeness in the moment.

For example, in Annamaya Kosha, the direction of attention is physical sensations. In Pranamaya Kosha, we begin to harmonize breath and movement, and in Manomaya we direct the thoughts. When when the first three layers syncopate, the spirit of the pose begins to emerge within Vijnanamaya, the witness consciousness. As we evolve, through deep self-observation we can begin to experience our practice through the lens of Anandamaya, where the posture dissolves into the experience of the moment, into pure soul presence.

Using the Koshas as a framework can be a practical and profound teaching tool. With this method, the teacher has a powerful system to direct the attention of the student by utilizing these five lenses. Then by designing a yoga practice with the Koshas as an approach, it becomes a powerful laboratory in which to discover, awaken, and transform habitual patterns and bring light and awareness that can lead to freedom, liberation, and self-mastery.

It’s important to note that the Koshas are not a linear system, but occur simultaneously, interweaving, feeding, and informing each layer of the the multidimensional Self.

True alignment happens when all Koshas are in communion, unity, and harmony.

When all our Koshas, or layers of the multidimensional self, are present and in communication with each other, we experience true inner alignment, union, yoga. Then we are in pure presence, listening to all layers of our being—body, breath, mind, witness, and soul—the Koshas.

Adapted from the Pranotthan Yoga Teacher Training Manual
Cofounders: Priti Robyn Ross and Devarshi Steven Hartman
© 2014; edited 2018 by Priti for the YTA newsletter. All rights reserved.
LifeAsYoga.com

April Q&A: Proper Yoga Attire and Age Guidelines for Yoga Pants

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 21:52:37 GMT

The Question of the Month:

What Is Your Response to the Controversy

Over Proper Yoga Attire and Appropriate
Age Guidelines for Yoga Pants?

These are 2 questions, relating to the same issue:

1. Do yoga pants and tops create an immodest or a sexually suggestive climate, or are they comfortable for the practitioner and helpful to the teacher?

2. Are they only appropriate for the younger student?

A yoga practice is a sensual experience, bringing the practitioner closer to full sensory (all 5) awareness, a gift of yoga. Hopefully, one knows the difference between sensual and sexual. Sorting that out, our yoga apparel design has been refined to provide comfort and freedom to move in every way the asanas command—reaching, bending, twisting, and lengthening in every direction as in splits on the floor and with inversions in the air. The materials used offer light, smooth, stretching textures that embrace the body, eliminating the need to fuss and fidget with extraneous fabric that clumps and bunches up during the practice. And yes, it makes viewing the kinetics and the dynamics of the body in motion more visible to the teacher, so muscular overuse and abuse can be more readily detected and corrected.

Pertaining to the propriety guidelines for the older and perhaps heavier practitioner, only our own aesthetics and comfort should be considered. People are well into their golden years and doing yoga, and if yoga pants are providing the necessary freedom of movement and comfort to practice, go for it! The secular population, regardless of age, rely on tights, stretch jeans, and stretch pants to complete their wardrobe, and I'm sure they don't wear them as well as a fit, toned, flexible yoga body, of any age.

Every month we answer your questions about yoga, as a student or as a teacher. Share your thoughts about this month's question in the comments or on our Facebook page. Send your questions to yta editor@gmail.com.

April Words of Wisdom from Paula Renuka Heitzner

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 21:43:10 GMT

Dear All,

As we evolve through our yoga practice, we heighten awareness of and appreciation for all aspects of life, within and without. Our seasons, by their very nature, help us to understand what this means, and how we become more attuned, not only to the self, but to all things universal.

The summer season radiates the full power of regeneration that is engendered by increased daylight and hospitable weather conditions, both of which encourage expansion within the body as well as in the garden, where we can clearly see the outer effects of this expansion and light. We can safely assume our yoga practice gives us these internal benefits with our breathing, stretching, and meditating, diffusing us with expansive light.

Fall follows and recognizes the zeal and energy expended by summer and realizes the need to create a universal balance. Fall slows down this frenetic flow of luxurious growth, and as the climate cools everything and everyone, the Earth prepares to rest, repair, and reclaim its expended energy, much as we do in savasana, the asana of rest and closure in our yoga practice.

Winter brings in the “big sleep," a time to go within, much like our vegetation and certain species of wildlife that hibernate. This time is used to deepen the rest and repair process.

Although these 3 seasons mirror their diverse attributes and can be astutely understood within the yogic concept, I think spring epitomizes yoga's greatest gifts. Sensory awareness is promoted by the coming-to-life activities, both in the body and the garden. The gift of surrender is so obvious as the winter energy weakens and the senses begin to strengthen, encouraging the gift of unfoldment. Slowly, but surely and strongly, the sap of life, in our trees and in our beings begins to flow, returning us to full sensory awareness of the cycles of all life on the planet.

