Keeping your knees safe is important but challenging, because the knee joints, despite their size, are rather fragile joints. One main reason is that there is no overlap of the two bones meeting to create the joint. That means the knee joints can move into problematic alignment with relative ease. Crescents of cartilage (the menisci) create a shallow joint socket [...]
How do you know whether you are working too hard or not hard enough in yoga? How much should you push yourself when practicing yoga? What is the difference between intensity and pain? What is perfect intensity, anyway? And why does it matter? Most people who practice yoga have experienced creating too much intensity, at least occasionally. So how do you [...]
You have probably heard a yoga teacher say something like "come to your edge". Most often this place is defined as the place beyond which the risk of injury goes up dramatically. In the context of stretching, I define "the edge" as the point beyond which you can no longer savor your breath. To me, that is a definition more [...]
Yoga for most of us is a journey towards increased awareness and acceptance of the way things are. But letting go of our future-focused, goal-oriented mindset is a long journey. Experiencing a moment of full awareness in at least some yoga poses some of the time is a big step in the right direction. But when the poses themselves become mini-destinations [...]
Back pain is one of the most common physical complaints people have. 80% of Americans complain of back pain at some point in their lives. Learning to stop overusing your spine (which we do to avoid having to stretch big hip and shoulder muscles) can help keep your spine safer. In addition, learning to lengthen and compress your spine intentionally [...]
When my dad was visiting Chiang Mai from Germany years ago, he was astonished how well the traffic flows there despite the huge number of vehicles on the road. Thai traffic has taught me an important life lesson that has not only made me a better driver, but a better person. True, traffic in Thailand is chaotic and there are [...]
Make your practice smarter than your habits. What is your prevailing tendency? And here is the real question: What happens when you let go of your prevailing tendency and work with the opposite one for a while?
I do believe in the value of alignment, and thus I have actually spent quite a bit of time thinking about this question. The answer I have settled on is that the question itself is taking you off the path, is derailing the deepening of your practice. It is simply not a particularly helpful question. To ask if there is [...]
There really isn’t much more to say than the title: Do less, feel more. It’s not about the difficulty or impressiveness of the poses you do. Nor is it about how long you can hold them without hating them or collapsing into a heap of muscle spasms. It’s about how deeply you can get your whole being involved in each [...]
“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; or you can live as if everything is a miracle.” –Albert Einstein Making this distinction may seem at first like a contrived intellectual exercise. However, living life from the perspective that everything is a miracle can profoundly change your attitude. It can change your attitude [...]
