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Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Timothy Burgin
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Great Yoga Retreats by Kristin Rubesamen
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 Looking for an escape to your stress-filled hectic life? Open up this beautiful coffee table book and be transported to magical and mystical yoga retreat centers from all over the globe. This book covers a wide spectrum of yoga retreats, from small and rustic centers, to posh and pampered spas, and to large yoga ashrams. The large color photos are artistically shot to show the beauty and ambiance of the setting, decor, food, land and architecture. Each yoga center profile has a brief written overview giving the author’s impression of the center and includes the contact info as well as the retreat’s basic statistics (number of rooms, teachers, food, activities, etc.). |
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Thursday, February 25, 2010 by Timothy Burgin
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Creating a Healthy Back with Pranakriya Yoga
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 Yoga and physical therapist Marlysa Sullivan’s first instructional yoga Cd uses simple yoga poses to strengthen and lengthen the core muscles of the body. This is a safe and preventative approach to maintaining a healthy back, and the program’s tracks can be individually selected for a more personalized and therapeutic approach to healing back pain. |
 Utthita Hasta Padgangusthasa ( Extended Hand to Big Toe Pose) is about staying connected to the foundation of ease and equanimity that is always within us while we work with the deep strength of our core, the flexibility of our periphery, and the openness of our hearts. And in being aware of all of these processes, to experience the feelings of solidity and expansion that constantly emanate from a center of balance. Wow. That is big. And the experience of this pose, when entered into fully is big. You can move into this asana feeling weak or imbalanced, and after a few moments of dedicated practice, you will find your roots, your strength and be able to expand and open more than you realized possible. |
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Monday, February 08, 2010 by Kelly Golden
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Mixing Yoga and Food Stirs Up Trouble
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Yogic diet is a hotly debated topic in the yoga community. Many ancient texts of yoga stress the necessity of a meatless diet, and one that is free from alcohol or stimulants. From the Hatha Yoga Pradipika which clearly directs the practitioner toward a sattvic (balanced) diet of nuts, grains, milk, and ghee, to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that emphasize the importance of non-harming through the practice of ahimsa, the bulk of the yogic compendium advocate vegetarianism and purity. But, a new trend in chic New York studio, Exhale Spa, not only defies this definition, but goes as far as bringing food onto the mat in the context of practice, which is stirring up lots of debate.
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 The latest release by Kristin Luna Ray is a bit hard to categorize. While an overall singer songwriter style is present throughout the Cd, this style is combined in varying degrees with jazz, latin, and world-music instrumentation. English, Sanskrit and Spanish lyrics are sprinkled throughout these soulful and heart opening songs. |
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Best known for his hot Power Vinyasa style, super-star Yogi, Baron Baptiste has teamed up with a leading authority on Multiple Sclerosis, Dr. Elliot Frohman to develop a yoga program for people living with MS. The video called My MS Yoga is an at home practice designed to address the specific needs of MS patients as they change from day to day.
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Kelly Golden
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Yoga Conferences Go Virtual
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The desire to deepen our understanding and knowledge is a vein that runs deep in the tradition of yoga. Students seek teachers, texts and communities that support the growing aspiration of gaining more wisdom through experience and exposure to those who have it. Students often gain this experience of study through retreats and trainings that can sometimes be timely and costly, though always well worth the time and money, but now there are opportunities to study with experienced, knowledgeable teachers without ever leaving the comfort of your own home as virtual trainings and conferences become more popular.
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Friday, January 15, 2010 by Timothy Burgin
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Winter Yoga Sequence
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Winter is a time of deep stillness and inner reflection. We can use winter’s introspective energy to gain clarity and insight for the spring cycle of growth and expansion. Willpower and determination is required to look deep into the darkness of this season to face our deepest fears, our hidden realms, and our unconscious minds. In Traditional Chinese Medicine winter is the time when the water element is dominant and the energy in the kidneys and bladder channels becomes the strongest. If the energy of the kidneys are weak than excess fear may arise or feeling of depression may occur, but if the kidneys are strong than we can access abundant willpower, courage and determination to survive and flourish in this season of darkness. This 41-step pose sequence will tonify and activate the energy of the kidneys to create the strength, wisdom and courage to do the inner work that winter presents.