Our yoga practice offers us a way to better identify, understand, and appreciate our moods, seasons, and cycles. The awareness awakened by our practice goes a long way to make our lives more fruitful, abundant, and purposeful. This month of April, the beginning of spring, reminds us of the importance of the senses and their impact on our well-being. We too unfold, strengthen, and develop as we respond to the increasing light. The gift of surrender slows us down, resulting in greater appreciation of the hum of our inner voice of consciousness, the flow of the sap of life, and to take the time "to smell the roses."

Our YTA workshop, held monthly on the second Saturday, offers presentations by awesome presenters to add energy and light to our work, be it teaching or seriously practicing. Spring into action and join us.

Yours In Yoga,
Paula Renuka Heitzner

My Yoga Story by Vandita Kate Marchesiello

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 13:50:06 GMT

YTA is looking forward to welcoming Vandita Kate Marchesiello on April 14, for Transform, Relax, and Rejuvenate: A Brief Retreat with Lasting Results.

Long before there were yoga mats, my mother knitted me a white woolen blanket to use for my yoga practice. As described in the Indian tradition, this or a tiger skin rug was what one used to sit upon for meditation. It was 1974, and I had just discovered the ancient traditions of yoga. Now, the way this discovery came about and the years that followed still put a smile on my face …

Marty, who owned a bar and had a great interest in sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, turned me on to a book by Jess Stern titled, Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation (after all it was the 70s …). I read the book, attended a free yoga class at a Catholic church in Schenectady, New York, and the rest is history.

Signing up for a series of ten classes after the freebie was a no brainer. I loved how I felt (without drugs) during a slow yoga flow, deep yogic breathing, and the icing on the cake … yoga nidra. I faithfully attended all ten classes and signed up again for another series with my teacher, Rupa, a devotee of Amrit Desai. Each week I entered the little house that also served as a yoga center and mini ashram and was soothed by the nag champa incense that burned on the alter next to photos of Paramahansa Yogananda, Gurudev (Amrit) and a variety of saints and sages from many traditions. Fresh flowers brightened the clean room as lovely music played and invited me in to sit quietly before class began. Dressed in all white, Rupa was the epitome of a yoga teacher: knowledgeable, kind, and open-hearted. After a year of study with her, she suggested I do a yoga teacher training with her and help her at the little studio and teach in the community. I was so flattered and humbled by her invitation that I accepted immediately. The training lasted about nine months and was an amazing experience. With such an emphasis on character development and the health benefits of yoga, I gained more than imaginable that impacted my daily life.

During this time Rupa took me to Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, to meet Yogi Desai. We attended an Inner Quest Intensive and spent ten hours a day for three days sitting with the question: “Tell me who you are.” Like peeling the layers of skin from an onion, this experience revealed some deep-seated resentments, feelings of abandonment, and ecstatic bliss. Over the years I participated in approximately seven of these intensives. Meeting Amrit at the end of this long weekend experience was joyful. He entered the room as if floating on air and had such a compassionate perspective for all the suffering we had experienced that weekend (imagine 20+ people crying, weeping, screaming, and punching pillows). He spoke eloquently about karma, dharma, and human nature and the power of love and left us all feeling good about our exhausting yet exhilarating weekend.

Returning home I started teaching at the yoga center and a variety of community centers. I also began contemplating a yoga teacher training with Amrit in Pennsylvania. In 1977 I took a leave of absence from my clerical job at General Electric to attend the month-long training. The property at the Summit Station location where the training would be held was nestled among cornfields and farmlands of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Long walks on country roads and hills revealed a patchwork of colors from the various crops that were planted on this ideal land. This city girl was in her glory, as I had longed for a place like this to call home.

Just a short time after I arrived for training I was busily preparing to welcome Swami Kripalu from India. This was a major and long anticipated event. Swami Kripalu was Amrit’s guru, and Amrit had been pleading with him for a few years to come to America and witness the interest in hatha yoga and the love and hunger hundreds of us had for these particular practices. The day of Bapuji’s (Swami Kripalu) arrival was unforgettable. A couple hundred of us all dressed in white with little marigolds in our hands and hair welcomed Swami with song and music that we chanted in Indian tradition. Bapuji, who spoke briefly after his long journey, said he felt so welcomed and loved and looked forward to spending time in satsanga with us soon. He spoke in Gujarati and Amrit translated. After being at the ashram for the month of training, I decided I wanted to stay longer and so quit my job and moved into the community that became my yoga family.

Well, here we are now and I’m still serving at Kripalu Center. The years from 1979 to 2018 have been full of teaching, training, presenting, coaching, directing, mothering, and now grandmothering!

I hope you will join me on April 14th for more stories and heartfelt experiences. See you soon!

Learn more about Vandita at yoganowandthen.com.

