Don’t Think of it as Pain Don’t think of it as pain,” my first yoga teacher used to say. “Think of it as sensation.” Yes, painful sensation. But I did start to think of it as sensation. And it helped. So I shifted my attitude off the mat too. For instance, I didn’t [...]
Diving Beneath the Surface for the Internal Arts of Qigong “That ’s the milion dollar question,” Sifu Tom Rizzo grinned at me when I asked him to give me his definition of qi (sometimes written as chi) energy, our prana, our life force. “A definition of something is much easier when you’ve understood it or [...]
Swami Veda Bharati gave the opening address at the International Association of Yoga Therapists conference in March, 2008. In his talk, he stated that the most important yoga therapy text is the Charaka Samhita. The Charaka Samhita is a Sanskrit tome generally believed to have been compiled two thousand years ago and is a work [...]
relationship as teacher; teaching in relationship "Hatha Yoga means the joining of sun and moon, masculine and feminine, and when we teach together it encourages this meeting inside each of the practitioners," says David Life, who has been teaching for decades with his partner, Sharon Gannon. David and Sharon are two of many notable examples [...]
finding the buddha, the dharma and the sangha on the road and bringing them home Last year I packed my bags for three months and moved from Los Angeles to Iowa. My greatest fear was not the bone-chilling winters, ruthless tornadoes or the sparser selection of vegetarian menu selections. My greatest fear was [...]
Interview: Robert Thurman Robert Thurman was named by Time as one of the 25 most influential Americans. A 45-year colleague of the Dalai Lama, Thurman was the first American ordained as a Buddhist monk. He cofounded the Tibet House with Richard Gere and is professor at Columbia University. Professor Thurman is an articulate writer and [...]
Someone’s in the Kitchen With Ahimsa In yoga class I caught myself beating myself up about beating myself up. I took it as a sign to start focusing on ahimsa (nonviolence). In classical yoga, ahimsa is generally given as the first yama (ethical precept), and defined as the non-harming of others by thought, [...]
Cultivate energy, boundaries and develop intuition. Whether you’ve always known that you’re an empathetic person, or only discovered this gift quite recently, you deeply sense and resonate with the emotions of others, which often results in you being connected to a wide variety of people, personalities, and situations. As a subject, empathy is rarely discussed [...]
Religion provides the big story that allows people to make sense of their often chaotic lives. And universality has been the goal of nearly all religions since the start of recorded human history. The core message of Christianity, universalist in tone, proclaims love and forgiveness as the means to create heaven on earth. Through God’s [...]
Max Simon and the Self-Centered Tour How do you inspire one million young people to meditate? Make it sexy. Make it cool. Tall order? Maybe. But such is the clear intention of Max Simon, founder of the selfcentered tour and son of Julia Simon, Transcendental Meditation teacher and Vedic astrologer, and Dr. David Simon, co-founder [...]