September 13, 2014
Benign or malignant? It’s impossible to know just yet. Perhaps it’s best to focus on the blessings of the present moment. Here are several unconflicted ways in which I can be happy for Rob Ford.
July 15, 2014
How would "lazy" apply to the person who has already jumped right in? I only ever hear committed practitioners and teachers quoting it. To me it smacks of an in-group encourashame. I.e., you can be young, old, sick, weak when you start, and as you continue. But once you’ve committed to the system, you really don’t want to be lazy. It sounds like it could be a joke meant to stiffen the resolve of people in doubt.
In my work on injuries, I'm very interested in the lag time between when a person first suspects that something is too intense or painful for them in practice, and when they actually stop or alter practice. In between those two points comes a litany of things they are told and learn to tell themselves -- "pain is an opening", "practice requires commitment" etc. -- about the necessity of continuing. It's also in this period that repetitive strain can evolve into chronic injury.
May 26, 2014
In a wildly entertaining tour-de-force of deconstructive research, David Gordon White’s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, released today), is an extended meditation on the red violin of modern Yoga.
May 10, 2014
Ayurveda today is more properly regarded as an interpersonal, intersubjective art form, with great potential for fostering an appreciation for embodied difference. Nowhere is this potential skill more called upon than in the practice of considering “constitution”: the individual’s unique psychosomatic profile, known as prakṛti. And in no other area is the promise of Ayurveda more confused and oversold. I would like to argue that the principle of constitution as popularly practiced is an ideal lens through which we can see both the shortcomings of an old medicine that has not yet exposed itself to the epistemological rigours of our time, and also the potential Ayurveda has to model therapeutic intimacy in an increasingly data-driven world.