Whole Life Yoga Blog
Practical Bhakti
Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion. It is associated with practices of singing, dancing, with selfless service, with the dedication of one’s actions to that which one considers the highest, with...
Prāṇa and Prāṇāyāma – An Anecdote and Some Reflections
I heard an interesting story from one of my Sanskṛt teachers, let’s call him the Professor. This teacher is a resident of Mysore, a seat of traditional Sanskṛt learning, and also in recent times a...
Pain and Yoga – Note to Self
Pain is inevitable. Pain is an intrinsic and very necessary part of the human experience. Pain helps protect us. It can be our friend. Yes, pain and suffering can beat us down, if we let them, but...
Picking up Good Vibrations – Sanskrit and Yoga Part One by James Boag
Yoga is a state of balance, of integration. It could be described as that state in which the seeming pairs of opposites that characterise our experience of existence: such as up and down, light and...
What is Practice – Mysore Morning Freewrite 4th March 2018
What is practice? Life is practice. Life, as it is said, is the field of bondage, and the field of liberation.Yoga techniques are preparation for the practice that is life. We get what we need. If...
Bob Marley and the Bhagavad Gītā
Q. So James, could you tell us a bit about this Bob Marley and the Bhagavad Gītā weekend? I’m intrigued and was wondering what it’s all about.A: Sure, when I first started getting into yoga and...
Representing That Which is Beyond Representation
At school, I was taught many things that I have since come to consider as being highly inaccurate, misleading, or mistaken. One of these was the idea that Hinduism is a polytheistic religion,...
Stop! Look! And Listen!
One time when I was in India, the Indian teacher in whose class I was sitting remarked that yoga āsana, the practice of yoga posture and the various movements between them, is ‘kindergarten yoga’. I...
Inquiry: Five Acts
The first imperative verb in the Bhagavad Gītā is pasya meaning look, be alert, be attentive, pay attention. So we might say that the basic practice in yoga is attentiveness. Yoga practice...
Yoga Re-perceived
Contrary to what is sometimes perceived: Yoga is not just a ‘physical’ practice Rather, yoga works with the whole body of human experience, using practical, natural, sustainable resources to help us...
A Few Words About Ganesa Saranam
In the Bhagavad Gītā, one of the most treasured texts of the yoga tradition, yoga is described as ‘samatva’ – ‘evenness’, or the integration of all the powers of our awareness; and as ‘karmasu...
Yoga – The Gathering
The human soul longs for the ‘real’ sensuous experience that we can only have in the gathering of live, shared interaction. In our contemporary culture, we are repeatedly encouraged to live ‘boxed’...