Sutra 5 An Excerpt from The Mama Sutra I’m speeding down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard on a glorious fall day, running through yellow lights, completely stressed out, trying to get to the meditation hall on time. I’m teaching the daily yoga classes at a women’s meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, a Buddhist retreat center in [...]

Bettering Our Relationship with Food Trying a New Fruit The Exercise Find a fruit you have never eaten. An Asian food market is a good place to look. Star fruit, lychee, kiwano, rambutan, papaya, custard apple, mangosteen, and dragon fruit are some possibilities. At a Mexican market look for mamey, guanabana, sapote, chico, or pitahaya. [...]

A Way to Self-Compassion One in All All in One— If only this is realized, No more worry about your not being perfect! —Sosan Ganchi Zenji, Shin Jin Mei   I needed someone to help me grab hold of compassion and bring it a little closer every day. —Eleanor This chapter offers ways to build [...]

A Challenge to Yoga Practitioners Comparing Our Practice If I had to pick one thing that challenges Western yoga practitioners more than any other, it would be the urge to compete. Because I haven’t spent more than a few months living in other cultures, I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that [...]

Cultivating the Right Attitude bhava-pratyayo videha-prakrti-layanam (1:19) Samadhi is a natural state for someone who is enlightened. shraddha-virya-smrti-samadhi-prajna-purvakah itaresham (1:20) For the rest of us, we must use faith, passion, mindfulness, quiet, and good judgment to support our journey toward samadhi. Our life is a reflection of our attitude, the energy of our mind. When [...]

Death A Long Distance Call On a Wednesday morning, sitting in my old blue Volvo in a parking lot after just getting a facial—my cheeks redolent with cream, all pores clean—I called the Cancer Center in Santa Fe, persuaded an oncologist to look up my chart. The oncologist I was assigned to was on vacation, [...]

Remembering to care for yourself as a mother can sometimes be the most difficult thing about your postpartum time. Kimberly Ann Johnson, author of The Fourth Trimester, has compiled a list of the five basic necessities every mother needs in order to be healthy, happy, and ready to care for a new child. Below you [...]

Would you like to keep your brain and nervous system happy as you age? These 20 pages provide must-have information about how aging affects your brain, central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, digestive system, circulatory system, and more. There are many easy things you can do to keep these systems healthy—learn how yoga can help! [...]

by Nina Zolotow, author of Yoga for Healthy Aging Because the sixth anniversary of the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog is coming up next week, I thought I’d check to see what our nine most popular—or at least most viewed—posts were over all time. (Nine seems like a random number but for some reason that’s [...]

by Nina Zolotow, author of Yoga for Healthy Aging Asana works to steady the mind through a focus on physical sensation, breath, or drishti (gaze). If we can bring that same focus into our Accessible Yoga practice, we quickly realize that the outward appearance of a pose is not a sign of whether or not [...]