Research has shown that happy emotions contribute to long-term wellbeing. But none of us wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every day. So how do you generate joy when you don't already feel joyful? One answer of course is yoga. :) Generate joy by focusing on the here and now One secret to increase your joy is to realize that happiness [...]
Pranayama, one of the core practices of yoga, is often translated as "control of life force" or "breath control". This is so because 'prana' means life force or breath, and ‘yama' means control or restriction. (See the footnote below for a detailed grammatical explanation of the meaning of pranayama). While this is probably the original historical meaning, it is worth [...]
Setting a solid foundation can improve alignment, balance, and spaciousness in your yoga poses while increasing your safety and enjoyment. In addition, setting your foundation with intention is a way to become more mindful in your practice. However, to reap all those benefits, it is important to actually notice how changes to your foundation affect your poses, rather than [...]
Muscular and Organic Energy are a pair of yoga alignment principles designed to work in tandem to bring us into balance. I find such paired alignment principles powerful teaching tools, because they inherently stress the importance of balancing opposites. By balancing opposites like Muscular and Organic Energies, we can increase not only our joy in our practice, but its [...]
Inner and Outer Spirals are a pair of alignment principles usually applied to the hip girdle. They are specifically designed to take us towards a place of balance, as they are based on the realization that wellbeing is a state of balance, not an extreme. This perspective runs counter to the widespread belief that more is always better. It also [...]
I lived in Thailand for many years, and always marveled how well the traffic flows there—and how rarely you hear honking—despite the huge number of vehicles on the road, combined with the frequently creative interpretation of traffic rules. My visiting dad stated with conviction that if there were that many vehicles on the road in Germany (where he lives), the [...]
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 [...]
