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 […]
A few years ago, in the midst of what might be called a “spiritual crisis,” I found myself writing a lot of poetry. I was depressed, disheartened, questioning everything I’d been taught about life, death, and all my esoteric notions of spirituality. I needed to articulate the whirlwind running through my mind, yet the only […]
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 […]
Well they’re at it again. Two NYC based companies known for “creating projects that have a positive effect on the world” want to turn Central Park’s Great Lawn in to the largest yoga studio ever. Picture this: 15,000 people doing upward facing together, led by well-known yoga instructors Elena Brower, Seane Corn, Colleen Saidman and […]
In 2011, the yoga blogosphere witnessed an explosion of substantial conversation about body image, eating disorders, and the portrayal of women in the media. From the release of Tara Stiles’ book, Slim, Calm, Sexy Yoga to the new Curvy Yoga movement, there is no doubt that bodies weigh heavy—no pun intended—on the minds of modern […]
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 […]
Dolphins are being killed in mass quantities in Peru, and this time the culprit isn’t the Japanese taste dolphin meat… it’s our collective hunger for oil.
Since the beginning of the summer, nearly 3000 dolphin carcasses have washed up on shore, and last week 615 were found on a single 135km coastline. With no external signs of trauma or evidence […]
Sticks and Stones May Break Some Bones But Words Are Breaking Bodies
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, […]
This is the second in a two-part series on discovering the Sacred in the Sutras. You can read part one here.
“By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness.” – Yoga Sutra 1.33
My first encounter Yoga Sutra […]
