Beyond Asana Blog

It’s that time of year when my holiday cookie baking - usually a weekend project - spills out into the weeknights. It’s a sure sign that the holidays are fast approaching. 

For some of us this means parties and reunions with loved ones. For others, it’s a solitary celebration, or a time for being with the grief, loss, or uncertainty we might be moving through.
 
Whatever it is for you this year, I think one of the most important ways yoga serves us - especially at this time - is by expanding our capacity to live it fully.

The practices and perspectives of yoga help us to be present with the full spectrum of our experience so we can show up for ourselves with greater acceptance, courage,...

Two words that evoke the best of the holiday spirit. How can yoga bring a new dimension to the ways we might usually think about them? Let’s take a look:

The English word “comfort” can be translated into a number of different Sanskrit words. But one that you might be familiar with is sukha, which means ease, comfort, or happiness. In the Yoga Sutras it refers to one of the qualities of a well-established meditation posture and, by extension your experience of physical ease and comfort in any posture at all.

You can also think about sukha in deeper sense of how your yoga practice can be a source comfort in your life. You can approach your practice as a time to temporarily let go of the d...

In last week’s post on the differences between dualist and nondualist yoga philosophies, we saw that whether we adopt a dual or nondual perspective makes a huge difference in how we see our relationship to the world and the nature of reality. Therefore, it has significant implications for how we understand the aims of our yoga practice, it’s role in our lives, and the forms that our practice takes. 

As I mentioned last week, dualistic yoga philosophies view spirit and matter as essentially different and independent from one another. They see the goal of yoga as liberating the soul from its entanglement with the body/mind and the outer world. This gives rise to practices that serve to det...

I would love your thoughts on the difference between dualistic and nondualistic yoga philosophies.  

I’m so glad you asked! This is an important question and one that has significant implications for your yoga practice. This week, I’ll explain the differences between dual and nondual worldviews and their distinct approaches to yoga. Next week, I’ll discuss what this means for your yoga practice.

Dualistic yoga philosophies consider spirit and matter to be fundamentally different and view spirit as superior to matter. The belief that reality is composed of two separate and independent parts is known as dualism, or dvaita in Sanskrit.

For most Western yoga students, the most well-known e...

How about including your body? The living, breathing miracle of your existence on this planet?

Amidst all the ways you might feel your body is less than perfect, consider the thousands of things that go right just to make it possible for you to get out of bed in the morning.

Take a moment and bow down to the ingenious mechanism of your breath, the wonder of having senses to perceive the world, and the masterful symphony of reflexes, systems, and processes constantly at work supporting all you do and all you are.

And, perhaps most of all, honor the awareness that’s there to do the thanking.

At the conclusion of last weekend’s Grounding in Gratitude workshop, one of the participants expressed her appreciation for the “long” final relaxation after the postural practice. In fact, it lasted only five minutes, though I fully appreciate how a good Savasana can wonderfully warp our sense of time. 
 
Acknowledging our need for deep rest, the group remarked on how tough it can be - even for those of us who know better - to give ourselves the time and space for it. I think there are some good reasons why we might resist giving ourselves permission to do nothing, even just for a few minutes. Yet, when we consider how life works, it seems like us humans are outliers in our compulsion for act...

Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
- Rainer Maria Rilke
  
Congratulations! You’ve been given 24 brand-new, irreplaceable hours.
 
They’re pretty much guaranteed to be imperfect and to include moments that disappoint you and others that delight you.

How do you wish to live them?
 
There’s no shortage of ideas and inspiration for how to make the most of the time we have. It’s a question that’s been pondered by seekers, philosophers, and poets throughout the ages. Yet, it’s one that only we ourselves can answer.

I heard a wonderful anecdote recently about the revered Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, or Brother Thay as he was known by his community and students. It was told by a monk who served as his attendant for many years.

One day, as Thay was getting ready to leave the dining hall of the monastery where he lived, his attendant saw that there was a bottleneck of several hundred people gathered at the door. Because it was part of his job in such situations to make sure Thay had enough space to exit the room, he began to assert himself into the crowd, when suddenly he felt a gentle pull on his robes from behind. It was Thay, who without saying anything indicated that making space in this way wasn’t ...

In a moment of near-perfect irony, no sooner did I get settled on the couch to begin writing this post than I was interrupted by my teenage daughter, who was getting ready for school and asked me for help making breakfast.

It’s an example of the classic paradox for us householder yogis and a question I’m often asked: How do you balance your commitment to going deeper in yoga with honoring your roles and responsibilities in the world? Is it possible to do both? 

This is an especially challenging dilemma to resolve if we consider Classical Yoga - the yoga of Patanjali and the eight-limbed path - to be our only option. In fact, Classical Yoga was originally designed as a renunciatory path....

 
Did you hear the news out of Alaska last week that the annual winter snow crab season was cancelled, for the first time ever, because of a decline in the crab population that’s likely due to the warming of the Bering Sea?
 
For me, it was another sad reminder of the fragility of the world’s precious ecosystems. I know I’m not alone in feeling a sense of grief when thinking about the future of life on earth, or in the deep desire to contribute to the healing and sustaining of life on our beautiful, miraculous planet.
 
Collective grief happens when a community or a society experiences extreme change or loss. It can manifest in the wake of major events such as war, natural disasters, or any other...