Breaking news: my fridge is clean and has been since early January. This may not sound like much but bear with me. All my adult life I have kept a messy fridge. I didn’t mean to, of course. No one does. But I was busy. There was always something better to do than clean the …
The annual Christmas letter from my longest – not, she will quite rightly insist, my oldest – friend, included a sentence I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Of herself and her husband she wrote: “we’re keeping as well as can be expected for people in their mid-70s.” I know the background, which …
It’s a new year. The clean, precise energy of January has replaced December’s animal urge to fight the darkness by drinking sparkling things and eating After Eight mints. Now we’re in the season of setting goals. For years, my yoga goals went like this: I will practice every day. I will do headstand in the …
Most of us know what slumped is, and what it feels like in our body. I hear the word most often from new students when they first sit in balance – and no one sounds happy about it. I wasn’t either. My front chest, which I was used to lifting, felt disturbingly low. “Stacked” is …
Read more Are you slumped or stacked? How to tell the difference.
With every year that passes, World War I becomes increasingly remote. As a child growing up in the 1950s, World War II was my yesterday, and World War I was close enough that I knew songs like “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” and “I’ve got Sixpence” from hearing veterans of that war belting them …
Okay, I’ll admit the part about the cookies is frivolous. You can also tone your abs while making wholesome soups, or chopping vegetables for stir fries, or washing salad greens. What you can’t do is tone your abs while standing in modern posture, with your pelvis forward of the line of gravity, or, for example, …
In every Original Alignment class, you’ll hear physical cues: relaxed pelvis with weight in the front, ribs down, chin released, weight in the heels, abdominals engaged but not tense. But there’s another layer of teaching, the pithy sayings, maxims, and guiding principles of the work. Each one, in fact, is a little piece of …
I’ve loved this picture from the moment I saw it. What strikes me most is the energy, relaxation and strength of the young mother, who carries her babies on her head as though it were the easiest thing in the world. It’s this ease that draws me into my practice, and the increase of ease …
This piece ran June 27, 2018, in the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog. The blog moved to a new platform in 2021, and in the process, several links were broken, including the link to this piece. I’ve taken the liberty of reconstructing it here, even though it’s now a historical document. I couldn’t help but …
For more years than I’d like to confess to, I greeted every January 2 like a sprinter in the starting blocks. I was armed with resolutions, high on solstice euphoria, and fueled, at least in part, by having eaten far too much chocolate in the preceding two weeks. The impending austerity looked good. We …
If there’s one thing that everyone from bestselling authors to renowned philosophers agree on, it’s the power of habits – itself the title of a bestselling book. From Aristotle (“we are what we repeatedly do”) to Henry James, (“Sow an action, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow …