Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

The inspiration for today’s recipe came from past cleanse participants who elected to try our new Low Sugar Plan. Who is the Low Sugar Plan for? Simply put it’s for those of us who struggle with our weight, mood swings, hormone issues, anxiety, and/or insomnia. It’s for those of us who have an insatiable sweet tooth!

Do you ever get confused with all the labels attached to yoga practices today? There is hatha yoga, kundalini yoga, power yoga, yin yoga, vinyasa yoga, flow yoga, hot yoga— and the list seems to keep growing. For starters, classic hatha yoga is often referred to as the umbrella under which any practice that includes physical postures resides. 'Ha-' is Sanskrit for sun and '-tha' means moon. Thus, hatha yoga is based on creating balance between our masculine qualities—active, hot, sun—and feminine ones—receptive, cool, moon.

“Yoga and Ayurveda are sister sciences that developed together and repeatedly influenced each other throughout history. Yoga and Ayurveda work together to enhance their great benefits on all levels”.

Have you tried and failed at meditating? You are not alone! We all lead busy lives and the whole idea of meditating, for the peace that it is reputed to bring, sounds great. But when we sit down, the mind noise can be frustrating, distracting and downright irritating. Some friends have reported that they have stopped meditating because increasing their upset rather than reducing it!

Yoga can be the practice of discovering your own inner state of joy, so how will you achieve your yoga high today? Embrace what calls to you! Yoga doesn’t have to be so serious or complicated. It’s truly a simple practice, but as Patanjali states in the Yoga Sutras, it isn’t easy. There isn’t an identical path for any of us. We’re all unique. Individually perfect or perfectly imperfect. What really matters is how you feel during and after your yoga practice.

Every teacher can feel the shift that happens in the midst of teaching when the collective energy in the class begins to synch. It is a palpable sense of connectedness - a heightened quality of flow as movement, breath, and embodied awareness come into flow. As you may know and feel, our heart has a tremendous role in such shifts of consciousness that we feel at the heart of yoga.

Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, which makes this juice cleanse I'm currently on pretty difficult. I mean, what would you rather have on a chilly morning? Fresh vegetable juice or a hot, delicious bowl of oatmeal? It's not a hard choice.

The smoothie bowl is a trend that I’ve been loving. They’re hydrating and cooling, making them perfect for summer breakfast or an afternoon snack. They don’t require sugar or sugar substitutes and you still feel like you’re eating a treat. Jason calls them “ice cream.”

If you’re reading this, you’re a seeker. A warrior of love and quester for experiences and purpose. You’ve been on the journey, maybe for a day, maybe for years. This journey of becoming who you are. And, it occurs to me that, at times (maybe at this time) you might feel lost. Your path may feel far away, and the road ahead may seem very murky and uncertain.

Mindful eating is a powerful tool that can be used to control weight gain, assist weight loss, fight binge eating, and deal with several other eating disorders. There are currently a lot of unhealthy solutions regarding weight loss, ranging from unhealthy fad diets to questionable, chemical supplements. Mindful eating, on the other hand, is a simple attitude that results in being aware of your appetite and thus allows you to control portions and make healthy meal choices. By practicing mindfulness while eating, you engage all of your senses, particularly when choosing foods. This way you are able to choose foods that are nourishing as well as satisfying. You will remain well aware of your level of hunger and be able to choose foods without relying entirely on emotional cues or stimuli, which drive many people to impulse eating. Eventually, you will be able to decide the ideal time to start and stop eating and the ideal foods to eat.

If you’re reading this, you #GoYourOMWay. You are not restricted by class times, work schedules or even walls. You have followed your heart (and our mobile app) to discover new teachers, styles and inspiring places to take your yoga. If you are reading this, you are part of a community that decided to throw away the script, think outside the studio and build the yoga practice that works for you.

September features two eclipses in a row, starting with a solar eclipse during the new moon in Virgo on September 1st. The next event is a lunar eclipse during the full moon in Pisces on September 16th. This makes all of September an incredibly potent month to start, end, renew, reevaluate and deepen all areas of life. The energy of an eclipse lasts six month or more, so use the preliminary energy of Virgo in the month to be cautious and careful of all you cultivate during this cosmic time. The lunar eclipse in Pisces is a good time to immerse yourself in transcendence and oneness, and let go of all that doesn’t serve your spiritual needs.

I have what you could call a peach problem. That is if you consider consuming massive amounts of the cuddliest fruit ever over the months of July and August, then yes I have a problem. I know Georgia is known for their peaches. But my friends, Colorado is the sneaky underdog of peach production. We make a damn good peach. Like shenanigans good. But those Colorado beauties aren’t around all year round. And it sucks. And it’s painful. And at least a dozen times I want to rock a grocery store peach that has traveled miles upon miles to be meticulously piled up in ze Whole Foods. But I don’t. (At least not usually.) Because they are always a disappointment. And because they beg to ask the question: do I really need to eat peaches 12 glorious months out of the year?

Why do I feel this sense of urgency? I feel it all the time. I feel it the morning when I first wake up. I feel it while I am doing my work. I feel it while I am driving, walking and riding my bike. I feel it when I am on my yoga mat. I feel it in meditation. I feel it now as I write these words: write faster, finish writing sooner, move on to the next thing you have to do today. 

My journey in yoga lately has been leading me to throughly analyze the way postures work. In other words, alignment. Lately I’ve been asking myself: what is the balance between strength and flexibility? Does a body party or muscle group need to be strong in order to be flexible?

It’s safe to say I’m green-tea obsessed. It hold promise for many different types of health benefits (including cancer prevention and cardiovascular disease prevention) and there are so many varieties and delicious blends that I never grow tired of it. Since reading David Servan-Schreiber’s book Anti-Cancer, I try to drink it regularly, so I’m often experimenting with different recipes. This one is my current favorite summer iced tea. It requires some prep, but you can make a big batch and drink it over the course of a few days.

There may be no better foreplay than partner yoga. Your girlfriend is in spandex, you're touching each other, and you're both getting bendy. It's hot—and research agrees. The ancient Indian practice has long been shown to ease joint pain, lower blood pressure, and relieve anxiety, but researchers say it's great for the sexual health of both women and men, too.

Summer is winding down and as the season starts to shift, it’s a perfect time to integrate some more calming practices to not only beat the last hot days of summer, but also to remind ourselves how important it is to chill out in our busy, high-tech world. Ayurveda, yoga’s sister science, offers advice on how we can acclimate to the heat and balance it out through both diet and our asana, pranayama and meditation practices. When we align ourselves with nature, we learn to live in balance no matter what’s happening externally or internally. Without launching a dissertation on Ayurvedic principles, we’ll give you the quick basics on how Pitta energy can be exacerbated in the summer and provide some practices that will help you stay calm, cool, and collected no matter how steamy it gets.

Practice our Featured Pose of the month, Warrior II, to fuel your flow. Warrior II / Virabhadrasana II symbolizes strength and victory.

It’s International Green Smoothie Day today (August 15) and we’re celebrating with a new low sugar green smoothie recipe.

One of the most powerful benefits of practicing yoga is that it creates space for you to work through negative emotions and the drama that might be weighing like an anvil on your shoulders. We all have samskaras or karmic tendencies and energy patterns and often we can get stuck in obsessing about the same few thoughts. Over and over again. Usually the thoughts that hold us back—you know those with self-doubt and self-pity? By practicing yoga with an emphasis on flow, vibration, dissolution, you can fire up your tapas and alchemize all that sh*t into positive energy.

One of the biggest hurdles we hear about from Conscious Cleansers (our next cleanse starts Sept. 7.) is that they don’t have time for meal prep! Well, today we have another time-saving recipe for you – A lunch that you can toss together in under 15 minutes! Going to the Whole Foods salad bar takes longer than that!

Are you ready to highlight your humanitarian efforts during this full moon in Aquarius? Good, because the world needs it. This is a time to shed whatever is holding you back from speaking your truth, particularly about how things need to shift. Each of us has our own way in which we can be the change we wish to see in our world. There is no singular effort, no one goal that needs to be accomplished right now; all efforts and all goals are equally important. While each of us has our soap box, so to speak, it is now that we need to stand upon it and clear the way for positive change. 

When I was little, my sister and I came up with this game that we would play whenever we would go to the ocean (once a year). We would be so excited to get our feet in the sand and our toes wet that we couldn’t wait to put on a bathing suit. Fresh from a 12-hour car ride, we’d run down to the beach, still in our clothes, roll up our shorts even shorter and feel the waves crashing on our feet. Then, we would challenge each other by declaring in delight “Step farther!” and each of us would have to take a giant step forward into the ocean. Whoever chickened out first because they were afraid to get waved on lost. We would giggle and scream and then start all over again to see how far we could get into the ocean without getting scared.

We don’t know about you, but we find watching the Olympics to be an incredibly inspiring experience. Seeing the athletes who have dedicated their lives, sacrificed so much for the opportunity to compete at the highest level on the globe have the opportunity to shine is powerful. Are the Olympics just about being the best? Winning the gold at all costs? Is it about the outcome? Or, is it more than that? Is it truly about the journey?