The top seven results of a Google search for the terms “skin” and “yoga” are all about the most superficial aspect of skin – not the health of the skin, but how it appears.

Search results promise yoga for naturally glowing skin, 6 powerful yoga asanas for glowing skin, 5 yoga poses for beautiful skin and more.

In her book Yoga Cures: Simple Routines to Conquer More Than 50 Common Ailments and Live Pain-Free, Tara Stiles offers practices for four specific skin conditions: acne, cellulite, dark eye circles, and wrinkles.

Working under the theory that stress causes acne, Stiles prescribes stressful asanas—plank, chataranga dandasana, side plank, and bow. By simply learning to stay calm through challenging asanas, Stiles asserts, practitioners will limit the negative impacts of stress, thereby reducing acne.

We can appreciate this idea, and recognize that learning to stay calm in stressful situations is a general benefit of practicing many yoga asanas. But the truth is, the development...

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

         —ANAIS NIN

Healing what ails us, whether physical injury or existential angst, is a leitmotif of yoga dating to ancient times. Today, yoga therapy is emerging from the shadows of intensely vigorous, workout-oriented yoga, reaffirming the healthy transformative potential of yoga. This growing trend might be associated with “leading edge baby boomers,” many of whom caught the largely countercultural 60s yoga wave, but now at an average of 70 years-old are a bit more frail. There’s also growing awareness that yoga can help with everything from alcoholism and PTSD to sprained knees and injured wrists.

Curiously, yoga chikitsa – Sanskrit for yoga therapy – can be a confusing concept. It is the term coined by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya to describe...

Excerpted from Chapter 17, " Communication and Interaction in Yoga Therapy," Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)

Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)

Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)

Meditation as taught in most yoga classes invites us to follow the path of Patanjali's method, which starts with Pratyahara, meaning "to relieve your senses of their external distractions." Put differently, it's a practice of isolation, one in which we go inside, separating our awareness from a world that Patanjalian yoga (indeed, most yoga) sees as illusory.

Tantrics take a different path, an expansive approach that affirms the reality of this world and everything in it as expression of divine energy. Rather than isolating the senses and thereby the self from experience in this world, in tantra we open to the fullness and wholeness of it all. It’s about embracing the fullness of our energy, in this realizing that pure joy resides within.

What is the actual practice? One of the many approaches within tantra taps into the 8^th century Vijnana Bhairava, which offers 112 techniques for opening to ecstatic awareness. The different techniques are tailored to different emotional, mental, ...

Steadiness, Ease & Presence of Mind

There are several basic elements that are ideally communicated to our students in every practice and given even greater clarity with newer students.  Among the most important is the idea that yoga is neither a comparative nor a competitive practice, despite some people doing their best to make it so.  

Exploring with this basic sensibility, the practice will be more safe, sustainable, and transformational. It’s a sensibility—a basic yogic value—that reflects the sole comment on asana found in the oft-cited Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: sthira, sukham, asanam—meaning steadiness, ease, and presence of mind (the latter, from the root word as, meaning “to take one seat,” which I interpret to mean to be here now, fully attuned to one’s immediate experience). It’s helpful to relate to these as qualities we’re always cultivating in the practice. Do note that Patanjali is not describing anything even closely approximating the sort of postural practices th...

Part of the sublime nature of yoga is that there are infinite possibilities for deepening and refining one’s practice. In playing the edges of effort and ease, exploring balance between surrender and control, and opening to self-understanding and self-transformation, there is no end to how far one can go along the path of awakening to clearer awareness, more integrated well-being, and greater happiness. There are also seemingly infinite styles and approaches to yoga, even different ideas about what yoga is, offering a rich array of practices that any of the seven billion of us sharing this planet might at any given time find most in keeping with whatever brings us to explore this ancient ritual for living in the most healthy and awakened way. It’s a fascinating, challenging, often mysterious path that ultimately reveals the deepest beauty inherent in each of us as we gradually come to discover the balances that most complement and support our diverse values and intentions in life. If...