Black sheep, white sheep, or just asleep?
Maybe you’re neither white nor black, good nor bad. Maybe you’re not even a sheep.Perfection in an asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached. From then on the sadhaka (practitioner) is undisturbed by dualities. –– Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, II.47-48, translation by B.K.S. Iyengar […]
News Flash: I have a skeleton!
On the left, Arthur. On the right, my wonderful and generous physiotherapist, Judy Russell. Well, of course I’ve always had bones. But now I have a 30-inch tall anatomically correct skeleton, named Arthur. He is nowhere as big as a full-sized skeleton, but he’s engagingly solid, and while the top of his head is missing, […]
What dandelions taught me about “cultivating the opposite”
On Sunday morning, I taught my two classes, came home, had lunch, and, since it wasn’t raining, went out to the back yard to do some spring cleanup. My main objective was to tackle the dandelions that grow just outside the flowerbed and between the paving stones of my parking space. I opened Photo365 on […]
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 […]
Lord, it’s hard to be humble
Perhaps not exactly what’s meant by humility. Right off the bat, I’ll admit that I don’t know much about humility. It’s not a virtue I’ve ever cultivated. In fact, I only started thinking about it on Monday, while I was reading a piece called Yoga, Our Mirror, by Montreal Iyengar teacher Carla Ramirez. (It’s in […]
Can you do flow yoga while sitting still?
On the face of it, this is a dumb question. Flow yoga, as generally defined, covers a wide range of forms all of which link poses in close to continuous movement. Some, like Ashtanga, follow a set sequence of poses, with a sun salutation between each pose. Others have no set sequence, and may or […]