Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

“Do your Practice and All is Coming”- Sri K Pattabhi Jois. If you love Vinyasa yoga and have wondered how it evolved, spend some time with us this week on an Ashtanga immersion and learn the foundation from which Vinyasa in the West is derived. Tap into the ancient wisdom and traditional practice of Ashtanga yoga, brought to the West by K. Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the Father of Ashtanga yoga. Ashtanga is a sweaty, vigorous yoga system based on the eight-limbed yoga path outlined in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Jois developed the Ashtanga yoga system when he was a student of T. Krishnamacharya at the College of Maharaja in Mysore, India in the early twentieth century. Traditionally, Ashtanga is taught in the Mysore style, which means students practice in the same room, at their own pace, with individual guidance from the instructor. Kind of like you, practicing yoga at home with YogaDownload.com.

Have you ever gone against your own intuition? How did that work out for you? Have you ever felt so numb to your internal signals that you didn’t even sense what your intuition is communicating to you? Or have you ever consciously overthrown your own intuition and gut instincts for your desire to be loved and accepted? Maybe you overrode your intuition hoping to prove that you were a perfect match for a partner, a job, a community, rather than sensing and questioning if the relationship, job, or community was a good match for you. Please remember there is nothing to prove in love and acceptance, and that true love and acceptance must begin within. We must start with ourselves and trust our intution, which starts on the inside. Yoga reminds us that the actual external experience is a reflection of our inner resonance. Yoga states that we will continue to attract experiences to bring awareness to any unconscious patterns that keep us from true connection, trust and joy.

One of the reasons why the Yoga Sutras are somewhat hard to understand for a first-time reader is because of the presentation and organization of the sutras themselves. Rather than presenting a chronological order of yoga with clear instructions, the very first chapter sets out to explain the unexplainable – the end goal of yoga, or samadhi. In fact, it takes an entire chapter and 51 sutras to really define and deconstruct what yoga is. Keep in mind, asana isn’t mentioned once!