Yoga in One Syllable

Yoga encourages you to consciously observe your experiences. It also encourages you to learn from them, and to put what you learn into practice in all spheres of your life. My grandfather was a great one for saying “the day you stop learning is the day you die”. When I first heard this zany idea [...]

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We’re all aware of the modern truism that “you are what you eat”. The food that we put into our bellies, thanks to the wonders of the digestive process, passes on its energy to the body, helping us to create new cells and to stay alive and well. And we’re all aware on some level [...]

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These days it’s becoming more widely accepted by western science that the mind and body are interlinked in a thousand ways, some obvious, some incredibly subtle. This, however, is no news to many other cultures and philosophies, including Yoga, which have accepted and explored the link for thousands of years. From a yogic perspective we [...]

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You’re sitting in a train carriage. The carriage is a narrow, confined space, and the people across the aisle are talking to each other in tones that are louder than they realize. You don’t want to listen in on what they’re saying, but you can’t help it: the voices drag you in, and before you [...]

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Lately, the yoga community has been debating the pros and cons of Bikram Chowdury’s proposal that Yoga should become an Olympic Sport. At first glance competition Yoga would seem to be missing the purpose, but is it as simple as that?

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A year or two ago, I read an article about a woman who leaves her normal life for a few days each year to enter a retreat, for no other reason than to practice silence. She first tried this in her early 20’s, locking herself away in a hotel room with a loaf of white [...]

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The human mind loves patterns. We search for them in the things we see, our ears listen for them in music and the rhythm of waves on the beach. And, the mind itself generates them through our behaviour. Have you ever noticed that when life throws you a familiar situation you tend to repeat actions you did in the past?

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Being human means we’ve been blessed with a mind. Yoga helps the mind to work better, to see things more clearly, to concentrate more effectively, and to understand how things really work. How does yoga go about doing this?

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