by Kara-Leah Grant Running a popular yoga website means I get all kinds of emails from people wanting me to review or share their yoga-related products and services. My favourite so far was the press release from a company launching a range of yoga shoes. Because we all know you wear shoes while practicing yoga right? So I was sceptical when Jonathan from Shakti Mat New Zealand emailed me ask said he'd send me a free Shakti Mat if I did a review about it. Road-testing, assessing and reviewing … [Read more...]
Restorative Yoga: Exploring Supported Child’s Pose In-depth
By Neal Ghoshal, Sacred Moves A little while ago I wrote an article on the eight essential principles of Restorative Yoga. Since then I've been continuing to delve deep into this beautiful practice. Deep rest is always calling! I'm happy to be sharing some more … and one of the most profoundly restful of the Restorative postures is Supported Child's Pose (Salamba Balasana). This is a posture which many find deliciously comforting and relaxing, perhaps because it tunes us into a time when we … [Read more...]
Jonathan from Team Shakti on Bringing the Bed of Nails to NZ
by Kara-Leah Grant Apparently one in ten Swedish people own a variation of the Shakti Mat - a modern-day rendering of the bed of nails. Consisting of a thin foam filler inside a cotton case mounted with 6000 plus plastic spikes, the Shakti Mat is meant to "increase blood circulation and stimulate the body to release endorphins which help to bring about a deeply relaxed state." And now, thanks to Jonathan and his business partner, who came across the Shakti Mat on a beach in Thailand, the … [Read more...]
How I’m Using the Power of Kirtan to Drive Positive Change
by guest author Madi Das, Kirtan Shakti Courtesy of Integral Yoga® Magazine, Summer 2015 Most days, I go to my regular job, wearing my regular clothes, and I type regular things into my regular computer until it’s time to go home. My co-workers know me as Joe, that guy who has enough light banter to be social, but not so much as to get distracted from his typing. Joe is a good guy. Familiar. Dependable. You know the type. But on Tuesday nights, I trade my collared shirt and GAP slacks … [Read more...]
How to use Feldenkrais Technique to Free up Your Yoga {video}
by Kara-Leah Grant I first came across Feldenkrais in a yoga teacher taught by a friend in Wellington - Oli Wiles. He was smitten with the technique and skilfully wove it through his yoga teaching to great benefit. Now that I've been practicing yoga for almost two decades, I've also become very interested in how the body opens up, or doesn't open up. From my own experience I can see that it's not a simple equation of doing x, y, or z posture enough times and achieving your optimum range of … [Read more...]
How Yoga Kirtan Helped Me Find My True Voice and Share it With The World
By Premratna, Premratna Music If I try to imagine what the course of my life would have taken without yoga, I get an image of the movie Life of Pi: a small boat, huge swells, a tiger on board and a lot of fear. Yoga found me while I was doing my ‘big O.E.’; that phase of life where we are typically searching for adventure. I was no exception. In between hiking, skiing, singing and songwriting, I went to a yoga class at the gym in the Canadian Rockies where I was living and working. The … [Read more...]
How Deep Do You Really Go in Your Yoga Practice?
by Kara-Leah Grant On Friday, a friend who is a talented healer, did some energy release work on my shoulders. He stood behind me, pressed into each shoulder and breathed. It was a simple technique and yet I could feel pressure evaporating into the ether. Afterwards he shook his head. You had half a ton of pressure in there. I know this. I feel it and I see it in my body when I watch myself on video - this held tension that isn't so much about the muscles but the underlying … [Read more...]
The Full Creative Abundance Sun Salutation Sequence
by Kara-Leah Grant Welcome to the sixth and final Creative Sun Salutation Abundance flow video here on The Yoga Lunchbox. This week we put it all together - everything that we've been exploring over the last five weeks. This time, I verbally talk you through two circular sun salutations - once on the right leg and once on the left leg. This is to help you fully learn the sequence. However, once you've got it, forget about watching me and the video and instead play and explore in your … [Read more...]
How Many Years of Yoga Practice Does it Take to Get Flexible?
by Kara-Leah Grant This is an impossible question to answer - at least, to answer definitively, but I'm still going to give it a damn good crack. And with good reason. Despite the fact that yoga has nothing to do whatsoever with flexibility - that flexibility is a side benefit of one's yoga practice and no measure of the depth or strength of one's yoga practice - yoga and flexibility are intimately intertwined in the modern idea of yoga. There's a good reason for this. We are predominantly a … [Read more...]
Why it’s Possible to Evoke Abundance through a Yoga Practice
by Kara-Leah Grant Welcome to the fifth Creative Sun Salutation Abundance flow here on The Yoga Lunchbox. This week we explore our final three postures, facing the back of the mat. As always, we're using the same tools and techniques to find freedom and ease in our bodies - breath, micro-movements, pulsations. It's also becoming more clear how it's possible to evoke a sense of abundance through a sun salutation. Our first posture this week is about releasing and bowing to the earth - … [Read more...]