Attaining a mature practice can only happen through piling up nearly countless failed attempts to become skilled enough in the techniques to avoid the painful consequences that come from wrong thinking, wrong effort, mistakes, misperceptions, and other for
Ashtanga is not arbitrarily difficult or demanding—no, the practice provides you with a perfect, explicit model of what it takes to come to the mastery of anything. And the requirements of Ashtanga’s sacrifice are so blatant, physical and explicit.
I’m going to tell you a secret about myself. I started practicing Yoga for sport. To stretch my muscles out from running. I taught myself how to practice for devotion.
To me the ashtanga family is like a fragile eco system and thus your own internal relationships and the external relationships with others in the family have to be tended to very carefully in order maintain a balance. And so even though I may disagree wi
Your efforts in practice are meant to feed the ideal images that you are shaping within your mind and body, and this maturation takes place nearly imperceptibly, little by little, day by day. Part of establishing yourself in the discipline, is learning to
The hatha yogi uses his body to create an inward, symbolic sand mandala each morning, and thus he mounts to a similar pinnacle of devotion, a turning away from the pull of materiality in favor of turning towards the sublime spiritual realms within. In ma
Baddhakonasana, Bound Angle Pose, is an important hip opening seated posture that is found in the primary series. In this blog post I provide instruction for the upright phase and the two forward bending phases...
I recently posted about the importance of spinal positioning in asana study, and also how the asana allies can help you to position your spine in the center of your asana. When I say asana ally, I mean that in response to the mind’s tendency to be turned o
To learn yoga you must stop seeing things LITERALLY, because nothing is as it appears to be. The world does not exist in the terms that my calculating mind fools me into thinking that it does. To become properly involved with this world, first I must rea
So how can I be realistic about the effort I do put forth? How do I accurately assess whether I practice too intensely or too mildly and in either case effectively? And what level of mildness or intensity is right for me at this time? How do I know the dif
