Inspired by the start of the year, I'd like to share with you the beginning of the chapter on practice, Sadhana Pada, of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.What are the Yoga Sutras?As a brief introduction, the Yoga Sutras are a Sanskrit text dating back about 1,500 years that represent...
Bringing the year to a closeTogether in these December week newsletters we are working towards consciously bringing 2022 to a close. We are taking time to be mindful and intentional about wrapping up the year so we can start with as clean a slate as...
TL;DRThere's a yoga practice called pratipaksa bhavana from Sutra 2.33:Upon being harassed with negative thoughts, one should cultivate counteracting thoughts. Maybe that's all you need for today. Or maybe, you want to know why...
Some Yoga advice for high emotion environmentsWith the holiday season upon us, and with it the high emotions of reconnecting with family and friends while navigating obligations, expectations, and the weird way we seem to revert into family roles we thought we'd long since outgrown,...
Jiddu KrishnamurtiI picked a book off my bookshelf this morning, a collection of writings and talks by J. Krishnamurti, a late 19th, early 20th century philosopher/mystic/teacher. Interestingly, Krishnamurti's origins are in theosophy, a western occultist religious movement that he, as a boy, was groomed as a...
Yoga, it's more than physicalAs much as I love and adore the embodiment practices and the physical aspects of Yoga, I know what lies beneath the way we care for and inhabit our bodies is our powerful, pesky mind.Without a certain mental attitude, without a...
What is Yoga about?Yoga is a practice of organizing your efforts to support a calm and steady mental state. It's basically all about calming the mind.The first Yoga Sutra of Patanjali says atha yoganusasanam: now I'm going to tell you about Yoga. The second says Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah: Yoga is calming/restraining/minimizing (nirodhah) the...
UghIsn't life boring? I mean, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes something unusual happens, planned or unplanned, and things are exciting and new for a while. But have you ever noticed that even when you go on vacation, for instance, things are still basically normal? You wake...
Dear Friends, I got nothing today. I'm uninspired. Let me open a Yoga book and see what pops up. From my notes in the margins:*Yoga as a reaction to the practice of manipulating the physical environment for sense gratification e.g. sacrificial offerings for boonsA boon is a thing that is...