Stamina and focus in yoga

Why do we want to build stamina in our poses? The poses are the playground for exploring how the body, mind and breath relationship. We first learn simple actions within simple poses. (such as the triangle pose, seen here above). Actions such as how to lift the knee caps or how to straighten the arms….

Asana as fact finding mission

In the yoga sutras of Patanjali, yoga is defined as the cessation of the movements in the consciousness. There are five classifications of the movements in the consciousness, they are: correct knowledge, delusion, illusion, sleep and memory. At any time your consciousness can be fluctuating in one of these classes. We hope though to get…

Learn to practice at home

1.13 tatra sthitau yatnah abhyasah Practice is the steadfast effort to still these fluctuations. In this yoga sutra “these fluctuations” are the movements of consciousness. We experience the movements in our consciousness when our thoughts are bouncing around. We have a thought which sparks another thought which turns into another thought, and so on and…

Why are we here?

My teacher is Laurie Blakeney. This week I announced that I am going to borrow her idea to introduce a weekly topic for discussion. The discussions will be brief, just a few minutes, but hopefully informative. At the end of the week I plan to post a summary of the discussion here on the blog….

Sticking with it

One of the many reasons I love teaching is because the students challenge me to clarify my thoughts. Sometimes the answers to their questions come easily – like “should the legs be straight in Trikonasana”? The answer is yes. Didn’t take much brain power to come up with that answer. But every once in awhile…