In yoga class, you’ll often be told to “go deeper” while you’re holding a pose. It’s a yoga cliché, a lesson that’s lost its power. It can be taken literally, but that’s not always the best idea. So what exactly does it mean? Read the whole entry on the Huffington Post

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 [...]

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 [...]

Book 1, Sutra 4: At other times [the Self appears to] assume the forms of the mental modifications. Book 1, Sutra 30: Disease, dullness, doubt, carelessness, laziness, sensuality, false perception, failure to reach firm ground and slipping from the ground gained – these distractions of the mind-stuff are the obstacles. I’ve been thinking about obstacles. [...]

Guest post by Christa Avampato “As a man adorns worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within.” ~ 2:22 On Labor Day weekend in 2009, my apartment building caught fire. I was almost trapped inside and only by following [...]

Where do you find answers to your major life decisions? Hopefully you have a few trusted friends. Maybe your family still gives good advice. Obviously you have Google. But at some point aren’t you tired of digesting everyone else’s advice? Where’s your intuition? Once I started listening, I found answers everywhere. Some are quiet, some [...]

Most Americans are introduced to yoga through the poses. (Sometimes I think that Krishnamacharya’s genius was to let us see it as a physical thing, instead of another religion to convert to or flee from. Later on, we can try on the spirituality.) Then we might find breathing or meditation practices. And eventually we get [...]

There was a great quote in the Times last week. Nicholas Kristoff, writing on the different neurology of liberals and conservatives, had mentioned that we often use the Internet to simply reinforce ideas we already have. To balance this narrowing tendency, he said we should seek out people with opposing viewpoints for regular debates. Jonathan [...]

I went hiking this weekend, in the hills across the Hudson from Beacon, with three yoga friends. We started late and stayed late but managed to make it back to the car three hours after sunset. Aka in the dark. In the last hour or two, when we were really struggling to see the trail [...]

Beautiful essay by William Deresiewicz: As we all seek more connectivity, we lose our sense of a private self. We no longer hear the still, small voice that speaks only in silence. It feels somehow wrong to blog about this essay — in fact I interrupted my own reading three times to post it on [...]