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The Yoga business seems like a big reflection of the world right now. And a lot of us are feeling stretched like a rubber band or, butter spread thinly over a slice of toast. As Yoga becomes more and more popular (especially hot yoga it seems) there are more studios and more competition but, yoga doesn’t do competition.

The world market is suffering. We are all aware of this no matter our latitude or, longitude. Financially things are upset in a big way and the global financial market is struggling to keep its head above water. The macrocosm and microcosm ie; Global money issues and our own.

There is a paradigm shift happening though and this is what is causing the turmoil that we’re all feeling. People are either adapting to their circumstance, cutting back on finances and realising they don’t need half of the things they used to believe they did. Or, people are struggling, getting more and more stressed and angry, wondering where the next buck is coming from so they can keep themselves in the life they’ve become accustomed to.

And for Yoga? Well, the practice has become big business. It was never designed to become big business apart from in the sense of the business of living in an enlightened way. Getting people into big studios and charging them large amounts of money seems to have become normal. Students were happy to big money because to a certain extent, it was a cool thing to be doing. Some students to be fair though, just realised that how yoga made them feel was worth the expense.

Now, for a lot of those studios, things have become tight. The majority of students are struggling to pay for their regular classes and studios have started to bring down prices which is a great thing. Some studios even charge a fixed monthly amount for unlimited classes. Working on the idea that most students will go to an average of two classes per week, the studio can work out a set amount. This means the dedicated student who will go to six or, seven classes a week, is on a winner in every way.
But, at its very core, Its fundamental principle. Yoga has nothing to do with material wealth and finance and the studios out there that are only looking for financial success, reaping the benefits of a global trend, will not last so long. The smaller studios offering classes to a handful of dedicated students, with the intention of helping those that come to class, those will be the ones that will make it through the hardship and weather the storm.

Because most of what we are seeing in the west, in a good few of the big studios, isn’t yoga. It’s a fitness craze designed around the postures of Hatha yoga. At best it is Bhoga, the sensual version of yoga that is all about rejoicing in life. We might feel better and less stressed but, this is only the start of the work. The real path is further over the horizon and a lot harder than we can ever imagine. I wonder if, one day yoga will evolve back to its original form of just Guru and student?

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Being a Student can be hard work, especially when it comes to study. Assignments on top of assignments, not to mention all the practical stuff, makes it all quite stressful. So, can studying at home be made easier for free?

In the ancient Indian system of yoga, a few techniques can be found to not only relax and de-stress but, also to help enhance brain function, clear the mind of external influences (Desperate Scousewives and The Champion’s league being the two usual external influences.) and focus mental clarity.

Many people in Ireland practice yoga as a fitness only. A few others practice yoga for its spirituality. In America yoga is a multi-million dollar industry that is getting more and more popular every year but, it’s mostly all about fitness. For those who only know a little about yoga, it has nothing to do with trying to put your right leg behind your left ear.

Hatha yoga is the root of all physical yoga as it is known today and is basically a practice of physical postures to purify the body in readiness for Meditation. But, in the process of purifying the body, the practice also balances the left and right hemispheres of the brain and this is where it can help us with mental clarity and focus.

When you’re sitting in front of your laptop at 2 in the morning trying to get that assignment that’s due at 9 in the morning finished, every 30 minutes or so, take a break. As far as stretching is concerned, those classic “I’ve been working real hard” stretches are always good. You know the ones; Stretching arms overhead, interlocking fingers and having a big yawn. It’s all good. A forward bend with straight legs is useful. See if you can touch your toes but, if you can’t, then just hang there for a few breaths. It stretches the hamstrings as well as making it easier for the heart to pump blood to your head.

One of the best benefits for studying though is the breathing techniques of yoga or, “Pranayama”. Again it’s all about balancing the left and right hemispheres of the brain and like your hands, the nostrils connect to the opposite side of the brain. So, left nostril is right brain (That’s the arty, creative and musical side) and right nostril is left brain (that’s mathematical, analytical, I am me side of the brain).

The practice of alternate nostril breathing or, Nadi Sodhana Pranayama is a technique that balances both sides of the brain quite quickly;

Sit in a comfortable position with your back straight. Your left hand can just relax on your knee, but with the fingers of your right hand you’re going to hold your nostrils right at the very tip of the soft part of your nose. Squeeze the tips of your ring and little finger together and place over your left nostril, then use the tip of your thumb over your right nostril.

