Four ways yogis can benefit from the Pomodoro Technique
When I write these blog posts, most of the time I do it to the sound of a small red kitchen timer, shaped like a chicken. Cranking the timer is a signal that the work is going to begin, and the ticking creates a reassuring sound barrier – it tells me that I can put […]
I’m in technical hell, and it’s gnarly, dude
First, my apologies to anyone who has tried to access this blog lately and run into a 404 Error message that begins, “Gnarly, Dude.” I’ve lately changed the address of the blog, and the error message is automatically generated by WordPress when anyone tries to use the old address. As soon as I figure out […]
Pain or golden glow? It matters what you call it.
Several years ago, while stocking up on reading for a beach holiday, I bought an old Pelican paperback (which has the name Doris Shadbolt written on the cover in a small, round hand). Yoga, by Ernest Wood, is an account written by an Englishman who came to India in 1910, learned Sanskrit and associated with […]
If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you get there?
If I stand on my back deck and type Los Angeles into the Google Maps app on my iPhone, the instructions on how to drive there begin: “Turn right out of the lane onto West 5th Avenue,” which is as tiny a baby step as anyone could ever want. It’s too bad there’s no Google […]
How do you work with the yamas and niyamas?
On Tuesday afternoon I spent an hour in a coffee shop near the studio with a teacher trainee, talking about the first two of yoga’s eight limbs, the restrictions (yamas) and the observances (niyamas). The yamas are the great vow of yoga, non-violence, truth, non-stealing, Brahmacarya, which is often translated as celibacy, and non-grasping, or […]
Weaken the afflictions to bring harmony into your life
What if you could remove discord from your life, and make it harmonious and ever so much simpler? Yoga philosophy says you can. How? You need to weaken the hold that the kleshas (afflictions or defilements), five powerful psychological drivers, have on your mind. At first glance, Patanjali’s list of kleshas in the Yoga Sutras […]