Greetings and a Happy Full Moonish to you,

First some inspiring news from Edible Gardens: Public Garden Feeds 200,000 People Each Month  This kind of news can open our minds to healthy and fun community expansions.

Perhaps you saw the article in the New York Times Magazine called How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.  I’ve been sent the article by friends and family far and wide. The article is chocked full of scary stories of serious injuries attributed to yoga. I thought one salient point was this

‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’

Anytime we move away from our true bodily sensations and breath and move toward performance or competitiveness, we are putting ourselves in a precarious position.

But even more unsettling to me was the article’s implicit definition of yoga as poses, as if that is all yoga is! Why that is like thinking…that a canned pea is the same as a freshly harvest pea from a pod. I mean, seriously, what would we be missing if our only experience of vegetables was from cans? This may seem a silly metaphor but I am always trying to shed light on the true bounty, the riches, the absolute sensuous delight of all of yoga. This emphasis on rigid rules for yoga poses with absolutes (in the article luminous yogis are quoted giving strict alignment rules) just seems to me to forget a rule taught me by my primary teacher, Betheyla,

No pose is more important than the person.

Finally what about the ulitmate purpose of yoga, happiness, peace of mind, equanimity. I’ll sign off with a sweet quote from Ramana Maharishi:

Thank you for bringing your hands to YogaNow. I’ll be subbing for Mike at 5:45 on Tuesday (that’s today!) and will be teaching every Wednesday at 5:45 pm. I hope you can join me and each other at YogaNow.

with love and affection,
namaste,
Meta.

PS The title of this blog, is from the yoga text, The Yoga Sutras, by Patanjali. Among other brilliance he lays out an eight path model for yoga, of which poses is one, that’s one of eight.