yoga

Yoga is great for your physical health, and fitness goals draw many of us to the mat. Some come to class because the elongating poses complement other activities like running, and some are motivated by the family member who can miraculously touch her toes, or the coworker who’s traded her sweaters for halter dresses since discovering Ashtanga. Yoga is a good workout. But if you’re in it for the “yoga butt,” you might be tempted to tune out all the other stuff, like when your teacher starts going on about the breath.

Few people call karmic yoga “karmic yoga” these days, but it still exists. You might know these classes as the weekly or monthly free class at your local studio. Perhaps there’s a donation-based class near you. Karmic or karma yoga is based from the Bhagavad Gita, which is a sacred Sanskrit Hindu text. There are three key paths to realization, and karmic yoga is one of them.

You’ve seen the classes before. They’re often listed as “Rock ‘n’ Roll Yoga” or another less zen-sounding name. Personally, I teach classes called “Namaslay” and “That Asana Though,” one with a rock playlist and the other featuring rap and hip hop. Of course, listening to pop music while working on your flow is far from traditional. It’s certainly not what the original practitioners of yoga envisioned when they came up with the asanas! However, almost nobody practices yoga in modern times like it was originally practiced. That’s okay!

Welcome to our #WellnessWednesday yoga primer. Yoga is a wonderful way to become attuned to your body and increase circulation and flexibility. Each week I'll offer you a pose with benefits and instruction.

I have a confession to make. In the not-so-distant past I was one of those yogis who irritates the ‘normal’ people in class. I would hang around for thirty minutes before class practicing my arm balances, I would do every single advanced posture in every class. If the teacher happened to include Crow Pose, you can bet I would be pressing from Crow to Handstand and back while most people were still struggling to lift their toes from the floor.

The Yoga of Eating

From morning until nightfall and sometimes beyond, the practice of eating can either be done consciously or unconsciously. When done without awareness, eating can contribute to symptoms of dis-ease in the body, but if approached with care and conscious attention, eating can be yet another way to practice yoga.

The most fascinating truth I learned while at yoga school in India was that we westerners had it all wrong. More than postures, breath and mantra, beyond meditation and devotion, the epiphany hit me one sweltering afternoon walking back to the dorms from seva. So many of us had come from countries where our yoga classes centered around holding postures and breathing deeply or powering through the heat and sweat as we sat deep into chair pose and drank in the ujjai. But yoga was not these things at all, or not mainly these things.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is characterized by high levels of glucose in the blood stream. Untreated, this can lead to nerve damage, kidney failure, and blindness.

Undaunted by the devastating effects of diabetes, researchers arranged a boxing match between yoga and diabetes. The fight was going to last six rounds, each one month long.

As we age, our brains naturally lose their function. Elderly people experience memory loss in the form of what they hear in conversations and the things that they remember seeing. Researchers wanted to test whether yoga could improve an elderly person’s memory as well as the standard memory enhancement training (MET). What they found was astounding.

Purvottanasana / Intense East Stretch

Benefits:

• Stretches whole front of body.
• Helps strengthen back of body: arms legs, and torso.

Foundation & General Alignment: