Whole Life Yoga Blog
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’...
Yama-niyama: Beyond Rules to Robust Harmonisation
One way that yoga could be described is as coming into sustainable, integrated balance, through all parts of ourselves and in relation to the world around us. A striking feature of ‘conventional,...
General Election – May 2015
In May 2015, in the UK where I am a citizen, there was a ‘general election’, when the populace may vote for the national government. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the subject of the pending...
The Battle of Yoga: The Gita: Pandava-s and Kaurava-s
If yoga’s all about peace, why is the Bhagavad Gītā set on a battlefield? And come to think of it, why are we doing all these ‘warrior’ poses? Questions like this are not unusual when we first...
The Gita: the Song of Now and the Glorious Opportunity of Our Human Life
A long time ago, in a situation that challenged him like he’d never quite been challenged before, a human being felt torn. He didn’t know what to do. The techniques, ways and patterns that he had...
Kirtan – Yoga of Song
In a traditional kīrtan, a bard-like leader ‘tells’ of the kīrti - the glory – of the Lord; or, we might say, of the divine qualities that are our potential. This may include compelling renderings...
The Orchestra: Practice, Harmony and Symphony
A youth orchestra is giving a performance. The members are ten years old and have been playing their instruments just a year. So who comes to the concert? For the most part it’s parents,...
And So This is Christmas 2014
Christmas, mid-winter festival, just after Solstice: celebration of things to come; celebration of the coming light; celebration of how the greatest things grow in and from the dark. Three wise men...
Dark Awakening
The darkest time of night is before dawn. When we are waking up. When we are waking up, it may well feel like we are getting lost more deeply in the dark, in greater uncertainty and confusion, in a...
Necessary Heartbreak
Chances are, most of us would not say that we want our hearts to be broken. Chances are that most of us would say we would like to feel happy in our hearts. If we ‘would like to feel’ happy, it...
The ‘Gift’ of Conflict
When I first came across the Bhagavad Gītā, I was puzzled. I had heard that it was one of the greatest spiritual texts out there, and I’d come to understand that yoga was all about coming back to...