Trading Our Push To Compete And Compare For Compassion And Challenge After weeks of practice, I’d finally done it – I could get myself up into headstand without smashing my heels into to the wall, and what’s more, I could hold it peacefully for a good thirty seconds. Imagine my dismay when, during a visit [...]
Can Ancient Ritual Heal Modern Separation Anxiety? Two hours after sunset in the mountains outside of Ojai on the Winter Solstice, the longest, darkest night of the year, I lost signal on my GPS. Even though I am a country girl at heart, I still felt disconcerted blindly navigating a landscape without streetlamps, without gas [...]
Seeking Ecstasy, Bliss And Equanimity Through Tantra My mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, was fond of his whisky. I was fond of his drinking, for when he drank (usually Scotch) his already profound ability to speak meaningfully and insightfully on spiritual subjects would dramatically expand. Whenever we would imbibe together, he would encourage me [...]
Marty Klein & Gretchen Hein Beginning Yoga for the Blink and Visually Impaired While Yoga is a practice that integrates all of the senses as a means to being present, it does not mean that a disability in one of the senses makes a person any less able as a practitioner. When one [...]
Sinister Yogis David Gordon White University of Chicago Press What is a yogi? This is the question behind David Gordon White's new book, the last in a series which began with The Alchemical Body and continued with Kiss of the Yogini. Unlike most academic studies in this area, the book's main object of inquiry is [...]
Chocolate has become the quintessential Valentine’s Day gift, representing love, sweetness, devotion and sensuality. Its origins as the go-to gift for romantic holidays are fairly recent and involve the magic of marketing and the ‘60s, specifically the 1860s. This was when the heart-shaped candies and the heart-shaped boxes were released in force. Before [...]
Ayurveda has been practiced in the US for only about 30 years, yet it is one of the systems of medicine native to India and is thousands of years old. Readers are invited to submit questions for “Ayurveda Q & A” to ayurveda@layogamagazine.com. Q: I was recently informed that applying onion juice to the scalp can sometimes [...]
Raw Brownie Recipe By Rod Rotondi In the home where I grew up, the acts of baking and offering brownies were gestures of love. At the time, the bleached white flour, refined white sugar and margarine were just part of everyday life. I now see those ingredients in a different light after nearly [...]
At a recent Yoga retreat two questions were raised: “What do you want to gain from your Yoga practice?” and “What has Yoga done for you?” The answers, suffused with “I” and “me,” implied that Yoga tends to be an egocentric practice that endeavors to improve the sense of self. That being said, an often [...]
Teaching Sanskrit Of The Hands When Lila Lolling was immersed in her Yoga teacher training program in the Sivananda Yoga tradition, she was aware of the interpreters who were translating the course material into French, Spanish and Mandarin, among other languages. Yet she noted a striking omission: There wasn’t an interpreter for the deaf. As [...]