Strength and Grace - A Collection of Essays By Women Ashtanga Yoga Teachers Ekaminhale is excited to announce the upcoming publication : Strength and GraceFeaturing essays by:Kino MacGregor, Harmony Lichty, Louise Ellis, Krista Shirley, Fiona Stang, Lisa Schremp, Magnolia Zuniga, Pamela Luther, Zoe Ward, Laruga Glaser and more.Over the coming weeks we'll be releasing excerpts from the upcoming book which will be available for free download on a TBD date. It will also be available in hardcopy form priced at the cost of the printing. This project was made possible by the volunteer work of the Alicia Beale and Derick Yu (Project Coordinators), Clint Griffiths and all the teachers involved. In the first excerpt from Louise Ellis she shares what it...
A Centered Arrow I have some ever-lingering, ignorant desires. Rather than aiming just to “do right” by my intuition in the moment some part of me secretly wants to “be right.” This desire for outcomes (rajas) or a mythical escape into a dark “nothing” (tamas) continually rears its ugly head, defeats me, and I miss an opportunity for openness and for yoga. I try to tame it, but only in small, palpable daily doses. For two hours a day I roll out my mat, enter the unknown, and submerge into proving myself wrong. And somehow, mysteriously, that is what I return for day after day. During the climax of the Ramayana, Rama (representing the Supreme Self) finally makes his way...
What is the most important thing you should focus on when starting or continuing to learn modern postural yoga? The first thing that pops into my head and probably you as well is how to do the postures. I disagree. The asanas (postures) are important but not the most important The Focusing Question “What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” - Gary Keller, The One Thing This question is used to harness the power of the 80/20 principle. Vilfredo Pareto's observation of a natural law that 80% of outcomes are a result of 20% of inputs. The focusing question takes it further. It attempts to zero in on the 1% of inputs that...
In order to learn, we have to fall. In order to accept that we're going to fall, we have to surrender. In order to surrender, we have to have faith. In the process of learning asana, we experience faith in form of trust...initially towards the teacher, and eventually towards ourselves.While rebuilding my house, I relearned that "you have to do things in a specific order, and if you skipped a step along the way, you will most likely have to go back." This is what I had heard my teacher say when I was first learning asana and later learned it as an integrated part of learning the different series of Ashtanga Yoga. You have to learn to...
In a sense, my journey on Ashtanga Yoga is unique because my relationship with India came before my relationship with yoga. I was a little girl watching TV, I remember an image of women in colourful saris with urns on their heads. When an opportunity came in my second year of university to travel to India and teach English, I packed my bag and life was never the same. Guruji used to say many lifetimes and i believed it is this karma with the wisdoms, traditions in India that makes my connection to yoga inescapable. For me the intersection of yoga and Ayurveda is a functional place. My desire to see and taste all of India at...
