Five years ago I discovered knitting, and it quickly became one of my favorite pastimes. Working with needles and yarn is a deeply satisfying experience on many levels. The color and texture of the yarn running through your fingers, the rhythm of the needles slipping and sliding away in your hands, the satisfaction of seeing […]
Intermediate/Advanced Practice: A Journey Round the Mountains
A mountain is a permanent fixture in a landscape and can be used by the traveler as a reference point to help them find their way. In this practice sequence, Tadasana (Mountain Pose) will become your guide. After a short restorative sequence to get you up out of the valley of daily life, with every […]
Fundamentals Practice: Growing Your Mountain
Mountains grow over the span of generations, the result of massive geological forces as the tectonic plates that cover the earth smash into each other in imperceptibly slow motion. Your Mountain Pose, on the other hand, can grow after just a few easeful poses. About Fundamentals Practices: Fundamentals practices are appropriate for all levels. They […]
Tadasana (Mountain Pose)
There’s a wonderful visual harmony and energy to a room full of people doing Tadasana (Mountain Pose), the classic foundational standing pose of yoga, but then, the same can be said of a parade ground of soldiers standing at attention. Both project an image of power and vitality, of conformity amongst a group, but yoga […]
How to Stand with Poise and Ease, Part 2
It’s Monday morning! Hopefully, you’ve had a relaxing and restorative weekend, and you’ve arrived back at work refreshed and ready to meet the week. Those first few moments of the day can be great, can’t they? So much spring in your step before the weight of the day presses down on you. But that weight […]
How to Stand with Poise and Ease, Part 1
In my last post, I floated the idea that a person’s physical aspect, their body, was a complex and dynamic organism capable of accommodating multiple directives or intentions, even if they seemingly contradict each other. In this exploration, we’re going to take a look at some of those contradictory intentions as a precursor to finding […]
Do Less, Not More
There is a long tradition in both Western and Indian cultures that gives a person’s physical aspect, the body, a bad rap, branding it as somehow lazy, unclean, not to be trusted, and in need of whipping into shape. In his book, “Tree of Yoga,” yoga master B. K. S. Iyengar evocatively spells out the […]
“Yank-and-Crank” Yoga No More!
Have you ever finally felt like you’re beginning to understand, after ages of struggling, some arcane instruction your yoga teacher has given you, only for them to tell you something completely contradictory? My yoga teacher, Donald Moyer, recently retired and I was looking back over a decade’s worth of notes from his classes. I was […]