Anyone concerned about their well-being knows sleep is important for the body and mind. Knowing you’re sleep deprived, too busy to get enough rest or suffering from insomnia can be a catalyst to do something about it.
Excellent health involves many variables and factors like proper nutrition, regular exercise, spending quality time with loved ones and/or engaging in some type of fun recreation activity. However, one of the most important factors in having vibrant health is rest and deep relaxation. Our modern, industrial lives are busier than ever with many of us skipping out on getting enough quality sleep.
Yoga is more than a movement we see in class – it’s an entire lifestyle and philosophy. In fact, the yogic lifestyle is made up of eight limbs. The eight limbs of yoga act as a guideline to live a purposeful life by. They stem from the Yoga Sutras, compiled by Patanjali around 2000 years ago. The first limb includes yamas, which are ethical rules. One of the yamas, ahimsa, is often oversimplified.
My mother wore hard contact lenses for over 30 years. After working with Yoga for the Eyes for several months she began to see a marked improvement in her vision and after six month's time, she didn't need the contacts anymore. Now she only uses reading glasses on the occasion that she is staring at pages for extended periods of time. I was astonished to realize that Yoga for the Eyes was so powerful and so quick in its results.
On a train ride from Bombay, India, to Goa, I sat in a car with a man in Bermuda shorts and white wild hair talking endlessly for the entire 12-hour journey of his experiences all across India: as a monk, in the Tantric temples, as a martial artist learning from the best. I had no idea I was cosmically being set up with him as my teacher for the next several months. He was a Tai Chi master and I was one of the lucky students to meet Sahm.
Barefoot and pregnant? Get that yoga mat out for this helpful and easy-to-do prenatal yoga.
One of my yoga teachers says we don’t notice the breath until we’re out of it.
By the time I started a yoga teacher training in 2011, I was out of it, both figuratively and literally: my breath was labored, shallow, strained. I was a first-year 4th grade teacher, and my heart was always racing, whether I was standing in front of my classroom, lying in bed, or brushing my teeth. I was clearly overwhelmed, my body was rebelling, and I couldn’t find the off switch. I was sure my short, panicky breaths were announcing my anxiety to the world.
Ghee - an Ayurvedic secret that's out, just not entirely. If you have never reaped the delicious, deeply nutritious benefits of ghee (also known as clarified butter), you haven't fully lived – and you haven't fully yogified. For once you taste, feel, know the incredible service ghee can do for you and your body, mind and spirit, you will fall in ever-lasting love. It's everything you ever wanted to know about ghee, just for the health of it.
The ancient Tantric science of yoga nidra is an incredibly simple way to access healing as well as deeper states of awareness not normally known by many. By practicing the “yoga of conscious sleep” the dream realm can be more easily accessed and eventually mastered. Yoga nidra also aids in uniting both hemispheres of the brain for everyday harmony and evolutionary bliss. Yoga nidra is key in not only assisting with deep subconscious healing, but in going beyond it to a state of transcendence. Here's how...
Below, we look at some of the benefits of practicing this set of poses, as well as the science behind those benefits