These writings are informal reflections on practicing and teaching yoga. Click on any title to read the entire piece.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
—ANAIS NIN
Excerpted from Chapter 17, " Communication and Interaction in Yoga Therapy," Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)
Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)
Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)
Meditation as taught in most yoga classes invites us to follow the path of Patanjali's method, which starts with Pratyahara, meaning "to relieve your senses of their external distractions." Put differently, it's a practice of isolation, one in which we go inside, separating our awareness from a world that Patanjalian yoga (indeed, most yoga) sees as illusory.
Part of the sublime nature of yoga is that there are infinite possibilities for deepening and refining one’s practice.
There are several basic elements that are ideally communicated to our students in every practice and given even greater clarity with newer students. Among the most important is the idea that yoga is neither a comparative nor a competitive practice, despite some people doing their best to make it so.
As we come to the experience in an asana in which we no longer feel any significant effect or effort in being in it, we might simply stay there, being in it, or we might find ourselves opening to a variat