Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

News alert: If a yoga instructor reprimands you because you don’t look a certain way in an asana or physical pose, that teacher may be in the wrong profession. A good teacher will emphasize that how you feel in a pose is what’s important, not what shape you are creating on the mat. If you are finding sensation and breathing fully, then you are in the right place. Despite the barrage of Instagram filtered images crafted by tall thin yogis in advanced yoga poses, you do NOT need to be a skinny pretzel to be a “real yogi.” We’re here to tell you there is no such thing as a yoga body. With the explosion of yoga’s popularity in the Western world over the last few decades, a huge focus on appearance has overshadowed what yoga is truly about. Yoga is for every body and there’s a style and type of practice that works for each individual. It’s adaptable. Accessible. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t. No matter who you are, whether you are thin or heavy, tall or short, in a wheelchair or an Olympic athlete, yoga is for you.

Whether you love a power Vinyasa flow class with minimal cues or an Iyengar class with seventy-five minutes of specific directions for one posture, you can benefit from digging deeper into alignment principles to enhance your yoga practice. Yoga Sutra 2:46, Sthira Sukham Asanam, states the posture should be steady and comfortable. Learning about intelligent yoga alignment will aid you in reaching this state each time you step on the mat. When you gain more knowledge about healthy alignment in yoga and philosophy behind a pose, you can benefit more fully––physically, mentally, and emotionally. We’re excited to share a special collection of nine short alignment tutorials, each specific to a certain yoga asana (posture.) These ten-minute classes will help you find the best version of each asana for you. The classes in this package cover common yoga poses and touch on all families of postures including forward bends, balancing poses, arm balances, twists, and backbends. We aren’t saying each posture needs to look a certain way or that every person will practice the asana in the same manner. Instead, we suggest if you increase your awareness of how each posture feels when you adapt alignment cues to feel right in YOUR body, you can deepen your experience.