Sadhana: practice for day five
If you’re going to commit to a yoga practice, one that is “cultivated skillfully and continuously for a long time,” as Sutra 1.14 specifies, then there’s a question you have to answer. If your body isn’t ready for arm balance, headstand and shoulder stand every day, what do you do while waiting for it to […]
Morning yoga practice: if it’s so important, why is it so hard to do?
Google “images for important and urgent” and you will be rewarded with an unbelievable 3,200,000 results, many of them featuring the four quadrants made famous by Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. On the off chance that you’ve been living under a rock, or shun self-improvement books on principle, here are […]
Where Do You Find Your Inner Teacher?
I went to Saskatoon at the end of May, to the Iyengar Yoga Association of Canada’s conference and AGM. What I found there, along with the aforementioned magpies, gophers and lilacs, was friendly people, good conversation, and something more: another piece of the Inner Teacher puzzle. The Inner Teacher is the innate intelligence that, among […]
Tricky Triangle Pose: protect your SI joints
Did you know that of the three simplest shapes, circle, square and triangle, only the triangle completely reverses its symbolic meaning when it’s turned upside-down? Rotate a circle 90 degrees and it still means wholeness, unity, inclusion, and infinity. A square turned on its head looks exactly the same and still means grounding, stability, balance […]
Four ways the Brahma Viharas can keep you clear
I want to have a lucid old age, but the odds aren’t looking good. Start with a family strain of dementia, add growing up in the toxic-chemicals-friendly 1950s, then stir in a rear-end collision that smacked my forehead into the windshield when I was 10, and really, all bets are off. I’d like to believe […]
When it comes to yoga practice, how much is enough?
First let’s agree that the day will never come when you’ve spent enough time practicing friendliness, compassion, joy and equanimity, and can just put them aside until tomorrow. For that part of a yoga practice, “never enough” is a given. But even in asana practice, there’s no possibility of doing it all. You can’t practice […]