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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Practice Pages: Yoga Therapy Yoga in Iraq: Inner Journeys Provide Sanctuary One of the keys to survival in a mortar attack is to hit the ground as quickly as possible. During one such moment, I happened to be close the ground already since I had just lowered my body into chaturanga (four limbs [...]
Practice Pages: Yoga Therapy Observing Habits and Affecting Change Through Conscious Direction THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE provides teachings to allow people to listen to the body’s habits in movement and posture and reorganizing our internal coordination. Like yogis entering a pose with specific actions such as anchoring the legs, Alexander students watch themselves stand, sit, [...]
Practice Pages: Yoga Therapy Oh, Those Aching Joints! How Yoga Helps People With Arthritis Feel Young Again “TODAY’S NOT SUCH A GREAT DAY.” That thought often resounds in the minds of people living with arthritis. Maybe the weather changed. Maybe they gardened a bit too much the day before. Regardless of the cause, participating in a [...]
Larry Payne, PhD, is one of the founders of the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT), a professional organization of Yoga therapists holding their third annual conference this March, the Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR). A Yoga therapist himself, he founded the Samata Yoga Center in Los Angeles and spearheads the Yoga therapy [...]
Practice Pages: Yoga Therapy What is Yoga Therapy? by Felicia M. Tomasko, RN The International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) sponsored their third annual Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR) in Los Angeles, March 5 - 8. The weekend featured a historic three-day meeting of the organization’s Council of Schools, where more than [...]
My daughter was sitting on my bed when I returned home from a Yoga class. “What’s that on your pants?” she asked. I did a quick scan for food stains. I couldn’t find anything. She pointed. “That thingie on the back of your pants...” I looked in the mirror and saw what she was referring [...]
Cultivating Practice, Relationship and Sexuality Through Breath “The energy of life that Yoga calls prana is exactly the same energy that is engaged in sex. Practicing postures with the whole body and with feeling will have a spontaneous effect on your ability to love and be loving. When you have found a rhythm [...]