Yoga in One Syllable

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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Almost four decades ago a book called “The Limits to Growth” was released. Funded by the Club of Rome it modeled the possible consequences of a rapidly growing population and the finite resources our environment can supply: it outlined limits. Yet the idea that growth may be limited is not generally popular policy: twenty years [...]

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Truthfulness, or Satya as the yoga texts term it, is something that most of us value highly in ourselves, and in others. It is also one of the key values we are encouraged to live by when we practice yoga. However, practicing Satya is somewhat more involved than fessing up to your fourth grade teacher [...]

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In Yoga we are encouraged to develop Santosha, a sense of contentment in our life. A pretty tall order, you might say, when there’s still so much to do, to achieve, to worry about. Have you ever asked yourself why that is? The answer is probably a little disconcerting:

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I hope you’ll forgive me a moment of nostalgia, but I’ve had a very old Bjork song floating around in my head for the last week, and it won’t rest until I give it due attention. The song in question, or the fragment of it that keeps coming to my lips, goes “there’s mo-o-ore to [...]

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As humans, we have a strange dichotomy existing in our minds. Part of us loves the familiarity of the known – the comfort of routine- and yet some other part of us finds it tedious and loathsome. Equally, while part of us craves new experiences and finds anticipation in the possibilities of the unknown, another [...]

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‘Being present’ is a constant theme in many Eastern philosophies, and with good reason. Have you ever noticed that unhappiness actually arises from your memory of past experiences, or from the imaginings about your as-yet-undetermined future?

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We can spend a lot of time, and money, chasing after “new”. New cars, houses, clothes, and, of course, experiences. A car with a DVD player to silence those back seat “are-we-there-yets“; a kitchen makeover filled with the latest stainless steel gadgetry; a month long holiday off-the-beaten track. Whatever the object of our desire, we’re [...]

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