Five Minute Yoga - Friendly Advice for Growing a Home Yoga Practice

At last: I’m learning to row.
When I was seven, my family rented a cottage on a small lake, with a rowboat the kids could use. As the youngest, I had to fight to sit in it, much less row it. Then one late afternoon, I found the boat abandoned. I climbed in, gripped the oars, and...

What if trying to be better keeps you from being present?
When I first heard my teacher Ingelise talk about “the lunacy of trying to be better,” I was not convinced. Of course we try to be better, don’t we? If we weren’t trying to be better, then we wouldn’t come to class, and we wouldn’t practice. But that...

I had three months off teaching this summer, mostly because I spent June in India, studying at the Iyengar yoga institute in Pune.
Anyone who has studied at RIMYI knows that a month there doesn’t really qualify as a holiday. Not with a two-hour class and a three-hour practice six days a week, along with observing as many classes as you can absorb. Still, I wasn’t teaching, so let...

In the week and a bit since B.K.S. Iyengar died, this has become my new favorite quote. And as each day passes, I am more grateful to him for setting such a good example of a happy life and a majestic death.
Yes, he could glower. Yes, he yelled in class. But he was not an angry man. He was impish. He took on his role as the traditional tough-love Indian teacher and played it to the hilt, impatient, frustrated by his students’ inability to grasp immediately...