When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Yoga Bear chose me. For quite some time, I had been talking about wanting to get involved in charity work. Talking about it and actually doing it are very different things. When my nephew Blaise was born three years ago with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a very rare [...]
Sutra 16, Verse 39 From the Radiance Sutras, A New Translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra The universe is an expanding shout of joy. A jam session is vibrating throughout creation – tune in. Feel it humming in your body. Hear it in the sounds of nature all around you. Listen to the deep, blissful [...]
While teaching a workshop recently, I tried something I had never done before: I demonstrated a sequence without speaking a word. In the hushed movement of our shared breath, the participants observed my modified sun salutation and organized themselves into pairs to take turns witnessing one another. I was hoping to engage a recently identified [...]
Practice Pages: Alignment Alignment. It’s quite the buzz word. Everywhere I turn someone is talking about being “in alignment.” Not just physical alignment – as in the proper position of the pelvis in tadasana (mountain pose) – although it IS part of the picture. People are referring to a much broader topic that affects [...]
Think you know what “yoga” means? Here is the full definition of the word, Yoga, as set forth in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, page 856: the act of yoking, joining, attaching harnessing, putting to (of horses) a yoke, team, vehicle, conveyance employment, use, application, performance equipping or arraying (of an army) fixing (of an arrow [...]
I had made all the excuses I could think of to not learn Tibetan – I’m entering menopause and my hormones are erasing my memory; I don't have time; I’ve never had a propensity for languages. (I took five years of French at school and can remember about three sentences and have only some broken [...]
One of my teachers describes the ultimate expression of a pose to his mostly beginning students with the phrase: In a perfect Yoga world. For instance he might say: In a perfect Yoga world, your head would meet your foot. On good days In a perfect Yoga world helps me see how even [...]
The Sanskrit word guru has several meanings; the most common is teacher. Gu means darkness and ru is the light. The spiritual teacher referred to as a guru is one who can take away the darkness of ignorance and bring down the light of wisdom. Traditionally, the guru is someone who serves as a sacred [...]
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 [...]
The Divine Power Of The Senses “I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it,” says Shug in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. God wants to “share a good thing.” It is clear that we have been given a great capacity to share in [...]