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I’ve been studying and teaching yoga in the Iyengar tradition for more than 30 years. The field has changed. In Liberating Yoga, Harpinder Mann relates her own frustration with finding an authentic yoga path. The path of yoga is very broad, but I agree with Mann about what’s authentic: real yoga comes from India and…
Today, the yoga center reopened after our winter break and the 2025 classes began. Not only that, the sun came out after weeks of cleansing rain and everything shines. Happy New Year! I love fresh starts, and I grab them wherever I can. New Year, of course, then again for the Chinese new year. I’ll…
The three warrior poses (virabhadrasana I-III) are poses of strength and power. They lead inward, psychologically and physically, as the practitioner must balance the powerful muscles of the legs and arms by recruiting the small, stabilizing muscles close to the spine. Why bother? Commonly, we overuse the big outer muscles of the hips and buttocks.…
September is here with low clouds and a little rain. They say summer will roar back later this week, then more clouds. Birds are gathering for migration; animals are stockpiling food. Transitional weather with unstable, transitional energy. We’re a part of all that. Like everything living, people are seasonal creatures tuned by dualities: the swing…
Many years ago, I did a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I sat for hours troubled by a profound sense of crookedness. I did my best to sit up straight and still. I kept leveling my shoulders. I kept lifting my chest. And every effort to be correct made me feel like I was swimming against…
A student asked me to write about how to overcome inertia in order to begin better habits. Luckily, I know something about training animals, and people are animals. It boils down to this: only positive reinforcement or no reinforcement at all (I’ve blogged that before!). Praise yourself for any small success. Reward progress. Celebrate whenever…
As a writer I’ve heard the advice Less is More all my life. But why? What does less offer that’s greater than more? Here’s a literary example: The luxuriant, soft, red, gold and brown coat of my athletic old farm dog shimmered and gleamed in the bright warm sunshine as he investigated his surroundings with…
I read an article about how we ought to imagine the good that might come from climate change.* The author, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, does not deny the dire situation, but encourages an attitude that searches out positive opportunities. When I look back over these blogs, they mostly focus on this idea: trouble…
According to the yoga sutras, all of existence is of one piece. Our senses restrict us to the one-way linear field of time, but we have roots in another dimension. The goal of yoga is to dis-cover and experience the atman, the enlivening core of us that always dwells in that other dimension even as…
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