by Kara-Leah Grant This week in my Ashtanga practice I've been exploring and playing with two joints in particular - my ankle joints and wrist joints. Thanks to a Yin Yoga workshop, I've identified that I have a limited range of movement in both of these joints - less than the normal range. The only posture that my limited ankle mobility appears to impact in the Primary Series (I'm up to Bhujapidasana (Shoulder-Pressing Pose)) is Utkatasana (Chair Pose). Prior to the realisation about my … [Read more...]
Search Results for: Ashtanga yoga
I’m Afraid my Students are Going to Get Bored with my Yoga Sequences
by Kara-Leah Grant This came up in conversation this week - a new teacher expressing a fear that her yoga sequences weren't interesting enough and that she was going to be boring her students. She wanted to know how to make her sequences more interesting. However, there is a fallacy of logic here. The teacher has a fear arising - that of boring her students. Her approach to working with that fear is to ensure that the external circumstance triggering the fear is removed - bored … [Read more...]
The Real Stories Behind The Top 4 Yoga Myths
By Lucinda Staniland The internet is full to bursting with articles debunking the ‘Top Yoga Myths’. They tell us that contrary to poplar belief, Yoga is not a religion, that it’s not just for skinny, rich, flexible young women, and that it really is good exercise, as well as a holistic spiritual experience. Opinion is divided in these articles as to whether yoga really does or doesn’t give you great abs and fantastic orgasms. But, in general all these articles paint the same picture. Don’t … [Read more...]
How Yoga Helped Me Emerge From the Darkness of Depression
By Astrid Vause I have been practicing yoga for a while now, in fact I am a yoga teacher, but it wasn't until I got sick that I fell deeply in love with this beautiful practice and it's healing powers. It was a warm sunny and vibrant day in my new home in Los Angeles and my children were building towers with wooden blocks and laughing as they toppled over. I sat on the floor with my knees tucked up to my chest and watched the crashing blocks, wincing as they hit the ground. I felt like I too had … [Read more...]
Reflections on Teaching the Worst Yoga Class of My Life
by Kara-Leah Grant On Saturday I taught my first yoga class in five weeks, as it's summer holidays here and I've been doing just that - holidaying. Possibly it wasn't prudent to take so much time off teaching when I've got a major festival within a week - i.e. Wanderlust. Although as I've been on a Forty Day Practice, my asana practice is stronger than it's ever been. However it turns out a strong asana practice doesn't necessarily make me a stronger teacher. I turned up on Saturday … [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...]
How Yoga Trance Dance™ Destroys World Weariness and Opens Up Creative Flow
by Kara-Leah Grant If you know me, you know I love dancing. Always have, ever since I saw Flashdance at age 8, and got hooked on the original Fame TV series. That was me... always dancing. But there was never any chance I could become a professional dancer because I had zero flexibility, plus at age 16 I had a spinal fusion. (I still remember the first day I danced again after that operation... the doctor said three months, I gave it two.) However... life moves in mysterious ways and in … [Read more...]
J. Brown on the Three Sensibilities that Shape Our Yoga Practice {video interview}
by Kara-Leah Grant I've been following J. Brown for a few years now, inspired and impressed by the consistent and constant magnifying glass he applies to the yoga world. J. has no qualms about challenging the accepted flow with his articles, calling into question elements of yoga teaching and practice that he finds problematic. But then, J. Brown is an upstart who has always gone against the grain right from the beginning of his career, deliberately taking a different approach from the … [Read more...]
How My Ashtanga Practice Taught me to Practice Courage
by guest author Pip Bennett After all that darkness of my last article, I decided I wanted to up my practice. I wanted to devote myself and commit to the Ashtanga practice as it demands: six days a week. To take on the challenge and see the benefits of a regular practice. Two weeks later, I hadn’t practiced yoga even once. It’s now been a couple of months since then. I did get myself back into the yoga room, but only for a couple of weeks. Turns out that although you can do yoga anywhere and … [Read more...]
An Overview of Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga
This article is an edited extract from K-L's new book, The No-More-Excuses Guide to Yoga, from the section called Yoga History, Philosophy and Concepts. It's a huge topic area, but in seven chapters, there is a succinct overview of much of the territory you might come across in yoga class - including Patanjali's Eight Limbs of Yoga. by Kara-Leah Grant, author of The No-More-Excuses Guide to Yoga One of the most famous of the yogic texts is The Yoga Sutras. These were either written by, or … [Read more...]