Beyond Asana Blog

During a visit to my mother's house years ago, I left a yoga philosophy book lying around in the kitchen. When I returned a few hours later, she looked at me wistfully and said, “I was looking through your book. It must be so nice to believe what you believe.” 
 
What an intriguing statement, don’t you think?
 
It got me reflecting about the nature of belief in yoga and the source of our faith in the practices. 

In Sanskrit, faith is known as shraddha. It's meant to be based on our experience, born out by practice, and reinforced by self-reflection. 
 
For example, if someone tells me that Half Downward-facing Dog can ease lower back pain, why should I believe them until I try it out? It’s only ...

If we’re connected on social media, you might have seen this quote that I posted in honor of Earth Day. There’s a backstory to it that I wanted to share with you because it holds an important lesson:
 
I first read it in 1992 at the World Yoga Center, the studio where I was introduced to yoga and took my first teacher training. It was hanging on wall in the changing room. I can still remember the feeling of exhilaration, as if my whole being said “Yes!" Although I knew nothing about yoga philosophy, the words felt true on a deep, instinctual level. Reading them sparked something inside me.
 
Little could my 23 year-old self have imagined that in the decades to come I would be immersed in the ...

What more can we accomplish now than the survival of the soul. Harm and decay are not more present than before, perhaps, only more apparent, more visible and measurable….So much in collapse, so much seeking new ways out. Room for what new can happen.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter excerpt from 1914

 
What strikes me about Rilke’s prophetic words are the phrases the survival of the soul and room for what new can happen, and their resonance with the transformative power of yoga. 

The soul is often referred to in yoga as the Self, the atman, or the Heart. It’s envisioned as eternal, unchanging, and indestructible essence within the human being. In this most transcendent sense, there’s no quest...

I read an article in The Atlantic magazine a few days ago called Sick all the Time. This pretty much captures what our household has felt like over the past 6 months, with someone battling one bug or another nearly constantly. And while, thankfully, all our illnesses have turned out to be mild and transient, it’s still no fun. 

I recently wrote about the cycle of creation according to Nondual Tantric philosophy, which includes the acts of creation, maintenance, and dissolution.  

These are considered to be three of the five functions of consciousness, known as Shiva in this tradition.  Just as Shiva is said to perform these functions on the universal level, they are also recognized as i...

Everything dies, but that’s kind of good. It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life, it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity.

- adrienne maree brown, writer, activist, and author

 
In our course on Nondual Tantra, one of the concepts we're exploring is the creative cycle. This tradition envisions an absolute consciousness - unbounded in its freedom and power - as the source from which everything comes into being, hangs around for a while, and then subsides. It describes this source power as giving rise to the dynamics of both our inner and outer worlds in a perpetual cycle of creation, maintenance, and dissolution. ...

I sometimes joke with students that a side benefit of practicing with me is that by listening to all the verbal cues I give, they don’t have time to think about their problems. I’m only half kidding.

As a student of alignment-based asana, I was taught by teachers who used lots of words, words that guided me deeper in my practice, words that captured my experience and turned it into learning and growth, and words that gathered the energy of my monkey-mind and focused it inward to grasp ever more subtle aspects of my being. 
 
The role of language - and by extension the intellect - in an embodied practice like asana is fascinating.

Using our intellect in asana is how we crystallize our experience ...

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
― Pico Iyer

I took my first series of yoga classes while working as an executive secretary in a midtown Manhattan office. This was the early ’90s, when we still had old-fashioned tape counters that would measure how much of a cassette tape you’ve played and whose numbers could be set back to a string of zeros by pressing a button. 

By the end of the class, I felt as though my tape counter was set back to 0000. My reset included a release of the ment...

A few weeks ago, as I sat on my couch reading about the immense scale of the devastation in Turkey and Syria, at one point it almost became too much. My chest constricted and my jaw tightened. I sensed myself viscerally wanting to pull my attention away from looking at the photos and reading the accounts of the unfathomable loss and horrific tragedies unfolding there. It felt as if a dark, heavy cloud of sadness was sitting in my chest.

I didn’t want to turn away, though. I wanted to stay with the news and bear witness to the suffering unfolding for my fellow humans.

I turned to my breath. I imagined that with each inhalation I was becoming fully conscious of the pain and suffering I was re...