Whether you are a home yoga practitioner or a yoga teacher, you are likely to find ways to put together the yoga asana into a flow or a sequence that begins with centering and grounding, builds in intensity or challenge (or progresses in some way) before slowing down at the end.   As a home practitioner, that was never a problem for me, because I simply put together movements that felt good to me at the moment.   Sometimes I'd forget what I did on one side by the time I got to the other side, but what did that matter?   I was moving (or being still) with my breath, and that was my practice.   That is yoga. In 2019, I completed the 200-hour yoga teacher training, and began teaching.  There began my challenge.   Now I was not only putting together a sequence of movements to share with and teach to others, I was expected to offer some kind of intelligent design.   Foundational poses should build up to more challenging ...

  I’m intrigued by paradox - seemingly contradictory propositions which also carry truth.    I started paying more attention to paradox during my 200-hour yoga teacher training in 2019.   The fellow prospective yoga teachers and I were studying, in some depth, the yoga poses (asana) and learning about the appropriate verbal cues to use while teaching.    This was interesting…    we wanted to offer cues that would support the less experienced yoga practitioner, yet touch the subtlety and the nuance of the pose. Here’s one that proved to be absolutely eye-opening for me: “Root down to rise up” (and all variations on that theme).     I never thought much about the process of “rising up.”   Quite frankly, I never much paid any attention to how my feet (or other bodily part) was/were using the ground, either.     And to think that these two apparently opposite directions of energy were related! "Flying starts from th...

My 7-year-old grandson asked me if I knew The Seven Elements of Harmony.    (Capitalizations are mine.)   I was taken aback - extremely impressed with the deep and reflective nature of his question.   Imagine a 7-year-old contemplating the nature and aspect of harmony.   As a matter of fact, just think about how striking it is that a 7-year-old would even use the words “element” and “harmony.” So I thought a bit and starting talking about Compassion.    Respect.   (Capitalizations are mine.)   I commented that when we have compassion and respect for one another that there is less occasion for disagreements and strife, thus nurturing a lifestyle of harmony.   (I resisted using the word “harmonious,” given his age.   I can’t remember if I actually used the words “strife” and “nurturing.”)   “What do you think?” I asked him.   I was most curious to see what he might perceive. “You don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t get ...

As I think about it, in some ways we seem to be a collection of our stories.   We have stories of our childhoods, stories of our first loves, stories of our careers, our children, our elders, our cultures. Stories of loss and pain. Stories that we tell others and stories that we tell ourselves. Tahir Shah, in Arabian Nights , tells us that "Stories are a communal currency of humanity. I was thinking about this today as I sat after dinner listening to my husband (in his 70's) and his friend (in this 80's) tell some stories about their childhoods, their parents, and about their experiences in the military before or during the Viet Nam War.   I could see their eyes lighting up in the retelling.  I could sense how vivid were their memories.  I listened to stories (some that I had heard a number of times) about sleeping in a house crowded with numerous relations, trying to sleep with the noise of all of the men snoring.   About older siblings who cared...