Yoga in One Syllable

Last time I alluded to the idea that limits can be both real and imaginary. When the mind is not controlled properly it can create all manner of false limits: our memories are full of misleading information about how the world operates and how we should behave in it. Whilst all this is true what [...]

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“Learn to go beyond your limits”. It’s a popular self-help mantra of many modern gurus. Our world seems full of people, books and billboards telling us we don’t need to live according to our limits. That instead we should push beyond them. I’m not going to deny that our mind can keep us trapped by [...]

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“Do your work; don’t do other people’s work.” I’ve been reading about Karma Yoga again. This precept of Karma Yoga sounded a bit uncaring and callous. Was the Bhagavad Gita telling me that I could walk through the rest of my life never helping another person?

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In the spirit of thinking less, I’ve been doing more. I’m not randomly filling my time with busy-ness rather I’ve begun a campaign of consciously and mindfully doing and acting. Doing more may seem to run counter to many spiritual philosophies – doesn’t yoga advocate retreating to the Himalayas and meditating in a cave? Yes. [...]

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I think too much. I’ve been told this quite a few times lately. My doctor told me that my brain was working too hard. The Ayurvedic doctor I see in India flatly suggested I stop thinking. And then, the jnana yogi we visited in India confirmed that a person can definitely think too much (although [...]

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In my last article I talked about jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, and how practitioners of this form of yoga spend their life trying to understand the nature of the mind and how it works. All this sounds like an extreme sport version of intellectualisation. But we all know that humans don’t just think [...]

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Our Indian Yoga Tour for Summer 2011 is now well and truly over. We all had a lovely time and I hope to be able to share a little of the magic of India with you over the coming weeks. As I readjusted to life at home the other evening I took a walk through [...]

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If we observe the world around us we can see that life is full of opposites: light and dark, hot and cold, black and white, drought and flood. This duality is fundamental to yogic thought. These opposites are the extreme boundaries of life’s potential experiences. However, yoga does not encourage us  to run headlong into [...]

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When I was growing up, phrases like “watch your language”, “mind your P’s and Q’s” or the exclamation “language, please!” regularly flew round the classroom. Unsurprisingly, teachers were generally referring to the colourful profanities of excited teenagers. Now pipe down at the back – this article is not about swearing. Rather, it’s about how our [...]

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Regular readers will note that things have been a little ghostly around here the past few weeks. Transcontinental travel, it turns out, doesn’t bring out the blogger in me; I’m quite happy absorbing a sunset, or watching the wind whip grains of sand across a dune, without feeling compelled to race back to the computer [...]

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