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Yoga Philosophy

Shantimayi

Yoga Philosophy

Within Hindu philosophy, the word yoga is used to refer to one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy. Yoga in this sense is based on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and is also known as Rāja Yoga to distinguish it from later schools. Patanjali's system is discussed and elaborated upon in many classical Hindu texts, and has also been influential in Buddhism and Jainism. The Bhagavad Gita introduces distinctions such as Jnana Yoga ("yoga based on knowledge") vs. Karma Yoga ("yoga based on action").Other systems of philosophy introduced in Hinduism during the medieval period are bhakti yoga, and hatha yoga.

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Journal Post

Interestingly, if you execute a search for the word gratitude, the top results are links to research by academic institutions like Harvard Medical School. Research has been conducted on the beneficial effects of gratitude on our health and wellbeing. Research has shown that by expressing gratitude, you decrease the focus on negative emotions and report improved mental health. Gratitude has also shown long lasting positive effects on brain scans.
Finally, in February, we welcome the return of the light with Candlemas on Feb 1 - the midway point between the Winter Solstice & the Spring Equinox. You may have noticed an increase in energy as the days become lighter and lighter. Hopefully, you have spent some time in reflection and are starting to feel the call to begin to plant seeds to grow your vision for the New Year. And it's ok to move slowly, like the Groundhog, and return to your Winter's nest for a few more weeks.
200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training in Rishikesh, India
The spiritual link, versatility in yoga, experienced and professional yoga gurus and schools have made Rishikesh the haven for yoga and wellness enthusiasts. The following article will highlight the same. Rishikesh isn’t just a tourist place. Over the last few decades, the city has established itself as a hub for those seeking spirituality and wellness. It is now home to various yoga schools where reputed yoga gurus bestow their knowledge to yoga aspirants from different corners of the globe. Since yoga originated in India and Rishikesh has carried forward the legacy, it is also known as the ‘yoga capital of the world’.
To be an evolved practitioner and an eminent yoga teacher, you need to undergo yoga training, and all the better if it is Nepal. Explore the article and know why to do yoga teacher training in Nepal and the opportunity the country bestows. Traverse to the land that witnesses the mystical merger of nature, spirituality, and yoga, and submerge deep into this magical world created by the country of Nepal. Renowned as the meditation capital, Nepal is an ancient yogic land of yoga that bestows you a wonderful opportunity to discover ‘self’ and form a connection with your spiritual being.
10 Days Iyengar Yoga Workshop In Rishikesh India
Yoga Teacher Training School in Rishikesh, India
200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training in Rishikesh, India
Internationally Certified 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training Course in Rishikesh, India 200 Hour Hatha & Ashtanga Yoga Teacher Training Course in Rishikesh, India - Yoga Course Certified with Yoga Alliance USA, Yoga School in Rishikesh.
100 hour Yoga Teacher Training Course in Rishikesh, India 100 Hour Hatha & Ashtanga Yoga Teacher Training Course in Rishikesh, India - Yoga Course Certified with Yoga Alliance USA, Yoga School in Rishikesh. The 100 Hour Yoga Teacher Training Course (Pre-TTC) is first section of 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training at Aatm Yogashala that conducts every month throughout the year, This short term course is designed for all walks of life people. For those who wants to learn yoga to become certified yoga teacher.
  Good health and happiness are our birthright. Don’t trade it away.   According to Yoga sages, the three main causes of disease are stress, toxins, and bad eating habits.

