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Posted on December 26th, 2012 by in Wake-Up Call

How Yoga Helped Me Learn to Love My Body Again

by Carly Sachs, guest blogger

I remember shyly asking my classmates to take off their shoes, the school linoleum cold on our feet as we teetered and crashed into our desks and each other. The assignment for Ms. Rotar’s seventh-grade English class was to give a  how-to speech. I had decided I wanted to teach my class to do yoga, despite the fact that I had never actually done yoga. So armed with my books from the public library, I taught my fellow students how to do Tree pose, Vrksasana.

Why I was so determined to do yoga still confounds me. I’d heard about yoga for the first time in the course catalog of my local Jewish Community Center under the classes for seniors, and soon after my seventh-grade speech, I asked my mom to sign me up.

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Posted on December 6th, 2012 by in Conscious Living

Creating Rituals

We used to say that to be happy, one must find success. These days, to be successful, we are realizing, we must choose to be happy.  With scientific studies shedding light on the fact that attitude can literally change our lives, the field of Positive Psychology has been growing. In this series, Positive Psychology professor and Kripalu faculty member Tal Ben Shahar, PhD, explores the notion of what it means to be truly happy, and what tools we can use to practice the art of happiness.

Tal Ben-Shahar, guest blogger

We all know that change is hard. Much research suggests that learning new tricks, adopting new behaviors, or breaking old habits may be harder than we even realize and that most attempts at change, whether by individuals or organizations, fail. It turns out that self-discipline is usually insufficient when it comes to fulfilling our commitments, even those we know are good for us—which is why most New Year’s resolutions fail.

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Posted on December 5th, 2012 by in Yoga

40 Years of Kripalu in the West: Coming Home

In this monthly series running through 2012, community members recall milestone moments to commemorate and reflect on Kripalu Yoga.

In 1972, a small residential yoga retreat called Kripalu Center was founded in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, by Amrit Desai and several of his students from the Philadelphia area. Desai had emigrated to the United States from India, where he was a close disciple of the yoga master Swami Kripalu. Over the next 40 years, Desai’s students integrated Swami Kripalu’s core teachings with psychology, science, and Western approaches to healing and self-development, creating groundbreaking programs and approaches to well-being. Today, Kripalu’s curriculum, professional training, and yoga research continue to be informed by the lineage of Kripalu Yoga. To commemorate the 40-year milestone, we asked several teachers and community members to reflect on what Kripalu Yoga means to them.

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Posted on December 1st, 2012 by in Yoga

Mudra Yoga

The practice of Mudra Yoga opens your highest potential to feel and heal, inviting your deepest self to surface. An empowering and meditative practice, it is a doorway to exploring the potential of posture and meditation in a whole new light. You will come into a state of clarity as you experience your innate wholeness, while gaining tools to transform and deepen both your own and your students’ yoga practice.

History of Mudras

Mudras are gestures or postures for the hands, face, or other key areas of the body. In Sanskrit, mudra means gesture or seal, referring to locking or sealing in a specific feeling, state, or energy for a particular effect. For example, Anjali Mudra, commonly known as “prayer pose,” awakens and locks in feelings of reverence, peace, and connection to our own and all others’ hearts.

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Posted on November 25th, 2012 by in Moment of Quiet

Moment of Quiet

“Just for a few moments, simply sit, breathe comfortably (close your eyes if you’d like), and allow yourself to be at ease. Stop reading, stop all activity, and notice what happens.”—Stephen Cope

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Posted on November 22nd, 2012 by in Conscious Living

Vitamin G for Gratitude

You may have heard: Grateful is the new happy. Gratitude has broken past its usual Thanksgiving dinner table border, and is now popular all year long. Self-help books implore us to count our blessings, Facebook quote-picture memes remind us to appreciate what we have, and magazine articles stress the importance of giving thanks. But why?