Sitting with your back nice and straight, take a good deep breath in and out through both nostrils. Now using your thumb to block your right nostril (gently) breathe in through the left. Hold at the top of the breath while changing from thumb to fingers on the left nostril, then breathe out through the right. Hold at the bottom of the breath, then breathe in through the right. Hold again at the top of the breath and change from fingers to thumb again and breathe out through the left nostril. I’ve just explained one complete round of nadi sodhana. Always start and finish with the left nostril. You can drop the hand and practice breathing through each nostril without closing the other…..  sounds impossible, but with a little practice you’ll get a sense of it working.

Nadi sodhana pranayama is said to give increased intuition with a little practice. Stopping for a break while studying, having a stretch and then practising this breathing technique for around five or, ten minutes will give your body and mind a kick and get you back on track again. Try it while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil for that all important cup of tea.

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A little bit silly really. The comments are going to make the ignorant fearful and the informed will have less respect for the Vatican.

Crenshaw is so right. The Father needs to do some research into what yoga actually is and realise the similarities but, then maybe the last thing the Vatican needs is, people realising they can find God in themselves without having to rely on the Catholic church leading them by the hand?

What do you think?

I’ve always been a huge fan of Bruce Lee. As a kid I remember going to Karate classes and watching “The big Boss” and other movies. I also remember how I felt after a Karate class; Focused, centred and confident. It wasn’t until I began practising yoga that I felt the same feelings all over again.

Even at such a young age, I’d realised Martial arts wasn’t about the fighting. As Bruce put it “Martial arts is about self-knowledge.” The work made me feel something different inside.

I went back to Bruce a couple of years ago. My Parents gave me a book voucher for my birthday and I bought “Bruce Lee ~ The art of expressing the human body.” A collection of Bruce’s training notes and believe me, he made lots of notes. His practice was as much yoga as you can possibly get and his philosophy was incredibly yogic as well.

One of the things in the book that really gave me a “Mindful smack” was a quote from Bruce; “There is no such thing as an effective segment of a totality.” You see, he believed strongly in the idea that, if you just trained yourself in one particular area, one particular style, flexibility would be lost, your practice would stiffen and become weak. The only way to stay strong in your practice is to take all practices, seek out the strongest poignant parts from each and meld them into one. This was how he started “Jeet Kun Do” what has become known as “The style without style.”

It needs to be the same with yoga. Hatha yoga is Hatha yoga. The physical practice of postures. Whether you call it; Ashtanga, Iyengar, Anusara, or any of the other myriad of styles, it’s still all Hatha yoga. To get caught within one particular style leaves one isolated to all the other styles. The only way to stay flexible is to embrace all. All is one.

Bruce Lee had to resign from the style that kept him caged. He wasn’t allowed to teach the way he wanted, to who he wanted and literally had to fight for the right to do so. And in doing this, he became an inspiration to millions all over the world.

No one style is better than the next but, it seems that a lot of the time yoga gets caught in trends where certain styles become more favourable than others. In the early stages of our practice, it’s possible to favour one style over another. As our practice deepens though, we may start seeing the attraction of other styles. To not be able to investigate every style could end up becoming stifling. Flexibility would be lost.

‎Learn the principle, abide by the principle, and dissolve the principle. In short, enter a mold without being caged in it. Obey the principle without being bound by it. LEARN, MASTER AND ACHIEVE!!! ~ Bruce Lee

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Things have been changing in recent times though; One of the biggest waves in recent history wassurfed off the west coast of Ireland. And it’s just happened again off the coast of Portugal.

Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara (sounds Irish to me….) has just caught a 90 foot wave at Praia do Norte, Nazaré Portugal. McNamara was tow-in surfing with Northern Irish man Al Mennie and English surfer Andrew Cotton.  Al Mennie says;

Everything was perfect, the weather, the waves. Cotty and I surfed two big waves of about 60 feet and then, when Garrett was ready, (along) came a canyon wave of over 90 feet!

The jet ski was the best place to see him riding the biggest wave I’ve ever seen. It was amazing. Most people would be scared, but Garrett was controlling everything in the critical part of the wave. It was an inspiring ride by an inspiring surfer.

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I’ve felt rather jaded with yoga recently. Not my own personal practice, although I’ve been busy starting college and my practice has taken a back seat to a certain degree, I enjoy it. It’s more the teaching of it that I’ve fallen out with.

Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching. I love the sociability of it. I’m an extrovert in the true sense of the meaning ie; I feel energised being around others. I love the energy of company that I find in a yoga class.

But I’ve not been teaching much of late. Summer is always bad for yoga studios right? And traditionally yogasana is started in the autumn anyway. I was hoping that in opening my own studio, there would be enough regular students that I could afford the odd residential here and there, with maybe a few master classes thrown in for good measure. There hasn’t even been enough students to pay the rent though.

