Once we are deeply entrenched in yoga, we can fall victim to yoga ego-mania. Has this happened to you? Do you find yourself judging others because they don’t practice yoga, or perhaps because they live contrary to certain yoga philosophies that you hold dear?
Tag Archives: yoga
Why Yoga Makes You Taller
Did you know that doing yoga makes you taller? While yoga won’t alter your true height by miraculously bestowing you with an extra vertebra, everyone who practices this pliable art grows taller, sometimes gaining up to a full inch.
How to Avoid Yoga Injuries
It’s very common for people to start practicing yoga as a way to recover from an injury. Yoga is a fantastic and effective tool to support and enhance physical and mental healing. If unchecked, however, your poor habits may lead you towards a new injury or re-injury.
Yoga and the Mind: Exploring the 5 Hindrances
Yoga classifies 5 of the foggiest, thickest clouds, as hindrances of the mind because they cloud and obscure clear thought and feeling. The 5 hindrances of the mind are desire, aversion, sloth, restlessness and doubt.
Be a Balanced Yogi, Inside and Out
Balancing in yoga poses always brings up anger and frustration. It’s natural to want to perfect something while avoiding the feeling of failure when you fall out of a pose. But, remember, if you are not falling (on or off your yoga mat), you are not trying.
The Hardest Yoga Pose (You Already Practice!)
You may not know it, but you may have already practiced the hardest yoga pose there is: Shavasana, or corpse pose. This is the final pose of any yoga practice, also called relaxation pose. It is called the hardest yoga pose, because in Shavasana you are meant to completely surrender all physical and mental effort. That’s hard to do.
Yoga at Your Desk
Practicing yoga at your desk may sound far-fetched. But think about it: How many hours a day do you spend sitting down? Between commuting time on the bus or in a car, at your home or office desk, and on your couch, the number of hours spent sitting might surprise you.
Yoga For Men
Did you know that yoga used to be exclusively for men? Yoga grew out of the ancient Indian Shramana tradition, when young men would leave home on a spiritual pilgrimage. Only in more recent times has the practice of yoga been adopted by women and, ironically, in the West it has been women who have predominated. But this too is changing fast, as more and more men are bravely stepping into the yoga studio and onto their yoga mats.
How to Meditate
When you sit on your yoga mat and dive into any of the practices that are currently called ‘meditation techniques’, you are actually engaging in Dharana: learning how to meditate. You are practising how to focus and still the mind and hold your attention in one spot or on one thing.
What is Meditation?
What is meditation? There are two distinct ideas in yoga that come together in contemporary yoga practice to form what we now define as meditation. One is dharana (concentration) and there other is dhyana (contemplation or meditation). Knowing the distinction between concentration and meditation is the key to understanding what meditation truly is.