Here are some good eating habits advised by the sages:
Let's be sensible about eating and fasting.
I'm just back from my third annual Yoga workshop in Hailey, Idaho. When I asked the folks up in Hailey what they wanted to work on this year they set me an interesting task: a weekend workshop based on poses named after Hindu gods. After digging through Iyengar's Light on Yoga (200 asanas), Yogeshvara Paramahamsa's First Steps to Higher Yoga (300 asanas), and the Lonavla Institute's Encyclopedia of Traditional Asanas (900 asanas), I decided to open things up and include in the workshop poses named after Hindu sages and one famous monster. And so we had a Virabhadra Class (the hideous demon created by Shiva to punish his father-in-law), a Sages Class, an Avatars of Vishnu Class, and a Shiva Nataraja Class.
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 three or four "teach-yourself-Sanskrit" primers, which for the most part were about as readable as Finnegans Wake. So if you have an irresistible urge to humble yourself with Sanskrit, take my advice and find a good tutor.
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 only by a relatively small circle of academics and priests.
Is each individual on Earth responsible for their own life experience? Or are other people to blame when they are angry, tired, tedious, envious, rude, selfish and just down right mean? How do you make space for other people's roll through the rollercoaster ride of life when it bumps right up against your happy day at the park?
Do you ever find yourself holding on so tightly to a desired outcome that you are a filled with anxiety, tension or blind ambition? Have you ever wanted to do a yoga posture so badly so that you are literally obsessing about it and can talk of almost nothing else? This is perhaps the definition of unhealthy attachment at its core. Yet at the same time the driven mind directed at a task at hand is one of the most powerful tools we have to change our lives. So the question then becomes not how to rid ourselves of our desires or our drive but instead how to train our mind to work towards our desires without the unnecessary tension of attachment.
There is a point in every marathon where no runner quits and there is another point where the majority drop out. The quitting point is painstakingly close to the finish line and, when measured in terms of percentage points, sits at approximately the last five percent of the race. The drop outs' hurdle is the last stretch of the race where the end remains hidden from view. It is here where athletes have been working for a long time that all the major mental and physical obstacles set in. Doubt, anxiety, disbelief, exhaustion, dehydration, hunger, the feeling of no end in sight and physiological stress compromise rational thought and convince many to throw in the towel.
Most people know yoga as a physical exercise system that increases flexibility and teaches them how to relax. However, yoga is a comprehensive discipline that encompasses principles for living in the world and practices to deepen spiritual life, in addition to achieving physical well-being. Yoga is a nourishing practice on all levels!
The first attempt at an English translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra ("Threads of Yoga") was made by James Robert Ballantyne (1813-1864), a Scottish Orientalist and linguist. From 1846 to 1861 he was the principal of the prestigious Sanskrit College in Benares, established in 1791 by the British East India Company. Ballantyne, an adherent of a movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment (which also claimed as members poet Robert Burns, novelist Walter Scott, philosopher David Hume, and inventor James Watt), was also a prolific translator and writer.
I don't typically write reviews for these letters-in fact I've never written one here before-but I have a new book hot off the press that needs and deserves all the hype it can get. Last Fall I was fortunate enough to be invited to a yoga conference at Cavallo Point, just on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge, a beautiful spot (with a great restaurant) if you're ever looking for a retreat location. The gathering was billed as "An Opportunity to Consider an Authentic Voice for Yoga Today" three days of talks on topics like the relationship between yoga and buddhism, yoga and art, and yoga and tantra ... well, what did you expect yoga people to talk about when they get together?
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 highly prized but at times difficult to digest, often because teaching seems to contradict everything we hold true, or because we're told things about ourselves we don't especially want to hear.
It is said that the Buddha's definition of truth is "what works." His pithy statement points toward one of the essential teachings about truth also contained within the path of yoga: impermanence. Knowledge and information come into our consciousness at an appropriate time, enhance our being and when we've integrated the lesson, it passes. The intelligence to accept the impermanence of all experience is the seat of true knowingness.
Awakening and enlightenment are two of the most objectified and misunderstood signposts along the spiritual path. Often construed as something outside yourself, many true and genuine seekers mistake the process of gaining spiritual insight as a process of looking for the missing element in their own being. Yet awakening cannot occur to anything outside the realm of what already exists in your own being. Or else, by definition, it would not be awakening.
You create your reality by the thoughts that you think. Your attention is itself responsible for your life experience. No matter how awful the traffic jam is, how loud your neighbors are, how inconsiderate people may seem, how delayed the airplane is, you are the one who is in control of your reality.
Join Manorama, Director of the School of Sanskrit Studies in New York City, for a very special ten-hour workshop on the Yoga Sutra.
Students will delve into the unique relationship that exists between breath and sound, and between energy and consciousness. Combining academic knowledge and practical experience, this course offers a new lens through which to view the vast and enlightening subject of the Yoga Sutra.
I've been intending for a couple of months to pick up our story line with Sri Yogendra, one of the unsung heroes of modern yoga. Born Mani Desai in 1897, he became in his late teens a disciple of Paramahamsa Madhavadasa, who at the time was reputed to be 118 years old. Paramahamsa, which means "great swan" (or "goose") is an honorific title given to highly enlightened beings (why is an enlightened person compared to a swan? That's a long story for another time). Mani's father threw a fit when he found out his son-a bright kid destined for great things in the world-had dropped out of college to become a yogi, which in those days meant a life of renunciation and celibacy.
At the end of February we left off with one foot in the door of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the oldest surviving Hatha Yoga manuals. Hatha Yoga emerged sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries CE, strongly influenced by both Hindu Tantra and Indian alchemy. The Pradipika was written four or five hundred years later, though remnants of these ancient disciplines are still evident in this text and others like it. The Gheranda Samhita for example, a companion text that's a few hundred years younger, calls Hatha Yoga the "Yoga of the Pot" (ghata yoga), "pot" here referring to the human body (or more precisely the torso) which is compared to an alchemical vessel.
Traditional Hatha Yoga, as it's described in the school's oldest surviving instruction manuals, is an odd-looking duck, at least to our modern Western eyes. Take the granddaddy of these books, Svatmarama Yogendra's Hatha Yoga Pradipika (literally "Light on the Forceful Union-Method"), which is a venerable 600 years old, possibly older. It consists of 389 verses divided into four chapters on asana, pranayama, mudra ("seals") and bandha ("bonds"), and samadhi or enstasis. We moderns might expect the longest chapter would be on asana. And why not?

