You may have heard that doing just 5 minutes of meditation a day can greatly improve your health. We all know that it’s good for us, but what does it actually do? It decreases stress. Stress is something that is experienced when the brain interprets a situation as being threatening or demanding. All situations, however, are neutral. They are a state of being. The way a person interprets a situation is what can potentially cause stress, if interpreted negatively. The…
Yoga Studios and Health Food Cafés – A Match Made in Marketing Heaven? While it may seem that every second yoga studio is now all of a sudden expanding and exhaling coffee machines, fruit juicers, tables, chairs and funky hipster tunes from the depths of their cashew-nut strewn duffel bags, the trend of new health food cafés emerging in cohorts with yoga studios nowadays has far deeper-rooted sit bones than you may think. One thing yoga teaches us is to…
Ikigai No, it’s not the contact details of that oddly-smelling dude from the bar last weekend who you assured you’d text after one too many cocktails. (iki-guy, get it? ….). I recently stumbled upon this picture of a venn diagram centred around the word ‘ikigai’ in an article on elephantjournal.com, and through a bit more research, was truly uplifted by what I read. ‘Ikigai’ is a Japanese word which translates to ‘the reason for being’ or a ‘reason to wake up…
It was Valentine’s Day this past Tuesday. And while it lends itself to being a romantic holiday, it can be celebrated for all types of love. Valentine’s Day–or any day, really–is a day to celebrate love in all its forms. Love for our friends, love for our family, love for ourselves, love for life! The word “yoga” means “union”, the union of all things, the interconnectedness of us all. It encourages us to love one another, as well as ourselves,…
When I first started Meditating I could hardly sit still for 3 minutes let alone 5. I’d manage to go through the motions for 5 days or so and then something would happen and I’d fall out of it. Then I’d beat myself up about not doing it. Then I’d do it again. Maybe for a little bit longer. Maybe not. Erratic. Unpredictable. All over the place. My practice was an analogy for my mind……………..and me. It’s now a year…
There’s a great story I always come back to about a doctor in Hawaii who ended up “cleaning” a criminal psych ward just with the power of his thoughts. Dr. Hew Len was hired to work at a ward for the criminally insane nearly 30 years ago at the Hawaii State Hospital. This particular ward had a high turnover rate of staff and many who endured their time at the ward rolled their eyes as they saw the calm and…
It’s happened to all of us at some point or another. You’ve done 6 downward dogs in half an hour. Your body is saying,”No,” but your mind is looking around the room, making sure not to fall behind. Everyone in class is going into a 7th downward dog. You know that your shoulders have had enough. You know that you’ll be carrying a backpack for about 20 minutes on the way home. But you feel like you need to get…
I’m a Shiny New Yoga Teacher – Here’s 5 Things I Know (And More Importantly Some Things I Don’t Know) The first thing you will realise at the beginning of any yoga teacher training course, no matter how many years you’ve been practicing yoga or in how many different countries you’ve travelled, classes you’ve attended or new styles you’ve tried, is how little you actually know about it. Don’t get me wrong here; I simply mean that there is just…
8 Ways to Cultivate a Home Yoga Practice You asked – and we have provided! Last week we asked what topics you Yogahubbers would like to see more of on the blog, and a surprising amount of you expressed an interest in learning more about how to more effectively cultivate a home yoga practice. While there’s nothing that can quite replicate attending your favourite class or a certain teacher’s weekly flow, sometimes we simply cannot make it into the studio…
You’ve seen classes advertised as Vinyasa, Iyengar, Yin, Kundalini, Astanga, and many more that are labelled according to a lineage or specific style. Any of these mentioned can be classified with very specific rules, sequences or concepts that define them as that particular style of yoga. But what is Flow Yoga and why is each Flow Yoga class so different? Yoga Flow can generally be defined as a yoga class that incorporates energetic movement through a series of asanas (yoga postures), by which the student…
