Marketing is a bad word for many of us, evoking images of sleazy commercial manipulation. But if we have something that really helps people, we need a way to let them know it’s available. So here are some non-cringe ideas for yoga teachers whose goal is helping people, not making money.
Read MorePopey was having a hard time. Things were desperate, dull and dissolute in the lead up to Christmas. The bulls had been kicking up dust in the city office, and the team, including the Drillers and Fieldies, were bored, tired and overworked — a sure-fire recipe for trouble. I was leaving that day for Christmas break despite Popey’s conviction that I had been permanently transferred to his team. Later that day there would be tears, but not from me, for once.
Read MoreThere’s nothing like a list of no-nos to inflame the adolescent western mind.
I was sitting in a circle at a yoga study group in New Zealand, and the only person of Indian descent was reading out a list of their personal list of Yama and Niyama, which very roughly translates as ethical precepts, dos and don’t dos.
Read MoreIn this article, we collate advice for those who share yoga in strongly Christian communities, for how to break down barriers and teach in a non-dogmatic way.
Yoga is what you do as your principal devotion. It is your principal practice. Not puja, not meditation, not kirtan, not philosophy. In the ancient times, asana itself was what was done in the temple to your deity.
Read MoreDespite the fact that most Western Yoga teachers are women, we don’t often hear much discussion of gender or gender inequality in the yoga world, perhaps because of the unhelpful separation between the personal and the political that persists in our society. New Zealand-born, U.S.-based Mark Whitwell is on a mission to change that. We interviewed him to find out about his Yogic approach to gender equality, and how this necessarily entails a critique of masculinity and a vision of a more equal world. Interviewed by Rosalind Atkinson.
Read MoreApparently the culture of casual sex hookups and “friends with benefits” relationships now rampant on college campuses and elsewhere in American life isn’t living up to expectations. In her book The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy, researcher Donna Freitas reveals that although she expected to find that the vast majority of college students revel in the casual sex ethos, “instead I encountered a large percentage who feel confined by it or ambivalent about it.”
Read MoreOh Corona. Yeah, you had us there for a moment.
After what may be called a “global panic attack”, following the first weeks of disturbing information about the virus on the telly and online, it literally felt like the world had pushed the “pause”-button for a while. Quiet streets, closed shops, empty cinemas and museums. Social distancing strategies have had us wiggle around each other in 1.5 meters distance, giving each other “the elbow” instead of the hand.
Read More1) Enjoy a daily practice of intimacy with your body and breath, linking the mind to the whole body, and abiding in the mystic perfection that is your life and its perfectly established relatedness to the cosmos.
Read MoreIs there an inherent power dynamic between the Yoga teacher and the Yoga student? Is the teacher powerful and the student less so? Can authentic Yoga be transmitted within hierarchical power structures? In this short essay I want to offer a non-patriarchal framework for understanding the teacher-student relationship in Yoga. A perspective which sees mutual friendship and equality as both the means and end of wisdom transmission. The way through the trauma of alienated social relations is via intimacy…
Read More“If you want to teach people, you have to love them,” said the tall figure seated near me on the floor.
Shit, I thought. What am I doing here, then? I don’t love people… I hate them! I feel them frozen in fear and radiating phoney bullshit, and I can’t bear it!
I looked around the room at the other bodies. No-one else seemed to be freaking out…
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