“Is the Lord among us or not?” Exodus 17:7 One of the first yoga skills that I try to cultivate in new students is the practice of paying attention to the breath. Breath awareness is central to all yoga practice: breath draws the spirit inward, calms the monkey mind by giving it focus, and nourishes…
August 7, 2018 “For everything there is a season.” “Measure twice, cut once.” “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” These types of pithy sayings are known as aphorisms. (The book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible is full of them.) They are easy to remember and contain a readily recognized truth. Raja yoga – or royal…
April 27, 2017 “The kingdom of heaven…you don’t die into it; you awaken into it.” Cynthia BourgeaultThe foundation of yoga practice, the first two limb’s in Patanjali’s eight fold path describing the spiritual technology of yoga, is a set of ethics and ethical practices called the yamas and niyamas. This ethical foundation is what distinguishes…
April 23, 2017 Abide in me…as I in you. John 15We have been writing off and on this year about yoga’s ethical foundation, the yamas and niyamas, and how they inform our Christian faith. But we thought we had better back up and put them in context. The yamas and niyamas are part of yoga’s…