Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

Flexibility, balance, strength, and equanimity—you’ve probably heard of all those reasons to practice yoga, right? Not just benefits for the body, but for the mind and soul as well. How about combating stress and delving into spirituality? Absolutely! The list goes on…

How’s your state of mind? We here at YogaDownload.com know how hectic life becomes this time of year. We’re right in the stretch between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve when many of us could use a shot of adrenaline or a warm blanket and a teddy bear to make it through to 2017. At the very least, we could use a rejuvenating yoga class or a calming meditation practice.

Happy Thanksgiving friends! We’re here to help you kick off the day mindfully. Before the company gets here, take 10 minutes for yourself to get grounded in a moment of thankfulness – that’s what today is all about, right? Root down by sitting or standing in a place that feels comfortable, and spend a few moments gathering all your favorite people and places and foods and pleasures in your heart. Sometimes it’s easiest to start a meditation with “I am grateful for…”

When we are in harmonious times, it’s easy to express our beliefs and our truth. Many of us yogis surround ourselves with like-minded people seeking to live life on a higher vibration. We choose to focus on the positive and live from a place of compassion and love. Practicing these principles on the yoga mat strengthens our resolve to practice them off the mat. But how do we stand in our truth when it is challenged from all sides? How do we remain peaceful and positive when there’s no choice but to fight to preserve our dignity, our values, and our beliefs? The concept of being a warrior and fighting doesn’t have to mean that we are denying our spirituality.

Reverse Warrior is a powerful standing pose that stretches your hips and groins, while lengthening your spinal and intercostal muscles. The posture also helps blood circulation, reduce stress, mitigate back pain and can be a mood-booster.

Nobody’s life is a static, well-paced journey, despite how many plans we make, how many goals we set, and how well intentioned we are. No, life is messy and serves up surprises every day. The world's a roller coaster and we aren't strapped in. Maybe we should hold with care, but our hands are busy in the air. This line from alternative rock band Incubus’ iconic song 'Wish You Were Here' sums up how many of us feel on a day-to-day basis. Flying along by the seat of our pants— navigating the challenges we encounter along the way.

This week we’ve got some great new classes designed to help you unleash your inner Shakti energy. Activate your connection to Shakti by mixing up your usual routine— change is good!

This soothing toddy will warm your bones as we transition from long summer days to the fall and winter months. The ginger lends a spicy kick, turmeric brings in an earthy quality along with an array of health benefits, the honey soothes the throat, and lemon balances it all out. You can make the turmeric honey paste ahead of time and keep it on your counter so that you can whip up this delicious toddy in just a couple of minutes.

Natarajasana, or Dancer's Pose, is a glorious heart-opening posture that challenges balance while lengthening the chest and spinal muscles. Also referred to as Lord of the Dance pose, Natarajasana stimulates the Heart Chakra (Anahata) and the Third Eye Chakra (Ajna), to help the practitioner feel more grateful, forgiving, focused, intuitive, and free. 

The spirits are stirring this time of year, which means that some of you might be conjuring your own personal demons (again). We all have a few ghosts from the past and skeletons in our closet that like to haunt our memories – and we’re going to help you shake them out and clear your spiritual cobwebs.

Do you ever feel like yoga should be more accessible? It has become harder with our fast-paced lives to get our practice in. Especially in a highly digital world, we have become more and more distracted. Instead of staying centered and trusting our internal compass, we’re pulled in a million directions. What’s the solution?

We’ve got something new for you this month. In the interest of exposing you to a broad range of yoga, we’re excited to roll out new Kundalini classes and practices with Guru Jagat from the Rama Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology. If you aren’t familiar with Kundalini, you aren’t alone. More mysticism surrounds this style of yoga than most others. Do you have to wear white? No. Is it a religion? No. And, what’s this about coiled serpents? How can this ancient practice apply to me in this modern age where I’m just seeking to find a mind-body connection?

Among the core tenets of yoga philosophy, drishti—a Sanskrit term referring to immersive mental concentration—can expand, deepen and recalibrate that intrinsic mind–body connection during your practice. In order to experience these benefits for your well being, however, you must become attuned to every nuance of movement on your mat, from the postures and energy flow to breath work. The best part: you can practice to reach this desired degree of focus off the mat, just as effectively, through other pursuits that sharpen both cognitive function and physical dexterity. The following autumn inspired activities can help yogis everywhere, from the disciplined veteran to the untrained novice, improve their drishti throughout this beautiful and transformational time of year.

Are you living your life to the fullest? Have you done the work to uncover your beautiful shining light? Living your most authentic life? And, if so, are you sharing it with the world? Consider this: you already possess the power and strength to do whatever it is you want to do. Each one of us is born with a special gift, a potential that when realized allows us to shine beyond our wildest dreams. Yoga offers the tools to help harness your prana and unleash your unique energy to live a life without limits.

As one of the most beautiful flowers in the world, the lotus stands for enlightenment and self-awareness. It has its roots in the mud, at the bottom of streams and ponds, but rises to blossom above the water without becoming wet or tainted by the mire below. It symbolically represents being fully grounded in our truths, yet aspiring past suffering and negativity towards our truest forms.

Meditation teaches us how distracted we really are. We just don’t usually notice because we are so distracted. Most of us generally have the same series of redundant thoughts circling around in our mind, over and over and over again. In our society, we are so focused on getting somewhere, getting what we want, the “if only” syndrome so to speak. If only we can just get this job, this house, this person, fill in the blank, then we’ll be happy. When we are operating from this mindset, we aren’t focused on the here and now.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

With the world’s drishti turned to Rio this week, we’ve been asking ourselves, what if yoga were a global competitive sporting event? Yogis would be judged in categories like compassion, presence and breath - they would be judged on their non-judgment. Yoga will likely never join the 28 sports that earn gold medals (and if they did what version of yoga would that be?), but with over 36 million Americans practicing everyday, we still feel a patriot-like sense of pride and community. Many global athletes embrace a yoga practice to enhance their athletic performance. In addition to physical conditioning and strength training, yoga helps build mental agility – in short, it connects brain and brawn for a higher purpose.

You began your workday with the best of intentions. Quite virtuous intentions, actually. But, your job is hectic and deadlines loom. Despite planning on attending a yoga class at the studio down the street or even in your office wellness center, you find yourself trapped at your desk working overtime. Again. If this happens to you on a regular basis, don’t despair. You can squeeze in time for yoga at the office, even if it’s at your desk with no sticky mat or stretchy pants in sight.