These mindful practices are like taking a soft cloth and wiping the smudges off the window of our busy brains. In this way, we polish our perspective, making room for extra wisdom, patience, and compassion.
Read moreSacred Threads: The Story of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
Join us for this six-week series of myth-busting, story-telling, meditation-inspiring, and sacred-text-decoding with Annie Moyer, Master of Divinity student and longtime fan of Patanjali’s 196 aphorisms on Yoga and all it means.
Read moreThe sun, the moon, and us mere mortals
I've often wondered what early humans must have thought during a solar eclipse. Were they terrified? Did they fall to their knees in awe and wonder, begging the universe for mercy? Or dance wildly in the fields, abandoning their toil in the majesty of the moment?
Read moreCooking potatoes: Moving from grim to grace
Troubling emotions can be likened to raw potatoes, inedible in their current state, but subject to transformation when effort and intention are applied.
Read moreA thought, or four
All we can do is recognize the precious opportunities we have right in front of us to celebrate joys and to hold space for pain, whether that pain is in our own hearts, in the hearts of friends and family, or halfway across the world among human hearts enduring devastating violence.
Read moreWild Asana Book Release Celebration with Alison Zak
Wild Asana: Animals, Yoga, and Connecting Our Practice to the Natural World is a 'nature memoir through a yoga lens.' It explores how we can connect with and become animals on our yoga mats, taking inspiration from common critter pose names, Hindu mythology, wildlife research, and more.
Read moreA True Start
The perennial New Year's Resolution is getting a makeover, and I'm glad for it. The old look was hard to keep up with, swathed in an attitude that we weren't good enough last year, so we better kick it up this year; we all know how that turned out. By February, we were exhausted and demoralized, and whatever habits we were seeking to change tended to creep back in, leaving many with the feeling that the new year got off to a false start.
Read morePodcast Alert!
Uplifting, easy-going, thought-provoking conversations about practicing and teaching yoga, living and loving mindfulness and meditation, and breathing and being in challenging times.
Read moreCalibrating Courage
Each of us is a finely-tuned individual being, with a custom calibrated courage meter, which makes it pointless to judge the guts someone else needs for a task at hand. There’s also no point in judging ourselves.
Read moreMaking Simple, Happy Habits
If we view meditation and contemplative practice as opportunities to turn the skill of thought-quieting into a reflexive habit that doesn't require much effort, like the mundane chores of daily life, we can become adept housekeepers of the heart and mind.
Read moreThe fine line of flexibility
On the road to flexibility, we must be on the lookout for significant potholes. Hitting those at high speed risks losing the integrity that defines and holds us together, and many of us move so fast that we don't realize we've gone beyond safe boundaries until something breaks, whether it is a tendon or a heart.
Read moreNew Skills and Freshly Cut Grass
Because we know that the human brain is malleable, neuroscience has been able to map the avenues of new neural pathway creation toward the best of who we can be: more confident, more creative, more attentive, more patient, more resilient. In a word, happier.
Read moreShaken ground, steady breath
If something hurts, feel the pain. If something confuses, ask questions. If something angers, trace the anger’s source. If something is untenable, reach out to what you can reliably touch: a friend to give a comforting hug, a donation button to give material support, or the earth where you’ve planted – with eternal optimism – your summer tomatoes.
Read moreOriginal Yogis?
Observations collected with unflinching wisdom over several hundred millennia evokes a nascent yogic awareness: the horseshoe crab as an original yogi – calm and composed, reminding our troubled parts that time marches to a beat and at a depth we can't begin to fathom.
Read moreTexting, typos, and making connections
The beauty here is that our brains are programmed to put the pieces – or the letters – together. It's the same neurological mercy that prevents us from having to re-learn to brush our teeth each morning, or check a recipe every time we want to boil water to make tea. It frees up the mental and emotional space to learn and process the big stuff: how to live through a pandemic; how to know if we're in love; how to appropriately mourn losses and celebrate gains.
Read moreCreeping Quietly Into 2022
Personal ritual certainly has its role in navigating life – a prayer in the bathtub can never hurt – but time is the only thing we can reliably count on to carry us forward, and it doesn't serve us to bargain or argue with its pace.
Read moreShining light on the shortest day
The difference between succumbing to the darkness and lifting a hopeful gaze to the light is the quality of attention we pay to any given moment. It is light, after all, that creates shadow in the first place, and if we linger long enough in any moment, its shadows will point us to the beam shining at every tunnel's end.
Read moreHow do we know what we know?
Yoga offers insights into consciousness that help us sort our present world perceptions. With discernment and equanimity, we can avoid sliding into habitual negativity and misunderstanding.
Read moreLife is a balancing act
As we hone our skills to stand on one foot, to stretch for strength, to exhale at least as much as we inhale, we can keep our eyes and ears open for ways to live in balance during a time that seems anything but steady.
Read moreShall We Dance?
Whether we feel it or not, we are always dancing. Next time the self-critical creep of laziness leaps to mind, get wise to its misinformed ways. Grant yourself permission to sit still, or lie on the ground, or wander aimlessly on a wooded path, and allow yourself to feel the inner dance of simple life
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