What Does it Mean to Be Stoic?

What Does it Mean to Be Stoic?

Yoga image with caption alluding to how dark losing control of the mind can be.

Even though I tend to be a glass half full kind of person, I really detest the sentiment of pretence when it comes to positive thinking.
Particularly when it’s dressed up as spirituality.

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Asteya: Yoga in Daily Life

Yogis in Savasana in a yoga studio to depict the peaceful end to a Yoga class.

We all know that it is wrong to steal “stuff” – to take things that do not belong to us, to commit fraud or to plagiarise etc but there are other forms of stealing that are more relevant to the average person when it comes to observing the yamas and niyamas. When the class is relaxed, peaceful and quiet, it can be frustrating when someone’s phone rings or buzzes. It can affect the equanimity of the whole room if one person begins to shuffle around, sighing with boredom while everyone else is lying still in relaxation. Then there are those folk who seem to explode into a yoga room, often late and usually loudly, “stealing” others’ rights to some (often) rare quiet time.

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What Do You Prefer In a Group Class?

Over the past 20 or so years of actually teaching and continuing to learn, what I teach now, has been pared back considerably, but, yet, I know it’s actually way more useful for the most amount of people. Many of us are managing injuries and conditions and so what we do is also practical and therapeutic and still challenging enough for the majority.

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Yoga in the Time of Corona…(Covid 19)

Relinquish Control. Accept. Take Each Day as it Comes. Yogis, let’s not stick our heads in the sand. It is time to be sensible and, praise be, nip this thing in the bud. I hope you are on board and understand what a difference it will make to the health of our whole community /…

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Why do Human Bodies Need To Move?

Why do humans need to exercise? It’s a shame if the first thing to pop into your mind was “to burn calories” as it sort of misses the point. Most of us in the modern, Western World eat far too much and just don’t move enough, so if we just stopped eating so much, we’d…

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Why Yoga Teachers Should Adopt a “Best Practise” Model.

At the end of the 90s, I worked at Dorling Kindersley publishing and we were working on edits for the Australian market of the big, hard cover book by BKS Iyengar. I was asked for some input and added my yoga school at the back. The Australian Iyengees were very cross once the book came out because that school wasn’t specifically “Iyengar, so for future editions, it was changed. But was Iyengar that rigid? it’s probably fair to say that he just described his yoga as “yoga”.

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To Squeeze and Tense, or Not to Squeeze and Tense?

That is the question…🤔! I am talking about muscles of course, and this is my perspective, based on my own yoga practise, years of exercise, study and experience. I grew up in this modern world – a world where women (especially, but now it’s men too), have been informed they need to have a flat,…

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