I find that my relationship with myself is greatly affected by my body awareness. Practices like yoga, which require listening to my body and bring me into my body in the moment, help me; these activities are now important paths that I travel repeatedly on the way back to myself.
There’s so much about yoga that we don’t know or can’t comprehend—and by we, I mean all of us—from the practiced yogis and yoginis to those who don’t know the "y" of yoga. As we have oft reiterated, yoga is not just exercise.
If you practice yoga, you’ve probably noticed that yoga twists feel very rejuvenating. If you haven’t tried a yoga twist, you may want to check out Yoga Journal’s overview of twisting poses. Much like the motion of wringing out a towel, they compress and then release the muscles and organs of our body and leave us feeling cleansed and looser. Twists can be completed standing, seated or even while lying down.
When I first started practicing yoga, I was driven by both spiritual and emotional factors, but I also wasn’t getting any younger and felt the need to do what I could to maintain my physical body.
I had no idea how deep the practices would take me! Not only would they offer the realization that I was more than the physical, and that the physical body was a temple, they would also purify, rejuvenate and beautify this sacred vessel.
From this came the desire to care deeply for this temple my soul had been given and to make this devotion part of my daily yoga routine.
Barefoot and pregnant? Get that yoga mat out for this helpful and easy-to-do prenatal yoga.
I have a confession to make: I am a 230-hour certified yoga teacher, and yet I still use online yoga videos at home. I know this sounds ridiculous (can’t I do yoga on my own?), but there is something so soothing and relaxing about having someone guide you through a practice. Yoga videos have vastly improved since the days of workout tapes and DVDs, and many high-quality videos and sequences are available for very little, if not for free!
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.
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.
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!
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.