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 Yoga-star Shiva Rea has released a new DVD geared especially for yogi/nis who wish to have a daily practice but don’t have much time. Seven 20-minute sequences can be practiced by themselves or can be stringed together and combined with two different meditations, a shorter core or forward bend sequence, and a guided shavasana. There are three options for choosing your practice on this DVD: choose a single sequence, choose a preset practice (2-4 sequences combined), or for the ultimate customization use the yoga matrix to mix together specific practices of your choosing. These options give an great amount of customization for the length, intensity and type of yoga poses for your practice. |
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Thursday, January 07, 2010 by Kelly Golden
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College Students Meditating to Lower Stress
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Ask any college student, present or former, about the stress of Higher Education, and you will be met with a unanimous response. College is stressful. Even though my college experience is well in my past, I can remember feeling overwhelming stress during the process, to the point that I was experiencing chronic neck and shoulder pain. It was during this very stressful point in my life that I discovered yoga and meditation to help me deal with the mounting expectations of student life. Now a study of D.C. college students shows that meditation can go a long way in helping students deal with the stresses of college.
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Sunday, January 03, 2010 by Kelly Golden
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Empowering Your Intention in 2010
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One of the most common occurrences as one year fades into the next is the creation of a resolution (or a list of them), in hopes of starting the New Year fresh. It is a noble idea delineated by dates on a calendar, but all too often those things that we vow to do, become, achieve, or create end up in the left in the dust, or filed away to come back to sometime in the unnamed future. Yoga often ends up on the list of resolutions with the hope of increasing our health or our balance. But something that is less as well known, is that the practice of yoga itself can add power to resolutions and to your efforts to honor them. Some of the more subtle practices of yoga, like pranayama and meditation, are designed do just that, to make our resolve our reality.
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Saturday, January 02, 2010 by Timothy Burgin
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Premium Membership Giveaway
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We have five 1-year premium memberships to YogaBasics.com to give to our lucky readers! To enter this contest, simply leave a comment to this post and we will randomly select 5 comment authors on January 16th.
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Monday, December 28, 2009 by Kelly Golden
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Pose of the Month: Kurmasana
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 The Bhagavad Gita, one of yoga’s most sacred texts, spends eighteen chapters exploring the path of enlightenment. In Chapter two, verse 58, Krishna says to Arjuna, “Having drawn back all the senses from the objects of sense as a tortoise draws back into his shell that man is a man of firm wisdom.” The instruction is to draw inward like a tortoise in order to find the experience of pratyahara, what the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define as sense withdrawal. From this place free of external distractions, one can rest in atman (or the true Self), and find eternal peace.
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Monday, December 21, 2009 by Timothy Burgin
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Buddha's Brain by Rick Hanson
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 This fascinating book describes how meditation practices can literally change our minds. Hanson uses neuroanatomy, physiology and psychology to explain how the brain works in creating specific feelings and states of mind. The bad news is that the brain and the body seem to be hardwired to create suffering. The good news is that current research is showing that the brain is malleable and changeable, and it is changed by how we use it. |
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Friday, December 11, 2009 by Timothy Burgin
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The Yoga Bible by Christina Brown
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 This sweet 400-page yoga book covers 170 yoga poses, as well as the other yoga practices of Pranayama, Mudras, Bandhas, and Kriyas. The book starts with a clear, short, and concise introduction to yoga, and ends with a yoga therapy section, but the book’s bulk is focused on teaching the yoga postures, which it does exceptionally well. For each yoga pose the name, benefits, drishti (gaze), prerequisite poses, counter poses, modifications and energetic effects are given. |
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Wednesday, December 09, 2009 by Kelly Golden
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Yoga Teachers Fight Regulations
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Yoga teachers in Virginia are fighting back against planned state regulations of Yoga schools. Three yoga instructors filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop a state mandate which would regulate yoga schools like vocational classes. The officials seeking to impose regulations see it as a way to protect the investments of the students who participate in teacher training programs. Regulations are implemented on vocational classes that prepare students for a job.
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Wednesday, December 02, 2009 by Kelly Golden
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Do we Really Need a Yoga Champ?
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According to the wife of Bikram Choudry, Rajashree Choudry, competition and yoga go hand in hand. To support this she has created two non-profit organizations that sponsor and stage yoga competitions in the U.S. and abroad. The most recent of these was in October at a Bikram studio on the Lower East Side, The New York Regional Yoga Championship.
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Monday, November 30, 2009 by Timothy Burgin
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Enlighten Up!
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 Yogini and filmmaker Kate Churchill set out to capture how the transformative powers of yoga would effect a new practitioner in this superb documentary. She follows Nick, an out of work journalist, as he takes his first yoga classes in the hip yoga studios of New York and as he explores the devotional aspects of yoga in India. Nick is charming, inquisitive, and skeptical of the possibility that yoga can enlighten him. Kate is passionate and unfailing in her desire for yoga to transform Nick, and this eventually leads to a conflict that was courageously shown in the film. These small segments of drama add a bit of spice to the film’s main focus of showing the vast world of yoga through the eyes of a beginner. |
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