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...]

Who knew? There isn’t just one right way to do things. Even in Yoga.

Assisting trikonasana

by regular columnist Elissa Jordan, Adventures in Teaching One of my Dad’s favourite stories to tell about me as a little girl is the one about my favourite word: why? I carried the word with me everywhere until it was a scraggly, worn-out dirt-encrusted version of itself. There’s some discrepancy as to whether or not this was, in fact, my first word. Dad says yes. Mom thinks it was second, after no. Either way, right from the start I’ve wanted to know the why behind things. Not … [Read more...]

Be a Tree: Interpretive Yoga for Adults

Intend.

It’s Autumn: trees are delighting us with a riot of colour, littering the ground with jewels from their branches. We can take a hint from Mother Nature and enjoy a similar process ourselves, letting go of old, stagnant, nonessentials. Releasing has many more nuances than just ‘getting rid’ of something. Pay attention to Nature move through a full cycle of gestation, birth, growth, and decay and you’ll see letting go as making space. Indeed, Spring blossoms and leaves come to … [Read more...]

Kickstart 2010: Are we having fun yet?

The joy of yoga

If you started your 30 days of yoga sadhana on January 15th then you’ve been practicing for 10 days now. You are one third of the way through your sadhana. Are you having fun yet? Maybe that seems like a strange question. Maybe you expect yoga to be serious? It is. At least, it is profound. My experience of yoga has been that it leads me into all of my own darkest places and then helps me find the steadiness and the ease that I need to go through each of them. Yoga can be intense. … [Read more...]

Kickstart 2010 with a commitment to your yoga practice

by guest author Marianne Elliot Okay – as promised – here is everything you need to know to join me in starting 2010 with yoga. I’ll be starting my 30 day sadhana (Kara-Leah wrote more about sadhana, what they are and why we do them here) on 15 January because it is the first new moon of the year and that’s generally a great time to start new things. I’m inviting you to join me. Make your own commitment. My commitment is to practice a particular set of asana, pranayama and … [Read more...]