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: Meditation I don't know about you, but when I meditate, my mind does not go blank. It’s an inner wilderness adventure. I close my eyes and blam, it’s wild in here. There is a whirl of thoughts and feelings, a hundred sticky notes of things to do. When I tend to each thought, [...]
Psalm Isadora photographed by Amir Magal The Inner Journey From Pain To Bliss, The Outer Journey From Practice To Giving Back Psalm Isadora's exposure to Yoga took place fifteen years ago when a friend invited her to a Yoga class at a gym. At the time, she was suffering from back pain due [...]
Bhakti Fest Rocks “The Woodstock of the kirtan movement ;” this was the tagline organizers used to describe Bhakti Fest. This weekend didn’t have the mud, the nudity or the crowds, but the idea of Woodstock was conjured up (on the fortieth anniversary, no less) and it had to do with the christening of an [...]
Attending the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Dharamsala, India, is quite a different experience from doing so in the West. Trade comfortable cushioned seats in a temperature-controlled environment for seats on a concrete floor under a covered rooftop exposed to the wild fluctuations of the Himalayan weather. Trade state-of-the-art bathrooms with the most basic plumbing alternative [...]
Around The World And On The Stage ONLY FIFTEEN MINUTES into the practice and we knew we were in over our heads. Guru Kal, (short for Kali), a powerful lion of a man, was barking out commands in a rapid and incomprehensible (to us) dialect of Malayalam. Following his direction, we awkwardly threw ourselves to [...]
Desi Bartlett Practice Pages: English Finding A Style Of Practicing Yoga Which Speaks To You DISCOVERING WHICH STYLE of Yoga speaks to you is largely a matter of taste. In Sanskrit, the word rasa means essence. When you are describing something’s rasa, you are talking about the qualities it has, the feeling behind those [...]
Practice Pages: Meditation Japa Breath From The Radiance Sutras, A New Version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra AYURVEDIC PHYSICIANS ARE FOND of saying, “Have all six tastes on your tongue every day: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent (spicy) and astringent.” Whatever your body type, by treating yourself to diversity of taste (rasa) you will have more [...]
Meeting The Man Behind The Shadow I USUALLY CONSIDER MYSELF to be conscious of what is going on around me, but when I entered a Los Angeles hotel room to interview Zhander Remete, the founder of Shadow Yoga, he seemed to appear out of nowhere, despite being in plain view. As his steady [...]
Brother Achalananda speaking at the Self-Realization Fellowship annual convocation in Los Angeles. Self-Realization Annual Convocation in LA August 2 - 8, 2009 There’s something both powerful and inspirational about sharing an enormous room with nearly 4,000 people, all poised and sitting silently, creating a meditative space that vibrates far beyond the walls. This [...]