Cell Phones in Yoga Class?

A few years ago there was a yoga culture controversy over a teacher who was fired from a corporate yoga class for discouraging cell phone use in her class. Hired by a company to provide a yoga break for employees,

Use These 5 Scapular Stabilization Exercises to Improve Your Yoga Practice

Scapular stabilization is a phrase that’s been buzzing in the health and fitness world for some time now—and for good reason! Scapular stabilization exercises can help to create more power and (as the name implies!) stability in your yoga practice

The Wise Self: Vijnanamaya Kosha

Vijnanamaya kosha is the part of us that lies beneath the thinking mind, the part that is aware of ourselves feeling our body. It includes the ego, the substrate of personality and conditioning that generates thoughts, emotions, and intentions. As

Instead of Discipline, Try Yogic Indulgence

I heard from someone last week who bought the “My Five-Minute Yoga” app, didn’t use it, and wanted to be sure that the $2.99 cost wasn’t a recurring monthly fee. (No. It isn’t.) During our email conversation, I asked why

3 Steps to Upward Facing Dog Pose

Upward-Facing Dog Pose (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana) is a major full-body strengthening pose. With weight on your hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders, you engage your upper body fully while your legs fire to keep the weight in the tops of your

Yoga Can Help with Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a condition of the nervous system that affects nearly one million people in the U.S. and 2.3 million around the world. There is, as yet, no cure for MS. However, research shows patients can manage symptoms

Try This Bedtime Yoga Sequence to Find Deep, Restful Sleep

Bedtime yoga should be soothing and calming to the nervous system so that you can downregulate your whole body in preparation for sleep. This can easily be achieved by practicing gentle, restorative poses right in your bed! Whether you’re having

Practicing Gratitude for Our Blessings, Big and Small

My favorite holiday is coming up. No, it isn’t Christmas. That holiday is associated with too many unpleasant childhood memories of dysfunctional extended family members and parental fights over money, coupled with the ever-growing consumerism surrounding what’s supposed to be

Be Your Own Yoga Mentor

Recently, as the leaves began turning into the fiery foliage of fall, I found myself thinking about how to reignite my yoga teaching. I know I’m not alone in experiencing Zoom fatigue, but this felt deeper than that. I had

Yoga for Text Neck and Head Forward Posture

There’s something surprising you probably don’t know about me: I’ve been using computers to write, edit, and publish documents as well as to email since 1976! The photo below shows me and another writer/editor at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto,

Balance Vata Dosha

Fall has gradually wound down making way for winter. As the days have become shorter and the light and heat of summer have subsided, there is a shift in our internal body rhythms too. Since yoga and Ayurveda declare that

Brahma Viharas: 4 Ways to Promote Mental Clarity

I want to have a lucid old age, but the odds aren’t looking good. Start with a family strain of dementia, add growing up in the toxic-chemicals-friendly 1950s, then stir in a rear-end collision that smacked my forehead into the

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