mind-body duality tagged posts

 “With its emphasis on strength and flexibility, power yoga brought yoga into the gyms of America, as people began to see yoga as a way to work out.”

So says a response to an inquiry about “power yoga”—a form of vigorous, extreme effort hatha yoga—on ask.com.

“A way to work out.”

As indeed it is.

Get that body to the studio.

Work it out.

Feel good.

Look toned.

Pat your yoga butt as you walk into the cafe to pick up a protein shake.

I don’t know exactly when yoga began to suffer the first fissures from those who would separate it from its profound spiritual roots. It’s a 5,000-year-old discipline, after all, and it was probably 4,999+ years ago that an enterprising Indian merchant wove together some special yoga garment or drew a posture or two on parchment that he traded for a persimmon or a bowl of soup at his friend’s stand down a dusty road.

Eventually, everything worth a whit attract...

We have a problem. It’s a knot, a tangle; we’re not quite sure whether to pull or push or just set it afire. It’s thorny, unapproachable, but we want a solution, we want to ditch this pain, this tension, the one in our shoulder especially, the right shoulder, the one that always bitches at us as it takes on our woes. (Or does it cause them?)

This big bag of skin, encasing these mysterious organs moving blood and bile, and this exquisite system of levers and pulleys and pivoting joints, muscles for climbing and lifting, smiling and punching and kissing—our servant or our master? Do we pound it into a solution or beg for its bestowal of grace and relief?

I have a body encasing a mind and spirit, I am a body of mind and spirit, I am a bodyspiritmind. I am that I am. That’s a quote reportedly from God himself, but it feels pretty right for this body and its fingers typing these words.

Meanwhile: My m...