From Shari Friedrichsen's Yoga and the Heart Workshop

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 22:00:59 GMT

Yoga for the Heart by Shari Friedrichsen

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 18:06:23 GMT

We are thrilled to be bringing Shari Friedrichsen back to the YTA community. Here are her thoughts about the Yoga and the Heart workshop she will be leading for us on March 10. Hope to see you there!

The practice of Yoga is based on Sankhya philosophy, which is a top-down philosophy stating that we evolve from the Light of Pure Consciousness. It further says that the cause (consciousness) is always in the effect (us). And yoga is a practice that is bottom-up, meaning we start with where we are in the body/mind and practice to experience and perceive our true inner nature, which is that light of pure consciousness.

This means that within this body/mind that light exists, not just anywhere but everywhere. The body cannot exist without it. Furthermore, through the continued study of yogis and yoginis before us and the sharing of their experiences, we understand that the most concentrated area of that light is in the heart space. This concentrated light is the essence of pure wisdom, pure love, pure compassion, unalloyed joy, and abiding intelligence. Yet we often don’t get to experience that in our life, or it comes and goes, seeming quite random. The haze or cloudiness is too thick. What the Yoga Sutras tell us is that there are ways to capture that experience and to maintain that level of joy and light within and at the same time live in the world with our work, our relationships, our desires, and our intelligence.

The key is to keep our bodies strong and resilient and our minds free from anxiety, worry, anger, angst, and doubt. As yoga practitioners we have had some success in maintaining or increasing the health of our bodies. Yoga has given us many tools and practices to support us in this. We have been able to reduce back pain, alleviate some of the aches in our joints, decrease our anxiety, lower our blood pressure, combat heart disease, and in many other substantial ways we have strengthened the functioning of our bodies. This is a necessary and foundational step in helping us relieve mental and emotional pain and enhancing the quality of our life.

To go further, we need to understand a bit more about the relationship between our body, heart, and mind. The body supports the healthy functioning of the organs, including the brain and heart, the locus for concentrated areas of prana and light. If the physical functioning is compromised, the movement of prana can also be compromised, or even decreased. And we may not even be aware of it, but slowly over time it drains us of our will, our determination, our body’s intelligence, our joy, and our vitality. To keep a healthy body, the foundational step is asana practice.

From here we can look at the mind. As we know from our practice, the body and mind are intimately connected. We do our practice and our mind is more at peace. We don’t, and we’re more apt to be reactive and doubtful about our lives, our experience of ourselves. After establishing a stable and comfortable body, relatively free of discomfort or disease, yoga gives us the tools and practices to further calm the mind. This is vital to the connection of the deeper regions in our heart. If the mind is wandering here and there, worried about this and that, the light and joy of the heart are quite difficult to access. We are stuck with our senses moving outward, catching hold of any thread of entertainment or relief or external habit we’ve cultivated. This kind of mind does not have the ability to experience the sublime aspects of the vishoka, joy untouched by sorrow or angst, or jyotishmati, supreme light of the heart, both of which are the subtle building blocks supporting the creation of the heart itself and concentrated in the heart area. Without a quiet mind, guided by inward moving prana, we miss out on this grace that is, always exists, and flows within.

The YTA workshop on March 10 will focus on practices that strengthen, stabilize, and turn us inward to this heart center. Through specific postures and breathing we will increase access to the four gifts that come with a body: rupa—beauty; lavanya—tastefulness; bala—vitality; and vajra samharanatva—the inherent healing power. Once we have ease and stability in the body, we will use specific pranayama practices to turn the mind peacefully inward. With a calm mind, we will be able to access the deeper stillness of the heart, where we can touch upon and rest in our true nature of unobstructed joy and light.

Deirdre Breen's Ojas Tonic Recipe

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 18:21:10 GMT

Participants of Saturday's Ayurveda and Yoga workshop with Deirdre Breen were treated to a taste of this delicious elixir at the close of the day. Here is Deirdre's recipe.

Ojas Nightly Tonic Recipe
1. Add small amounts of these to one cup of milk as you slowly bring it to a boil:

Chopped dates (1 tbsp)

Chopped almonds (2 tsp)

Coconut meat or flakes (1 tbsp)

Saffron (1/2 tsp)

Ghee (1–2 tsp)

Cardamom (1/8 tsp)

2. Add ojas-building herbs to the milk (1/8 tsp or one 500mg capsule of each):
Shatavari (Strength of 100 Husbands, sometimes spelled Shatawari)

Ashwagandha (Strength of Ten Horses, sometimes spelled Ashwaganda)
3. Optional: Once the milk, herbs, foods and spices are cooked and off the flame, add 1 tsp of raw honey.

Drink one cup each night for 3 months to rebuild ojas levels to support sleep, immunity, and overall well-being.

Enjoy!