Tao Porchon-Lynch is teaching a workshop at Strala Yoga next Saturday. She’s 91, and teaches yoga every day. Inspiring! Details: Explore the Body as Energy with Yoga Grand Master Tao Porchon-Lynch Saturday, July 24th, 2010 1:00pm – 4:00pm $25 on-line registration $20 in person at Strala $30 same day (if space is available) In this [...]

I’m still chewing on an idea from yoga this morning, a delicious treat. Even better than weekend pastries. Tara Glazier, the owner of Abhaya Yoga in Dumbo, was teaching us the concept of arm spirals. (It’s an alignment refinement she said she just figured out last week, after 10 years of practice.) We would internally [...]

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 [...]

We all know that stress is killing us. Or at the very least, aging and annoying us. It’s wearing out our adrenal glands, graying our hair, lowering our immunity, disrupting our sleep, and building our bulges. But how can we battle a cultural cornerstone? What are we, if not busy? If you reduce stress and [...]

Drink from the far side of a glass of water. Eat a spoonful of sugar. Get someone to scare you. Then pour the sugar water on your friend’s head, and come here to stop your hiccups. Hiccups are caused by a spasm of the diaphragm, the breathing muscle that runs across the base of your [...]

I’ve always said that smoking is the American meditation. (Maybe the European one, too?) Taking a moment for yourself, focusing completely on your breath, noticing all the little sensations in your lungs, skin, and brain — isn’t that what meditation is all about? Yes, you could choose nicer companions than tar and ammonia. But let’s [...]

Yoga is full of so many tips and new habits that it’s sometimes hard to remember them all, and put them into practice in your actual day-to-day existence. But this is what we mean when we say it’s a lifestyle. Case in point. I was really really busy a while back, and remember having something [...]

This came from some notes for a class I recently gave — thought I’d share. What does Bliss feel like? Is it extreme pleasure, or is it (as Swami Satyananda Saraswati, among others, says) more accurately defined as the absence of pleasure or pain, a state beyond mere pleasure and pain, a pure merging with all that is. So, [...]

Leslie Kaminoff, owner of The Breathing Project and my current anatomy teacher, just shared some notes from his workshop at the SYTAR (Symposium for Yoga Therapy and Research) yoga conference in Los Angeles: Some Suggestions for Individualized, Breath-Centered Yoga Practice Finding our individual form of asana practice is something we all need to do, even [...]

Two-score days ago I started a little New Year’s Resolution, and guess what? Today is day 40! I did it! “It” was a simple daily practice of Navel Lock with breath retention for 10–40 seconds. In most cases it was about twenty or twenty-five seconds; I’ve always had trouble with retentions on exhales more than [...]