Sunday, June 21st, will be celebrated around the world as the first International Yoga Day sponsored by the United Nations. Geeta Iyengar is encouraging us to use this day to honor yoga and our teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar.
There are many ways that you can honor this day, whether it is through your own personal practice or a more public event. Geeta generously offered a sequence that could be used in a variety of ways.
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…
At the national Iyengar Yoga convention in Dallas this past April the teacher, Abhitjata Iyengar, the grand daughter of B.K.S. Iyengar, differentiated between beginners and practitioners. She instructed the beginners to concentrate on gross actions. The practitioners were asked to work more subtly. I wondered, who were the beginners? And who the practitioners? The criteria…
Dr Geeta S. Iyengar, daughter of Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar, and the senior most teacher in the Iyengar community passed away today morning. She had completed 74 years on December 7. Sister to her five siblings but a mother figure to the whole community of Iyengar yoga practitioners which now spans 59 countries across the world,…
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…
The practice of Iyengar Yoga is diverse; there is a wide variety of approaches within the method itself. This variety in approaches is important because people are varied. People within the same age group are varied compared to each other — for instance, some people are fit and some are not. And a person will…
If you stick with it practicing yoga can lead to a life of contentment. But how does doing poses lead to contentment? Let’s explore a recent experience I had which will hopefully illustrate the process. I spent last week vacationing on Lake Michigan with six adults, six small children and one pretty big dog. There…
