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 […]
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 […]
Resolve to be Content: Five-Minute Yoga Challenge
It’s a new year. The clean, precise energy of January has replaced December’s animal urge to fight the darkness by drinking sparkling things and eating After Eight mints. Now we’re in the season of setting goals. For years, my yoga goals went like this: I will practice every day. I will do headstand in the […]
Withdraw your eyes, quiet your mind: Five-Minute Yoga Challenge
As a species, we humans are always on the lookout. Sight dominates all of our other senses and is largely responsible for the way we perceive the world – that aggregate of impressions which we tellingly call our “point of view. As long as we’re gathering visual information, our brains are busy. So it stands […]
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 […]