Last week I got to attend one of Jivamukti’s Master Classes at the Prince George Ballroom. Three hours with David Life is like solid gold. (Talk about an intense guy! He looked straight into my eyes, and I thought the back of my head might catch on fire.)

Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (a GREAT book), has a new documentary out. It’s playing a limited run at Loews Village (3rd Ave at 11th St) until this Thursday, October 18th. 2012: Time for Change presents an optimistic alternative to apocalyptic doom and [...]

I was lucky enough to stumble upon a book reading by Stefanie Syman this weekend at YogaWorks Soho. Her book / seven-year research project, The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America hit shelves this summer, and taught me a lot about the ways that Americans have interpreted “yoga” over the years. (Thanks Anya [...]

Aw, cute! The energetic and inspiring Christa Avampato, who has blogged here on Yogoer on occasion, was kind enough to include me in her new book, Hope in Progress: 27 Entrepreneurs Who Inspired Me During the Great Recession. If you’re looking for a little inspiration, it’s a great book. I loved the stories of other [...]

I’m reading The Feminine Mystique right now, one of those books you always hear about but never get around to reading. A pithy quote from Betty Friedan finally got me to the library. It was written in 1963, but it’s kind of blowing my mind. I’m not much of a history buff, so to read [...]

McGraw-Hill Publishing was kind enough to send me their latest yoga book to review. Anatomy for Yoga: An Illustrated Guide to Your Muscles in Action, by Nicky Jenkins and Leigh Brandon, is a helpful guide to a personalized yoga practice. The authors provide an overview of yoga anatomy, including terminology, main systems, and breathing. They [...]

The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other [...]

In one way or another, ALL our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual,” purely “intellectual,” purely “aesthetic,” it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurence. Aldous Huxley Quoted by Michael Pollan in The Botany [...]

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting–on a process, that is, of subtraction. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

It’s sometimes hard to justify a yoga class. The day-to-day challenges of life in NYC are pretty time-consuming, and the bigger picture is full of oil spills and underprivileged children and other important causes that need help. How is a full two-hour practice, or even a five-minute routine, really going to make the world a [...]