MyLifeYoga

I read recently that the average human life span consists of 300,000 days. The questions posed with this statistic were: How many days might remain for you? and How do you want to live those days? While it’s helpful to think about and plan your life, breaking down your life span into days instead of years provides an opportunity to become more conscious of how you are living and to take responsibility for your thoughts, time, and energy, and how and where you want to invest these– day to day, moment to moment .

Investment in thoughts: Not only was I never taught how to invest money in my earlier years, neither was I taught how to invest wisely in my choice of thoughts (my parents hadn’t learned this either). Strange, since thinking is central to the education process.

Thoughts are funny things. Without our doing anything, they can pop into our head instantly, and jump around incessantly–like Mexican jumping beans. Imagine you’re planning the menu for a party for Uncle Henry’s 90 th birthday party. Here’s how your thinking might unfold: Continue reading →

Can yoga make a difference in the lives of troubled kids? This inspiring story indicates that the answer is yes! The Holistic Life Foundation started with about 15 kids and now have helped more than a thousand with amazing results. The challenge for all the rest of us? Can we replicate this in our communities?

The Holistic Life Foundation web site. More about the founders: Ali and Atman Smith and Andres Gonzalez.

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With more of us leading increasingly sedentary and stressful lifestyles, yoga is becoming a key ingredient in maintaining good health. This may be one reason behind the surging numbers of those practicing yoga regularly. But hidden behind these rising number of yoga practitioners is another number: the rising number of yoga related injuries.

Till now yoga has been considered as very safe and the relatively small numbers of yoga related injuries has borne this out. Unfortunately though there is an increasing trend towards “aggressive” forms of yoga with the corresponding increase in yoga related injuries. A recent article in NY times talks about yoga injuries, and though the article relies heavily on anecdotal stories and may sound alarmist at times, it does help bring up the discussion on yoga safety.

The fact is that as we age our joints are going to get stiff. As joints stiffen injuries will occur even in normal day-to-day activity. So the question before us is to undertake some form of physical exercise that increases our flexibility and reduce our risks from injuries in our daily activities. It is expected that any physical exercise itself will have with it some associated risk of injury. So the question becomes how do we do the exercise without injury. For yoga the question becomes: Can yoga be done safely? And for yoga teachers and students the question is: What can you do to minimize injuries? Continue reading →