Are you experiencing an obstacle that is keeping you from practicing? Is your obstacle physical, mental intellectual or spiritual? And how can you know which one it is? Over the years I have experienced a huge list of obstacles to practicing. Most of the time I wasn’t able to name the obstacle until it had…
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….
A friend of mine years ago used to always say “if it’s urgent, it’s not spiritual.” She meant that if you are pressuring yourself to make a decision too soon you might not make the right decision. Some decisions do require urgency: Should I call the police or my spouse after a fender-bender? Don’t delay…
I attend class with my teacher, Laurie Blakeney, three or four times a year, usually during her weekend intensives up in Ann Arbor. In between her intensives I try to take class with other senior certified Iyengar Yoga teachers. There’s no certified Iyengar Yoga teachers senior to me in Cincinnati so I must travel to…
Can you grow a relationship with yoga? Many people don’t think of yoga as something you can actually learn. That is probably because a lot of what we see in advertising makes us think that yoga is an exercise for people who are already flexible and some how intuitively already know what they are doing….
Last week I published the Beginners and practitioners post. In that article I stated that in order to help beginner students become practitioners I need to first understand why people are not practicing on their own. What is standing in the way. I heard back from many of you. People sent emails or Facebook messages,…
Someone told my wife Sarah that they want to take class at College Hill Yoga but they feel intimidated. Sarah said they are worried they won’t know what to do in class. Of course, I think this is so silly! I think this is silly because I know that in Iyengar Yoga we teach the…
The College Hill Yoga classes are set up so that everyone begins in the Introductory classes. Students should take a least one session of the Introductory class before moving on to the next level. Students should start out in the Introductory class because in those classes we learn some preliminary actions that are necessary for…
Lots and lots of brand new students have told me on the first day “now, I have never done yoga before, is that okay?” I respond by saying “of course, this is the class for beginners, you don’t have to know how to do anything before coming class.” There seems to be some kind of…
Over the past month or so I have noticed a trend in potential students asking me to teach classes at a different time of day, on a different day or even in a different neighborhood. They are siting these three variables as a reason why they can’t come to one of the classes being currently…
