Twists - or revolved poses - in yoga are challenging on many levels. Requiring an understanding of the basic pose, they entice us to explore balance, integrate poles of consciousness, halves of the brain, wring out the viscera and cleanse the body. Perfect for Spring!

Twists will be included in all our upcoming classes (YogaNow, and coming soon! Ripple Effect… stay tuned

Try this sequence at home. It starts with a front facing pose - meaning your hips are parallel to the short edge of your mat.

With this in mind, start with Warrior I (Virabhadrasana I), then after at least five breaths, bring the arm that’s on the same side as the bent knee to your waist, elongate the side bodies and twist the still raised opposite arm and side body until that side of the belly is against the inside of the opposite thigh, and fold the hands in prayer position - Revolved Side Angle Pose, or Parivrtta Parsvokonasana.

After at least five more breaths, extend the arms up and down and straighten the forward leg for Revolved Triangle, or Parivrtta Trikonasana.

Come back to center with straight legs and still in a forward bend for head to knee pose. If you want, move through Warrior III for a final balance challege, or simply bring your legs together for Forward bend. Luxuriate in the release for at least five breaths, and slowly rise to Tadasana before completing the series on the opposite side.

Let me know how this sequence works for you… And see you on the mat!

Love, Truth, Beauty: Here, Now. That’s Yoga.

Yes! This question comes up almost every day in the searches that lead here. And that's the whole reason for this blog: to say, "Yes, yes, yes! Yoga Every Day!"

And 20 minutes is brilliant. Maybe you pick three poses to work on today, or this week. Or five. It doesn't matter. Make sure you have Savasana before you leave your mat so you can distill the essence of what you find there and carry it forward into the rest of your day and night. Maybe one day you do all pranayam, another is all mantra and yet another is all Sun Salutations. Beautiful! Answer the call of your embodied bliss - Sat, Chit, Ananda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss), Sanskrit: सच्चिदानंद.

reposted from 10Dec07 yogaeveryday.wordpress.com copywright Christine Stump

This is a repost from my wordpress blog of April 2nd. This Monday, May 5th will be the last webinar and the last discussion will be held on Gather Tuesday May6th.

  The focus of this book is precisely yoga, only he uses different terminology. He approaches union with self from a truly philosophic - wisdom loving - perspective, discussing time relationship, elements of consciousness, relation of self to its capacities and authenticity.  Like philosophy used to be done, when it was a practice in community, in times we only now have drama and poetry to record (think Plato, among others).

In the web class held every Monday night  he and Oprah begin each live broadcast with silence. Silent meditation. In communion with 100s of 1,000s of others. 

This last week the discussion was about what he calls the pain body. The pain body refers to the stored up energy of all the emotional experiences we haven’t had the time, consciousness, energy or resources to process. The pain body in itself is not a  problem; it simply holds the remnants we have not let go. We can come back to them in the present moment and finish digesting in our own time. But as long as the remnants are being held by the pain body, they are juicy temptation to the ego. They are, after all, the stuff of stories, of drama and of entanglement when properly spun. And that is what the ego does. It spins. Stories, time, past into future, mistaking the past for the present. It’s your own personal spin doctor, running double time in your ears, not even the phone tapped, just runnin’ your world.

Until…. until you drop in. Drop in to the present moment. Drop in to your body. Become present, here, now. (Yes, I believe you will find Love, Truth and Beauty this way: Here, Now. Notice I didn’t say pleasure. That’s fickle. LTB, though, that’s guarunteed.)When you drop in, become present it interupts the sound track, if only for an instant. It inserts a sacred doorstop between the streaming banners and the open space you’ve stepped into. You can watch, observe. Now don’t get caught up in judgment, that’s just more spin: Just be. Offer your own loving presence to yourself for this moment. This one moment. The only one there is.

In yoga this digestion of experience is said to occur through tapas, a fierce, firey focus on practice. We build the fire in the belly through practice, repitition, focus, concentration, meditation, pranayam, and that fire is the digestor of our food as well as our experience. It allows us to move through the world in real time, acting and reacting to things as they are, in the moment and completely experience it, so that like ducks we can shake off the unuseful remnants and remain fresh in the present moment.