iHanuman Features

Recorded Live at the Unity Woods Yoga Center. A Quarterly Discussion on the much-debated topic of whether Yoga can be called a Religion. Find out Senior Iyengar Teacher, John Schumacher's take after 40 years teaching Yoga.
It was another incredibly gorgeous spring night in Central Virginia when Tim Miller arrived for his annual weekend workshop at the Yoga Barn in Ivy. Our recording begins with Sutra I.4 Vrtti Sarupyam Itaratra and Tim asks, If we are not identified with the essential self with what then are we identified? Tim leads us to Sutra I.12, Abhyasa Vairagyabhyam Tannirodhah and reminds us that "The practice of yoga is really the art of learning how to let go...
On a cold day in December, iHanuman attended a special performance and class by a friend and up and coming Tabla star, Loren Oppenheimer. Loren is a tabla soloist and accompanist for music and Kathak dance and a member of the tabla ensembles Tabla Upaj and Tabla Triveni, which have performed throughout the US. And until now he has been a full time teacher at the Taalim School of Indian Music, which he helped to start with his Guru Pandit Divyang Vakil.
We are honored to present an introduction and talk on the Bhagavad Gita, given by Prahaladan Mandelkorn, Former Director of the Yoga Teacher Training program at Integral Yoga in Yogaville. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient spiritual text of the Indian Tradition which discusses ones relationship to one's Dharma or Duty in life as told through the Indian God, Krishna, and the Great Warrior, Arjuna.
This week's feature is a lecture on the History and Philosophy of Yoga with Charlottesville Yoga Teacher, Kate Hallahan. Kate is the Founder of the Guerrilla Yoga Project which offers Donation-Only Yoga Classes to all sectors of the community and Co-Director of the Charlottesville Yoga School. Kate has studied extensively with Kofia Busia, one of the world's foremost Iyengar teachers, as well as other senior teachers in both the Iyengar and Anusara Traditions.
Join philosopher and lecturer Neil Bhatt as he uses contemporary stories to illustrate the important philosophical principles introduced in the Upanishads. Neil's knowledgeable and engaging approach logically combines abstract philosophical concepts with tangible scientific and cultural facts, making challenging texts easy to understand and useful for self-development. This workshop is appropriate for all levels of yoga students, as well as anyone interested in exploring key concepts in Indian philosophy.
Richard Rosen is the Director of the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, CA. He is a regular contributor to Yoga Journal and is the author of The Yoga of Breath, a beginner's guide to pranayama, and Yoga for 50, an instructional manual for older beginners. Our feature was recorded live at a teacher training workshop at Yoga Source in Richmond, VA where Richard shared with us some of the history of how yoga arrived in the west, as well as how it has changed from its original form.
The Mount Madonna Center is a retreat center located in the redwood forest overlooking Monterey Bay in Northern California.The retreat center is affiliated with the Mount Madonna Institute, a college of yoga and ayurveda, and is sponsored by the Hanuman Fellowship, a community of yoga practitioners devoted to the teachings of Babaji Hari Dass. Every year the Mount Madonna community celebrates the great history of Indian mythology, philosophy and religion through a lavish parade through the streets of Santa Cruz, California. During a recent visit to Thailand, iHanuman caught up with one of the participants in the parade who shared his recap of the story of Hanuman. Enjoy the sounds of the ocean.

Video Embed

Bo Lozoff co-founded the Prison Ashram Project and the Human Kindness Foundation.  In this interview Bo talks about activism in the context of injustice and spiritual life.
Bo Lozoff co-founded the Prison Ashram Project with Ram Dass and the Human Kindness Foundation.  In this interview Bo talks about three surprising realities of U.S. society and how the incarcerated are some of the most hungry and ready for genuine spiritual transformation.
Shantimayi speaks on how to live in the world with consideration for others.
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