January 14 & 15: Christchurch, Mark Whitwell Weekend Workshop

mark-whitwell

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How to take your teaching even further – assist!

Assisting trikonasana

by guest author Elissa Jordan As a yoga teacher, over time, a funny thing starts to happen. Walking down the street you stop seeing people covered in their clothes and shoes and hair. Instead you start seeing collections of muscle and bone, alignment and postures carried around in a thin casing of skin. The knocked knees, the hunched shoulders, the sunken chests taunt us. I’ll sometimes mouth the suggestion of taking your shoulders back and down. Sometimes whispering the instruction … [Read more...]

Starting a Home Meditation Practice

Anyone can meditate at home

by regular columnist Peter Fernando, The Meditation Guy   Are you wanting to start your own home meditation practice? The number one piece of advice I have for you is: Just do it! Having said that, a recent question that came in asked for more details, so in response to that reader, here's... Six Useful Home Meditation Tips   1) Don't meditate in front of the TV (even when it's off), or in front of the computer. If you take some time to create a meditation-only space … [Read more...]

Learning to wait, and wait, and wait some more

nadine

by guest author Nadine Fawell, a Melbourne-based yoga teacher, blogger, and author of the yogAttitude cards. She is most interested in yoga's power to heal body, mind, and spirit. I was very sick a while back. I was too ill to leave the house for three weeks, and, two moths later, I am still coughing. When I went to the Doctor, she told me, “It’s a virus. I can’t do anything for you: go home and sleep it off.” I am, essentially, convalescing. I can’t walk too far or too … [Read more...]

How dropping my story helped me change my yoga practice

Why do my forward bends suck after over a decade of practice?

I've been practicing yoga for over a decade now, and I'm still tight and inflexible. That's not quite true of course, but when I compare my flexibility to that of the images of yoga we see in the media, or the popular teachers on DVDs... I fall well short. And I find it perplexing. It doesn't make me feel less than in anyway, and I'm well aware that the point of yoga is not flexibility, rather flexibility is a by-product of practice. But how long does it take to lengthen the … [Read more...]