How does the impossible become possible?
How does the impossible become possible? I don’t really know the answer to that. But I do know that in yoga it happens all the time. Take rope Sukhasana, for example, or Shirley’s rope trick – as I think of it. I first saw it two years ago, in an intensive workshop preparing for Junior […]
The Sniffley Sadhana
Summer Sadhana 2012, the fourth annual 10 days of early morning practice, has been a bumpy ride. Every day presented a new obstacle: one student had a family medical emergency; another’s dental surgery date moved ahead from July to two days before we started. There was a temporary crown that came out; a fall on […]
How to turn on your willpower and stick to your yoga practice
I used to think that willpower was a moral issue. Good, strong people did difficult tasks first thing every morning and never lost their self-control when they were tired or hungry. Bad, weak people failed because they didn’t have the moral fibre to do what was right in the moment. My concept of willpower was […]
How is a yoga pose like a Russian matryoshka doll?
What does yoga have to do with matryoshka dolls? A lot, as it turns out. From the outside, yoga poses can look as though they don’t have much in common. Take this handful: extended side angle, triangle pose, tree pose, reclining big toe pose and extended hand-to-big-toe pose. On the simplest level, orientation to gravity, […]
Discipline not working? Try indulgence for a change.
I heard from someone last week who bought the My Five-Minute Yoga app, didn’t use it, and wanted to be sure that the $2.99 cost wasn’t a recurring monthly fee. (No. It isn’t.) During our email conversation, I asked why it wasn’t working for her. “Unfortunately I don’t do the yoga,” she wrote. “In theory […]
Are some yoga poses lemons?
On reflection, I’d say no. There are poses that can cause harm if they are badly done. And there are poses so likely to be badly done that careful teachers rarely teach them – or more precisely, they rarely teach the final pose. That doesn’t make these poses lemons, just poses to approach with care. […]