As someone deeply invested in Indian Philosophy and Yoga when I first joined Instagram, I was fascinated by the surreal world of flying and floating yogis doing incredible things with their bodies. It was inspiring, aspirational and challenging. I soon connected with a variety of yoga practitioners – beginners, fitness buffs, traditionalists and even influencers...
Symmetry is visually appealing and we along with other creations of nature have learned to understand it over the eons of our evolution as something exceptional and good. It perhaps even represents a good genetic makeup and is favored in natural selection. Yet we break it every day.
Human spine is a formidable structure that rebelled against gravity and gave us the evolutionary breakthrough which no other creature of the planet has managed. Both spiritually and medically the spine has been much revered from Socrates to Hippocrates to modern science.
Spine is a critical medium for the subtle body as it is the cornerstone of all spiritual development. It is considered a physical embodiment of the mythological mountain, Meru, which is the centre of all physical, non-physical and ethereal worlds just as the human spine is the axis of our individual and spiritual existence.
There is nothing that goes on in our body without the brain being involved and there is nothing that goes on in the brain without the spine being involved. Together they control all the functions of our body from the very first breath to the very last thought.
Recently I was at a family dinner with two adorable bumbling kids – the little girl was excitedly telling me all that she had learnt about respiration at school when suddenly her adorable younger brother bellowed at all the elders “elbows off the table please” – you see, he’d just learnt it in school. And...
Posture or Asana is how our body chooses to take up space in this world; in fact, in evolutionary terms it is our posture that first made us human. All life originated from one single celled ancestor swimming in the seas and somewhere along the way one life became many different animals and one of...
I’ve come across a lot of questions asking about how to find the best yoga school which is genuine and authentic. Often the age of a school is considered a good benchmark of its veracity. However, I feel a better way to identify the best yoga school for you is to look at its lineage. The lineage...
An edited and shorter version of this article has been published by Elephant Journal. Click here to read. Life is the period between one breath and the next; a person who only half breathes, only half lives – Hatha Yoga Pradipika Breath performs an extremely important role in our life, not only does it have significant...