The situation has made me think, to re-evaluate where I’m at and focus on what I actually want. You see I don’t want yoga to be about money. Payment for me is hearing people telling me how great they feel after I class I’ve taught or, how they don’t get those crippling migraine headaches that used to keep them bedridden for days at a time, anymore.

We’re between a rock and a hard place at the moment it seems…at least, that’s how it appears for yoga studios around me on the east coast of Ireland. A lot of the bigger studios have begun to offer unlimited class passes. For around fifty euros a month, you can take as many classes as you want. That’s a pretty good deal I reckon!

Most of these classes though are based around the one-hour format. Can we really get a proper yoga practice in just one hour? I don’t think so. To really get the benefit of yoga, from yogasana to meditation, the class has to be longer. In the need to get more people in to pay for rent and teachers, studios have succumb to the fast-food ideology… value for money and quick when we’ve not got time, but doesn’t give us the long-term nutrition we really need.

Karuna yoga as a school, has been around for 47 years now. My Guru Ruth White, as a student of B.K.S. Iyengar (Guriji is still president of the Karuna school), was also studying Advaita and meditation with her husband John. In those early days, Iyengar wouldn’t teach meditation and Ruth’s love of this limb of yoga encouraged her to take the step in setting up Karuna yoga.

Karuna was my first style of yoga and it fits me like a glove. I enjoy other styles, but Karuna is my heart. Ruth’s classes are intense and can last for hours. I sometimes think she’d be happy to keep teaching all day, but she notices when students begin to get distracted by thoughts of lunch. Her morning sessions always end with pranayama and meditation after savasana. A few days of this at a residential and I’m walking on air.

So you can maybe see why I don’t really agree with the whole one-hour lesson thing. The other thing I feel students could be missing out on though is connection. Connection between student and teacher is important. Traditionally yoga would have been taught one-on-one, just guru and student and there would have been a certain amount of bonding in this dynamic.

It is possible for the teacher to keep a connection with a lot of students. Ruth White can certainly do it, there could be 50 budding teachers in her class but she manages to teach each person individually. And I’ve a feeling that John Friend is probably very much the same.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that; as yoga becomes more and more popular, with more studios opening everyday. And with yoga business being more about getting “butts on seats”. I hope we don’t lose sight completely, of what yoga actually is.

You see, it’s real easy to get caught up by the ego without realising. It’s possible that big studio owners believe they are reaching out to more people and spreading the yoga love, when the opposite may be the truth. There’s less and less of a connection with guru and student.

Anyone can teach yoga postures, but to really teach yoga, I think the teacher has to have had some kind of epiphany. An epiphany about how the life experiences they’ve been and are going through, are directly linked to what’s happening physically, with muscle, sinew and bone. The teacher can then see what’s happening with each student and share their experiences.

I’ve recently been doing some one-on-one sessions with a guy that runs and plays a lot of football. He wanted to try yoga because of the flexibility, to compliment his fitness routine. But he also wanted to learn more about how yoga sets the mind at ease and releases stress. He’s under some pressure with work and unlike a lot of guys, has decided to do something about it before it effects his health, as he’s been experiencing some anxiety and panic attacks.

In three sessions, not only has he found muscles that weren’t there before, he’s also not had one panic attack in two weeks! I don’t feel that he would have got those results as fast if he’d been going to classes with 20 or more people in it, unless the teacher was really good at making connections with the students.

So I don’t feel jaded about teaching yoga anymore. For a long time my biggest worry was trying to get people into classes, to pay the rent and earn some money. Now, I’m not worried. No matter how many people I teach, the only thing I really have to focus on to be happy, is how I connect with each person in the class.

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Studies carried out in York and Sterling universities in Britain have found that bereaved parents are more than four times more likely to die within a decade of the loss of a child. And this study has links to a previous study, that found a similar effect with the loss of a spouse, often referred to as dying of a “broken heart”.

Authors of the report, published in BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care are concerned about the findings of research done on British parents and have called for more research to be undertaken.

The research didn’t look into whether the deaths were caused by suicide or, were just symptoms of stress; ”The stress of bereavement may involve significant physiological effects – for example suppressing the immune system thereby increasing one’s propensity to disease,” the report said.

This suppression of the immune system may possibly be a pointer towards the possibility that still births could be connected to the health of the parents.

YOGA.

One of the benefits of a regular yoga practice is the support of a healthy immune system as well as the strengthening of a weak immune system (Back arching postures help to open up the chest, which then has positive effects on the Thymus gland, the seat of the immune system.) Esoterically the chest is also considered to be where our courage comes from and you can see this in action with the way a proud person may “Puff out the chest” or a person suffering from depression may let the shoulders drop and the chest becomes deflated.

