Greetings!
The original Piedmont Yoga Studio was located about two blocks east of our current home on Piedmont Avenue. On the first story of an old two-story house that had long been used commercially, the classroom had about 900 square feet of floor space, a little more than a third the size of our current Studio [...]
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Piedmont Yoga Studio News: March 2012
Piedmont Yoga Studio News: February 2012
Greetings!
Well, as you may know, the residents of Yoga Land have been in high dudgeon over the past week about that William Broad article (adapted from his book, The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards, coming to a bookstore near you in February) published in the New York Times Magazine, “How Yoga Can Wreck [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News: November 2011: Thoughts and Practice of Nada Yoga
The subject of the workshop at PYS was Nada Yoga, the yoga of sound. You may have heard of Nada or even taken a Nada class in your travels through Yoga Land. I can almost guarantee though that what you heard about or experienced wasn’t the traditional version of the practice, but instead was a [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News: October 2011
The email from the Yoga Teacher spoke of desperate, frustration, outrage. It reminded me of a very short, out-of-shape person just ordered to play basketball one-on-one against Michael Jordan in his prime. The time had come, the author stirringly declared, to once and for all do “what’s right” and put a stop to this “unacceptable [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News: September 2011
The email was signed by the chairperson of the Ethics Committee of a powerful international Yoga organization. Recently, Yoga Journal published an instructional article I wrote, and someone at the magazine mistakenly credited me as being a teacher certified by this organization. Now just to be clear: Thirty-one years ago, my very first yoga teacher [...]
News from PYS August 2011: Mudras
I was watching a yoga video this last week when the teacher asked his audience to bring their hands into the “prayer position.” This is of course the familiar palms-pressed-together with the thumbs-against-the-sternum gesture that’s more properly called anjali mudra (pronounced ahn-JAH-lee moo-drah). There’s an interesting story that attends this gesture, but before I tell [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News: July2011 Karma Yoga and the Yoga Sutra
The question came from a student now deeply engrossed in the Yoga Sutra (most editions have the word “Sutras” in the title, but technically Sanskrit doesn’t make a plural with “s,” and anyway “sutra” is both an individual aphorism and a collection of those aphorisms). He was wondering how this manual squared with Karma Yoga, [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News: June 2011
It was a gathering of assorted yoga types, so naturally the conversation opened with all the latest gossip and rumors in Yogaland. Eventually though the focus shifted to more serious matters, and one of the company turned to me as the resident Sanskrit expert-as they say, in the country of the visually impaired, the monocular [...]
May 2011 News from Piedmont Yoga Studio: Misconceptions of Yoga
Last week on the Internet I happened across a comment that cries out for a response. To paraphrase: traditional Hatha Yoga is a “preparation” for the “true” yoga, Raja Yoga (the “royal” or “kingly” yoga), the appellation commonly used for the practice outlined by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. This is one of the three [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News December 2010: A Lesson in Sanskrit
My formal Sanskrit education recently passed the one year mark, so I suppose it’s time to share a bit of What I’ve Learned So Far. First let me say that before starting this weekly class last Fall, I spent 20 frustrating years trying on and (mostly) off to teach myself Sanskrit. I went through maybe [...]
