There is something timelessly beautiful about a clean, elegant, functional, simplistic and sensitive design. This is also how it is when we inhabit our bodies, poised, in a comfortable arrangement of muscle and bone, a display of posture and movement, with the inner focus of the Zen art of flower arrangement. A Zen flower arrangement has what some…
How can we move on if we don’t leave? It’s a bit like the old country song joke, “Honey how can I miss you if you don’t go away”. Our world, and us living in it, is curiously attached to staying in it, considering the way we, as a society, tend to hang on to…
We live, every day, in our bodies. It let’s us get around on our legs, using the body and arms, and we’re in the body, day in and day out, all life long. Intellectually much of our life plays in our heads, this is where we think about life, and pursue much of our functionality. We also feel the…
There is a certain brutality to great truths. For instance, this quote “If the dead past is not buried, our whole mind begins to stink and makes life impossible for us”. Swami Sivananda was well loved, for many reasons, and my teachers at yoga school, who learned directly from this great yogi, told us he…
Yoga practice helps us experience glimpses of our potential. Connecting with ourselves in class is only a first step. Mindfulness happens when yoga techniques transform our everyday lives into an evolving, extraordinary experience, of practical physical functionality, and inner peace. Yoga points out that no-one person or group of people, no personal status or possession, no compliment…
Yoga is big on meditation, and on bodywork. It wants us to be in our bodies, mindfully, in asana practice, during meditation, and after yoga class. Body awareness imbues us with mindfulness, something that happens when we take what we learn from our practice on the mat, and apply it to our daily lives. A very useful skill to help…
We are whole beings, with many different layers or aspects or realities. Self-realisation, according to yoga, is when we become consciously aware of parts, and the sum of parts. Modern Western, holistic disciplines such as our Western version of yoga, simplistically refers to the human being as body-mind-spirit. Yoga traditionally refers to the physical human…
I produced a Binaural Beats soundtrack to help balance left and right brain hemispheres, and assist body-mind integration, for the video below. I figured it would help me further my alternate nostril yoga breathing for whole brain integration. Watch the video for the information and experiment, listening on headphones. You will see how binaural beats music with a stereo…
After a particularly challenging week and weekend I woke up this Monday morning feeling less than great. A few nights in a row up with a sick child, working till late and rising early to complete a project, and dealing with the unexpected, devastating death of our cat on Friday and a funeral on Saturday…