If you’re a yoga teacher, have your yoga classes been suffering the winter blahs. It’s common during the Australian winter that class sizes can decrease and even become minuscule.
In one of the sessions I teach, the numbers attending have dropped right off for a variety of reasons: school holidays, winter flues and colds, sprained ankles or broken arms, work conflicts – all the usual stuff.
I think I’m way beyond taking this lack of students personally. […]
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One of the main things that gets me out to the Yoga Shed early each morning is the fact that doing practice helps soothe my mind.
The mental benefits of practice never interested me in the beginning. I thought yoga was going to help with weight loss and build muscles. And, I admit, the show-off in me liked the fact that even from my first class, I could do some advanced poses.
Soothing the eddies of the mind – citta vrtti nirodha – seems much more important as I’ve gotten older. […]
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I had an opportunity to teach a group of boys a number of years ago who attended Sydney Grammar School. The boys’ music department teacher was a student of mine, and he felt that these boys who were music students would benefit from some sessions.
I prepared my lessons for a group of 14 boys, but only 11 of them came along for yoga. […]
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If you want to put your spiritual progress or personal development to the test, just wait for the people closest to you (and usually the ones you love the most) to annoy you. It won’t happen in the honeymoon period as with newborn children or newlyweds, but just give it time.
This morning my dear husband informed me (as Dame Edna would say, ‘in the most caring way’) that he thought “my fuse was getting shorter”. […]
My desk is covered with books. It looks disorganised but I can put my finger on any one of them in a moment. The six sutra scholars who have been sitting on the desk advising me for the last seven weeks have been joined now by Donna Farhi and Godfrey Devereux. They are making special appearances for today’s post.
Why? Because these authors are so accessible.
Are you an action person? Well, then Chapter Two of Patanjali’s Sutra is for you.
Yogis travel the yoga path through action (kriya in Sanskrit). […]
I’ve been thinking about the way we take for granted the things and people at close hand. I said ‘we’ because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who does this.
For example, today I was writing to a friend who is in Sydney and I wanted to give him a word picture of the view from my desk. […]
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How does a person who is completely body-oriented take on the intellectual study that is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra? Is it in any way possible for me to comprehend such abstract concepts as karma, kaivalya, kundalini, or kushalata?Today, in my search for meaning in Sri Patanjali’s I-50 aphorism, I am left scratching my head, wondering what to write.
Yes and no is the answer, or, as T.K.V. […]
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I woke up this morning in my warm nest of goose-feathers-doona, and it was oh so compelling to lie in bed. […]
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If you have not yet read B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Life, you have a wonderful experience awaiting you. Mr. Iyengar’s book is subtitled “The Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace and Ultimate Freedom”, and it’s written with the aid of a couple of heavyweight authors, John J. Evans and Douglas Abrams. […]
Perhaps this is too serious a topic for a Friday night, but, hey, we’re up to it! The subject relates to the sutra of the day – how we know ourselves.
Here’s a lovely video that I think illustrates an idea from Goethe: “being a wheel rolling from its own centre.” This is a simple, accessible video class from a series by American, John McConnell, and it’s called “Knowing Yourself Through Awareness.”
I learned yoga with a great deal of emphasis on the physical; this is the way Iyengar yoga presents itself to the untrained. […]
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I saw a photo of B.K.S. Iyengar on Facebook yesterday, taken at the Yoga Institute in Pune, India. He was being celebrated on the occasion of Guru Poornima, the festival that gives disciples an opportunity to offer gratitude to their gurus.
The last time I saw Mr. Iyengar was in Bronte Park (Sydney) where he was being interviewed for a radio program back in the 90’s. He has always been a man of considerable force in the world which has earned him a nomination for The Greatest Indian award. […]
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With the southerly gale forces blowing up from Antarctica this week (or so it seems), have you started putting on some weight? A small fat layer to insulate from the perverse winter winds. It’s allowed, isn’t it? After all, we’ll just cover up with skivvies, fleecies, and beanies anyway.
In yoga we can make adjustments to our diets by considering the gunas – the three qualities of nature that contribute to how we show up in the world. They are called sattwa, rajas and tamas. […]
There are many yoga practices: mental, physical, emotional, physical. One sort of yoga practice I do is letting go of certain ideas I believe to be true, for instance the notion that I’m not any good at speak off the cuff in front of a camera.
Here’s an example from today:
We spent a little time this afternoon making some videos that will probably find their way onto one of my websites. The purpose is to educate people and perhaps sell things.
I don’t feel comfortable in front of cameras. […]
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I have become a writing machine. I’ve been churning out words all day at my computer.
Some of these words have to do with an infusion of new material on the YogaAnywhere FB site. Some relate to a new Yogaanywhere Wordpress site that is coming down the highway very soon – watch this space! Other writing relates to a great new newsletter about to be birthed this week. […]
(If you are irritated by every rub, how will you get polished? – Rumi)
I’m trying on being philosophical about having lost a post that took me the better part of an hour to compose. Hey, I’m slow at this, even after 2.5 yrs. on “Yoga Suits Her”.
So, the gist of what I want to say is: I’ve been resisting like crazy writing about the next few Sutra. They relate to experiences I have never had. Fortunately, Chapter One is almost complete, and Chapter Two is more the realm of mere mortals like me.
Fortunately T.K.V. […]
I love my iPhone. I was an early adopter. Not because of any nifty apps I could get, of which there were few and far between back then. But I just loved the way the iPhone could display photos, and, lord knows, I have a lot of images.
I am not a luddite. I wonder, though, whether all the screens we view all through the day are serving our health. […]
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I’m not sure I believe in affirmations. In fact, I think I read a study somewhere that said affirmations can work against you.
Say you pick a slogan such as, “I am happy and free”, and you write up some post-it-note messages to be placed strategically around your home. Everywhere you turn, there’s a reminder of the state of being that you aspire to as though it already exists.
But, here’s the thing that can trip you up: you don’t feel happy and free. […]
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The practice of yoga can become addictive for some people, especially those personalities who have that little bit of a tendency to get obsessive about things, like me.
When I discovered Iyengar yoga in 1979, sometimes I would do more than one class a day. I would definitely be at the studio every day (except Sunday), and I even did a yoga teacher training course only five months after my first class. The course went for six months. […]
I don’t know what the exact trigger is for having to go on a diet – different for different people, I suppose.
Possible reasons for gaining weight are we’ve been on the holiday of a lifetime on a cruise ship where the food laid on was deliciously irresistible. Or how about, visiting distant family and suffering emotional setbacks that could only be soothed by comfort foods. […]
A yoga student in last week’s class said that she almost didn’t make it. She might have been vacillating for all the myriad reasons a mind can generate: too busy, too hard, too long since the last attendance, not feeling like it, winter blues, upset in the family, or just plain slack.
She didn’t tell me why it was a close call and I didn’t ask, but I was thinking about her today when I was cycling down to Manning Point. […]