Having written some of those articles myself, I can tell you that studies have found an “attitude of gratitude” can help with everything from healing from heart surgery to reducing pain. One chiropractic clinic assigned its patients a daily gratitude list; those who did it regularly saw a decrease in pain and an uptick in overall wellbeing.

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Posted on November 19th, 2012 by in Yoga

Coming Home to How It Is

In this piece, Stephen Cope, Director of Kripalu’s Institute for Extraordinary Living, investigates how and why practices like yoga and meditation create a sense of well-being and ease.

Recently, I was talking on the phone with my friend Sandy, who had just gone through an unexpected relationship meltdown. Her partner, Tim, she said, had suddenly developed “intimacy issues” and had fled the relationship “like a rat off a sinking ship.”

For an hour or so, we talked about the difficulties of her situation. She expressed her sense of disorientation and sadness. Toward the end, she said something interesting: “Thank God I have my yoga practice.” I could feel the gratitude in her voice. “It’s a little island of sanity. Like coming home. That hour between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. has become the most important hour of my day.”

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Posted on November 15th, 2012 by in Conscious Living

Walking the Labyrinth

Carly Sachs, guest blogger

Outside it is a perfect fall day—lots of colored leaves, blue sky with low-hanging clouds. It’s a day that feels like when I walk outside I’m stepping into a canvas, the day so gorgeous, it seems almost painted, too good to be true. Inside, I don’t feel so picture-perfect. And it’s hard being a yoga intern at a yoga retreat center and feeling bad. Even though I am using my tools—being compassionate to myself (sort of), breathing, meditating, and sharing—it still feels like something is wrong with me.

While I’m outside everything in the world looks perfect, and everything in my life looks perfect: a great romantic relationship, meaningful work, and loving family and friends. But something feels terribly raw and empty inside. The sense is that I’m not doing something I feel I should be doing, but I don’t know what’s missing. Or rather, somewhere I know there is a knowing in me, I just haven’t been able to unlock or translate the message. In this moment, it is a feeling.

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Posted on November 3rd, 2012 by in Words from the Wise

Can I Live A Fulfilled Life?

Where we look for answers to this question can make all the difference between fantasies and dreams come true.

I’ve been teaching at Kripalu for more than 15 years now—and throughout most of that time, I’ve been Kripalu’s Senior Scholar-in-Residence. Each year, I teach hundreds of people in hatha yoga programs, in yoga philosophy programs, and in personal growth programs. Sometimes I feel like I’ve inadvertently landed on one of the great pilgrimage routes of modern times, seeing—as we do here at Kripalu—a river of more than 32,000 contemporary seekers a year: modern versions, sometimes, of the ribald seekers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the more innocent characters of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Each of these contemporary pilgrims brings along his or her own story, of course, and each story is compelling. But over the years I’ve come to see that these stories, unique as they are on the surface, often have one central longing at their core, one insistent question: How can I live fully?

Our seekers phrase this question in so many different ways: How can I live a passionate and authentic human life? How can I discover the full potential of this human mind, body, spirit?

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Posted on October 31st, 2012 by in Healthy Living, Yoga

Self-Discipline Isn’t Unlimited

Ever wonder why it’s easy to call forth self-discipline one moment, but difficult in another?  Several years ago, researcher Dr. Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, pondered the same question. To understand why self-discipline can be elusive, Dr. Baumeister and his team ran an experiment: they wanted to know whether or not self-discipline was like a muscle—something that could be weakened with overuse. To test this question, they brought a group of hungry subjects into their lab and had each subject enter into a room with a bowl of cookies and a bowl of radishes on a table.  They told half of the group not to eat the cookies, but instead to eat the radishes. The other group could eat whatever they wanted. (They all ate the cookies.) Then, immediately following this experience, the subjects were brought into another room, where they were asked to complete a complex math problem. In actuality, the math problem was insolvable—the researchers were actually measuring how long the subjects persevered in trying to complete it.

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