This is probably why yoga has been found to be quite beneficial to people grieving or, that are suffering from depression. And a regular yoga practice that includes meditation and breathing exercises helps students to move away from the past and into the present, ready to embrace what the future holds.

Is yoga just for suburban baby-boomers and urban stress junkies seeking a hipper way to stay youthful and fit? Not if a growing number of yoga fanatics inside the US military get their way.

That’s right, everyone from grunts in basic training to elite warrior units like the US Navy Seals have caught the yoga bug, and now some top commanders are planning to incorporate the ancient mind-body practice into the military’s official training. The US Training and Doctrine Command (Tradoc), which oversees instruction of soldiers in everything from how to salute to the right way to hold a rifle, is proposing the largest overhaul of military fitness training in more than 30 years – and for the first time, yoga, as well as Pilates and martial arts, are being highlighted.

Tradoc commanders, joined by military health experts, say that traditional exercise models may make soldiers “fit” in the sense of more muscular, but often leave them too bulked up and vulnerable to injuries that yoga, which emphasises flexibility, helps prevent. And yoga’s focus on meditation and maintaining calm, they say, fits perfectly with the military’s broad new emphasis on instilling “mental toughness”, as well as physical strength, to ensure that soldiers can succeed on the modern technology-intensive battlefield pursuing elusive and nerve-wracking adversaries.

But is it ethical for peace-loving yogis to help the Pentagon fight its nasty wars? Many yoga business owners, anxious to spread the yoga “gospel” far and wide, don’t much care who gets the message – or why – as long as the market expands. Stay out of “secular” controversies, they say.

And others yogis have questioned whether yoga’s traditional “do no harm” principle really means “don’t go to war” – or rather, “war if you must, but do it with restraint.” They point out that prior to Gandhi, who largely blessed yoga as a spiritual practice of “non-violence”, Indian leaders in ancient times used it much as the Pentagon wants to today – as a way of preparing mentally for battle.

Naturally, some aspects of the growing yoga-military connection are more controversial than others. At the Walter Reed Medical Centre Washington, DC, a group of yogis has pioneered the application of an esoteric yoga practice known as “yoga nidra” – literally, “sleep yoga” – which new research shows can measurably reduce the effects of PTSD on returning war veterans. The nidra practice actually differs from most other types of contemporary yoga because it doesn’t rely on physically challenging yoga “asanas” or poses to strengthen the body, but depends instead on meditation and relaxation techniques, with participants lying motionless on their backs.

Robin Carnes, a former corporate publicist who helped pioneer the yoga-military-PTSD connection, has even established a teacher-training programme for aspiring military yogis through her organisation, Warriors at Ease, which may soon become one the first officially recognised “yoga defence contractors”. Carnes, together with a Harvard-trained professor, Richard Miller, conducted one of the first formal studies that measured the effects of yoga nidra on soldiers who had been scarred mentally and emotionally by their wartime service, and military planners came away impressed with the results.

But not all yogis have agreed to restrict their yoga training to healing practices. A big stir was created in the yoga world in 2006 when it was revealed that US Navy Seals and other US military units were getting trained in yoga, because they saw its application to Seal operations where stealth and calm could make the difference between life and death. Some Seals went on to pioneer yoga hybrids like “combat yoga” or “warrior yoga”, and even set up their own yoga schools, blending the yoga training with martial arts, and special Seal combat techniques.

Developments like these have left many peace-loving yogis aghast. But after a decade of exponential growth – an estimated 1 in 10 adults now practises yoga regularly – the $6bn yoga industry still has no widely-accepted training guidelines, to say nothing of licensing programmes, to guide the estimated 70,000 yoga teachers in the US as they navigate the burgeoning yoga market, with all its temptations and possible pitfalls.

“The few, the proud, the brave,” say the Marines. For some, it’s a marriage made in Nirvana.

Article by ~Stewart J. Lawrence For The Guardian.co.uk

Watch this video on YouTube.

Releasing our pent up feelings from our bellies can prevent disease and allow us to live more authentic and expressive lives. Sometimes, if too much emotional energy builds up inside of us, a blowout can result that can cause discomfort. You can help to alleviate this compression by doing the same exercise and adding sound to your emotional release. The more guttural the sounds released through your mouth, the more emotions you are likely letting go. Releasing your emotions from your belly doesn’t have to be painful and hard; rather, it can be organic and effortless. It’s important not to judge whatever comes up for you. We tend to stuff our feelings in our bellies when we are ashamed of them or not ready to express them. There is nothing wrong with having feelings, whatever they may be. You can’t help your feelings; if anything, you can help yourself by acknowledging the truth of your emotions so you can set yourself free.

Via~ Daily Om