15-year-olds aren’t supposed to have strokes. At least that’s what I thought. I try not to think about it too much. Even now, I only have bits and pieces; shards of memories that somehow remained intact even through the trauma my brain endured that day.
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When I arrived at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, I weighed just […]
More than 60 million people around the globe are displaced from their homes due to war, conflict, and persecution. That’s the highest number ever on record— one in every 122 humans on this planet. Many refugees board overcrowded dinghies to cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe. If they make it safely to shore, they are forced […]
What do you get when you cross a young religious skeptic from New Jersey with a titular Indian spiritual leader? Well, apparently this guy:
Meet Kumaré.
Part Borat-style prankumentary and part cultural analysis of Americans’ relationship with Eastern religion, Vikram Gandhi’s Kumaré provoked laughter as well as a lively dialogue at our in-house YogaBrains screening of the film last week.
Since each of […]
A new study reported on in the journal Pediatrics reveals that even though it’s legal for 17-year-olds to get the so-called morning-after pill, many pharmacy employees often tell teens they’re not allowed to have the drug anyway.
Whether she is under the age of 18 or not, all women should have agency over their own bodies. The “morning after pill” is […]
The conversations that really affect us — the ones that erode marriages, instigate wars, change the reality we know indefinitely and irrevocably — do not happen in the realm of the concrete, the explicit. They take place beneath and between our words.
Most, I imagine, would agree that tone of voice, facial expression, and body language […]
John Friend has been called a celebriyogi. Recently I had an opportunity to interview him at the Wanderlust Festival in Vermont. Ever since our conversation, I’ve been thinking about the tenuous boundary between cults, kulas, and communities in the yoga world.
I spent a lot of time studying social psychology in university. But if you really want a lesson […]
God, Allah, Krishna, Universe… I’ve long been fascinated by the many words we use to describe that oh-so-elusive category of our experience many refer to as “spiritual”. Ask a priest, he’ll call it Christ. Ask a scientist, she’ll call it nature. Ask a yogi… well, you tell me. Our names for the divine certainly run […]
As physically embodied creatures, our minds and bodies are intricately interdependent. Thoughts give way to actions, actions meld into habits, and over time our mental activities literally sculpt the bodies we inhabit.
Sometimes I wonder if the body, in many ways, is our deepest form of creative expression– a stage upon which we explore and express […]
Part 2: Seeking Balance in a World Without
I’ve been thinking, talking, and writing quite a lot about bodies these days. Apparently, I’m not the only one– yogis responded en masse to our recent question to the yoga community, What Does a Yoga Body Look Like? I’ve been so inspired thecomments– women declaring “my curves and […]
The church says the body is a sin.
Science says the body is a machine.
Advertising says the body is a business.
My yoga practice says the body is ____________.
There’s been an explosion of commentary in the yoga blogosphere as of late about yoga bodies— Slim, Calm, Sexy Yoga, A Plea from Curvy Yogis, Judith Laster’s Shellacking of Naked Bodies in YJ, and the […]
