The Blog

Tuesday, January 1
4:00pm to 6:00pm
Yogasana Center
118 3rd Avenue at Wyckoff (St. Mark’s)
4:00pm to 6:00pm718.789.7255 | yogasanacenter.com
$25 advanced registration/$30 on day of workshop
All levels welcome

Start the year right with this class for all levels of yoga student. Designed to detox and purify both the physical body and the energy body. Come clear away old thought patterns and bad habits, put the tensions of the holiday season and the trials of the past year behind you. The class will use the Eastern model of the chakra centers as a way of exploring the energies in the body and the energy we put out in the world. It will be a predominantly quiet and meditative practice using chanting and restorative poses to open and balance the different chakras. More than anything, it is a forward-looking and optimistic practice that will create and hold space for possibility and change in the new year.

This hugely popular workshop has been an annual tradition at Yogasana for the past five years. It fills up fast, so be sure to sign up early.

Radiolab is an excellent program produced for NPR that features lively and entertaining explorations of scientific and philosophical topics. In 2006, they aired a show about the mind/body connection, and included a fascinating segment on a man who suddenly and permanently lost his kinesthetic/proprioceptive sense. You can hear the entire fascinating program here:

Radiolab: Where Am I?

If the Alexander Technique is about one thing, it’s about negotiating the startle response. This is a reflex action we, all of us, undergo when faced with an alarming stimulus. It helps us to escape and protect ourselves when faced with danger. Most of us, however, live lives in which life-threatening danger doesn’t happen all that often, yet it is something we still have to deal with in one way or another on a daily basis.

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When I tumbled over the handlebars of my bike several weeks ago, I remember thinking, as I felt my kneecap get pushed sickeningly sideways by the impact, “Oh no, not my bad knee!” My right knee, the one I fell on, is the knee I tweaked in training when we were practicing lunges in my first term a couple of months ago. It’s the knee I tweaked going into Padmasana (Lotus Pose) without adequate preparation last year. It’s the knee I’m constantly banging into things day in, day out. Could this be a coincidence?

The very first time I had a problem with my knees was in my late twenties. I had been taking Mysore-style Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga for a few months with New York’s premiere teacher of the style. Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is an extremely athletic form of yoga developed in the late 1920’s by Yoga guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya for K. Patthabi Jois. In his book, “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” author Mark Singleton describes the origins of the style in the performances created by Krishnamacharya to promote the physical practice of yoga during the burgeoning cultural renaissance movement in India at the end of the British colonial period. It’s a system of four set sequences of postures that become increasingly gymnastic as they progress. When I was studying at Jivamukti Yoga Center in the mid ’90’s, Ashtanga was all the rage and I followed the herd.

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