In our Yoga Blog we will report on yoga news, trends and happenings throughout the world.
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Monday, December 24, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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9 Ways To Build Your Yoga Community
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You sweat together, cry together, and support each other physically
during asana practice, but do you and your yoga classmates support each other outside
the studio? If your yoga home is a safe space for growth with friends who
inspire you, count yourself lucky. If you’re longing to create a yoga family,
here are nine simple ideas for starters. Though most are geared toward teachers
or studios, students can pitch in to launch ideas and build momentum.
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Friday, December 21, 2012 by Tosca Braun
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Does Mindfulness Blunt the Conscience?
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Mindfulness in
schools: It’s the latest buzz, prompted in part by rapidly-proliferating
programs such as Goldie Hawn’s MindUP. In the wake of recent publicity, a
blog by Vancouver schoolteacher Tina Oleson argues that non-judgmental
awareness (a core teaching of mindfulness) risks “interfering with the child’s
ability to heed his sense of right and wrong.” Yet Oleson’s critique belies a
fundamental, if understandable, misconception of “non-judgment."
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Wednesday, December 19, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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The Gift Of An Open Heart
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The winter holiday season—whether you celebrate Christmas,
Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or solstice—is a celebration of light within darkness. It’s
a time of year associated with friendship, abundance, gifting, and other joys.
Tragically, the darkness within that light has come to include seasonal
depression, family drama, and even violence, from a mall in Oregon to an
elementary school in Connecticut.
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Friday, December 14, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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Patanjali, Man or Myth?
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Yoga’s roots, some say, stretch back thousands of years to
the Indus-Sarasvati
river valleys of Northern India. Yoga as we practice it today bears little
resemblance to that ancient knowledge. There is, however, a thread connecting
the old and new, traced by a scholar named Patanjali roughly 2,000 years ago.
Ashtanga yogis invoke Sage
Patanjali in their opening mantra, but no matter which yoga family we
belong to, we are all heirs of Patanjali.
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 by Tosca Braun
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Facing Fear of Death Through Yoga
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Death is the one certainty we face. How do you
make sense of this inevitability? A recent New York Times piece describes one man’s journey to India, where a yoga instructor informs
him “yoga is not some circus routine you
do with your body. It is about aligning the body, breath, intellect, and soul.”
Yoga is also, he noted, “dying many times before we actually die—and that way
we are forced to find calmness and experience rebirth.”
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Tuesday, December 04, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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Resolving Conflict Through Yoga
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Combine post-election grumbles with the family holiday table
and you have the ingredients for conflict. Fortunately, if you practice yoga,
you also have the recipe to help ease the upset.
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Friday, November 30, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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Planning A Yoga Retreat? Things To Consider
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With winter approaching, many of us daydream about escaping
on a sunny yoga vacation or retreat. Retreat literally means “withdraw,” and
the idea is to withdraw from one’s daily life, whether that means a mix of
asana and adventure at a luxury
resort, a week living like a sannyasin
in an ashram setting,
or an at-home sadhana
of asana, meditation, and cleansing.
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Can meditation
help your brain process emotions even when you’re not meditating? Contemplative
philosophies would posit “yes”; practice is undertaken in preparation for life,
such that a more mindful orientation generalizes to life outside of formal
practice. A new
study by DesBordes and colleagues in the journal Frontiers in
Neuroscience provides the
first evidence to support this. Meditation training was found to impact cortical processing of negative emotions outside of formal meditation.
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Thursday, November 22, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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Giving Thanks, Cultivating Contentment
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At Thanksgiving, we pause to gather with friends and family
to express gratitude for the year’s blessings. Although this North American
holiday is usually associated with the pilgrims’ first successful harvest, dating
to nearly 400 years ago, the idea of setting aside a time for giving thanks has
even older origins in spiritual and cultural traditions around the globe.
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Tuesday, November 20, 2012 by Tosca Braun
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Broadening Yoga's Reach
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As discussed in Part One, despite traditional yoga’s humble
origins, transnational yoga culture often appeals to the comparatively
affluent. In perspective, yoga is not alone in its lagged adoption among less
privileged populations; exercise, healthy eating, and self-care are also
relative luxuries for those short on resources. Yoga culture’s exclusivity is
merely cemented by homogenous media representations, which fail to represent
the diversity of actual (and potential) practitioners. Here we discuss some
common barriers to adopting a yoga practice, and how to expand yoga’s practitioner
base.
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Friday, November 16, 2012 by Tosca Braun
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Is "Transnational" Yoga Elitist?
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Whether you
practice yoga or have just seen it on TV, you could probably conjure to mind
the stereotypical yoga consumer: affluent, Caucasian, female, and bendy. A
recent Wall Street Journal article’s depiction
of yoga instructor Colleen Saidman, the willowy blonde, newly appointed
ambassador for California winery Estansia, does little to disabuse us of this
perception. Self-described as “uncommonly balanced” like a good glass of wine,
Saidman points to her $600 thigh-high blue suede boots, expensive watch, and
enjoyment of dark chocolate, sex, and wine as she notes, “I want to have fun in
this life.”
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Tuesday, November 13, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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Yoga Community Responds To Hurricane Sandy
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Many of us across the country felt
shock and horror as Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast two weeks ago. Though
news about the storm’s human impact was slowed by breakdowns in infrastructure
and communication, awareness of the East Coast’s halting recovery is
increasing. Yoga studios and individual practitioners are among those who have
reached out to Sandy’s survivors.
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Friday, November 09, 2012 by Tosca Braun
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Facial Yoga: Anti-Aging?
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Could facial yoga actually stimulate anti-aging properties? A recent ABC
article stirs up the age-old
practice of facial exercises to reduce aging, framed in 21st
century packaging: Facial
Yoga. Proponents allege it tones and
lifts facial muscles and claim it's “scientifically proven” to “help prolong the
production of collagen and elastin, which makes your face firm and springy.” Yet
despite the claim to scientific legitimacy, no research has been conducted on
the impact of facial exercises on aging skin.
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Tuesday, November 06, 2012 by Kathleen Bryant
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Teacher Training: Are You Ready?
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For many of us, discovering yoga was a lot like falling in
love—the surrender, the glow, the longing for more. If you’ve arrived at that
point where you yearn for a deeper commitment—you want to become a teacher or
to explore beyond the boundaries of 90-minute classes—you may be thinking about
attending a teacher training program.
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Friday, November 02, 2012 by Tosca Braun
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Music in Yoga Class?
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Is music beneficial to the practice of yoga, or is
it simply a distraction? In Part 1, we discussed how the tantric traditions of Kashmir Shaivism and Rajanaka
view externalities such music, wine, or sexuality: Not as temptations to be
overcome, but aspects of the divine to be celebrated and integrated into
experience—within moderation.
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