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 [...]
Tag Archive for ‘Sanskrit’ 
Piedmont Yoga Studio News May 2010: The Meaning of Guru
Like many Sanskrit words in the Yoga lexicon, the word guru has both a literal and symbolic meaning. Literally it means “heavy, weighty; heavy in the stomach (as food), difficult to digest; excessive, difficult, hard; important, serious, momentous; valuable, highly prized; venerable, respectable.” The guru is the venerable “weighty one,” heavy with wisdom, that’s both [...]
Sanskrit: “Perfected”
Whenever you practice or read about Yoga, you’ll inevitably run across Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the classical language of India, much like Latin is the classical language of medieval Europe. Nowadays Sanskrit is pretty much a dead language, and though it’s still one of a dozen or so official languages of India, even in its heyday Sanskrit was spoken [...]
