A Deeper Yoga

Explore the physiology of 30 key yoga poses, in-depth and from every angle, and master each asana with confidence and control. Did you know that yoga practice can help lower your blood pressure, decrease inflammation and prevent age-related brain changes? Recent scientific research now backs up what were once anecdotal claims about the benefits of yoga to every system in the body. Science of Yoga reveals the facts, with annotated artworks that show the mechanics, the angles, how your blood flow and respiration are affected, the key muscle and joint actions working below the surface of each pose, safe alignment and much more. With insight into variations on the poses and a Q&A section that explores the science behind every aspect of yoga, this easy-to-understand, comprehensive book is an invaluable resource to achieve technical excellence in your practice and optimize the benefits of yoga for your body and mind.

Christina Sell knows the difference between a surface buzz in the yoga business (for a better, more beautiful “ME”), and its roots as an ancient practice of ethical life and spiritual transformation. With over twenty-five years “on the mat,” her voice of courage and sanity has never stopped urging yoga students and teachers alike to take a deeper dive: to confront media hype about body-image and the promise of any quick-fix in favor of a lifelong commitment to wholeness and freedom. This book is both an epitome of that call, and a practical guide to ongoing self-discovery. As the author of two previous books: Yoga From the Inside Out (2003) and My Body Is a Temple (2013), Christina Sell holds an international reputation as a gifted and compassionate teacher and trainer of yoga. As a former gymnast who dealt with eating disorders and addictions in her early years, Christina knows how to redirect thoughts and habits of negative body image toward spiritual practice and inner-awakening. A Deeper Yoga is for any practitioner or teacher who wants tools and support in finding a loving, expanded relationship with his or her body, mind, emotions and spirit. Her book is for anyone on the path of yoga. Newer yoga students will benefit from the compassionate explanations of the inner journey and find direction in building a stronger foundation of practice. Experienced yoga practitioners will find a refreshing and honest exploration of both the hype and the heart of the work. Teachers of all traditions will benefit from the ongoing reminder that yoga is not only for the body, but for transformation of consciousness and spiritual unfolding. This is a book for the long haul! A Deeper Yoga is uniquely aimed at practitioners who initially found help from yoga, but who are now experiencing impatience, discouragement or even disillusionment. It leads the reader to yoga’s more esoteric teachings, using language without jargon or unnecessary details. The tone is compassionate, yet strong and authoritative?inviting us to empower our own deeper knowing, yet without watering down the traditional teachings. Topics of body image, self-hatred, eating disorders, addiction and emotional imbalance are considered throughout. Christina skillfully dismantles the illusions and early conditionings that lead to unrealistic norms of perfection and empower a media-driven standard of beauty. A Deeper Yoga offers an alternative view of genuine beauty.

Are you ready to practice yoga with all the heart and soul that it originally had? Recently a roundtable of America's top yoga teachers agreed that those who fail to understand the true spirit of yoga, using it only for striving, was the greatest challenge faced by the practice today. What is the cost to women using yoga to try and achieve an ideal? What are the benefits of embracing heart-centered yoga and self-acceptance? How can you return yoga to its original spirit?

Return to balance with this calming, healing approach. Yin yoga offer remedies to the stresses of your busy yang life. Each restorative pose targets your deeper fascia and connective tissues, helping you experience increased flexibility and improved joint health. Yin yoga also focuses on deep breathing and longer hold times, allowing you the time and space to clear your mind and enhance your mental acuity. These meditative poses will help you attain a renewed sense of mindfulness and physical well-being, making them the perfect complement to an active yang lifestyle and helping bring you back into balance. Yin Yoga includes these features: • More than 50 step-by-step poses that focus on specific areas of the body • 20 sequences linking the poses, designed to help you reach specific physical, mental, or emotional goals • Expert information on techniques and philosophies, including correct breathing techniques, chakras and meridians, and how best to practice yin yoga If you’ve been looking for something to settle your mind and body, look no further than yin yoga the practice and Yin Yoga the book.

In Yoga: The Practice of Myth and Sacred Geometry, master teacher Rama Jyoti Vernon shares techniques and knowledge suitable for all levels, from beginners to experienced students and teachers ready to explore the deeper aspects of this ancient system. Discover Ramas unique approach to the breath, a deeply therapeutic method that places the practitioner in a space of being rather doing. Explore the hidden meanings behind yoga postures, along with their physiological, psychological, and spiritual effects. Learn how the fruits of this deep practice can inform personal choices and relationships.

Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice explores the yogic traditions of the past, bringing them alive today, and preserving them for the future by examining what separates us, reflecting on our part, taking action for equity, and moving toward liberation together. The teaching format of this book offers tools, resources, and a framework for deep personal inquiry as readers explore: Separation: How colonization, cultural appropriation, and oppression results in trauma for yogis and separation from yoga traditions. Reflection: Understanding the causes of separation and our individual roles either supporting separation (knowingly or not) versus creating unity and equity in yoga. Reconnection: Exploring specific and concrete skills and solutions for living and practicing yoga as unity. Liberation: Integrate a more honorable and ethical practice in your life supporting personal growth by following the ancient teachings.

A Journey in the Heart By: Christine Apter, PhD, ERYT 500 This book is meant to be an organized curriculum that takes a student beyond the foundational philosophy, anatomy, technical aspects, and teaching methodology developed from many advanced yoga teacher training workshops. The basics of yoga teaching with the standards of Yoga Alliance are not covered in this text. It is designed as a manual intended to meet the criteria for 300 hours of knowledge and practice above and beyond what is taught in basic yoga teacher training. A deep desire and enthusiasm for the teaching is perhaps a more important criterion for the aspiration to dive deeper. To be proficient in teaching and practicing, it takes thousands of hours and perhaps decades of committed work. The art and science of yoga teaching and practice come together with the flexible format surrounding factual structure presented in this book. Rather than an authoritative tool, this manual is fashioned to be a framework for the creative work it takes to teach yoga and practice deeper. The reader is encouraged to build upon the information and inspiration and to be creative and innovative with the material.

How does a deeper understanding of the ancient spiritual traditions of India shed new light on our contemporary yoga practice? And what can India’s River Ganges teach us about how to live in a meaningful way? Through photography and personal narrative, Jennifer Prugh documents a series of pilgrimages over the last ten years to spiritually significant locations along India’s Ganges River. The Ganges is India’s most sacred river, winding some 1550 miles from its source, high in the western Himalayas, traveling eastward across the subcontinent to empty out at Sagar Island near Kolkata. The river is also known among Hindus as Mother Ganga, the Goddess. She dissolves sins, drinking her waters cures those who are sick, and dying on her banks ensures freedom from the cycle of life and death. She is a perpetual offering to all who inhabit the Ganges River Valley. What began for the author as simply a trip to India in 2007 to deepen her understanding of her yoga practice became a passionate pursuit to broaden her understanding of the ancient spiritual culture of India, from which modern yoga practice evolved and changed her life. By plane, train, automobile, rickshaw, and on foot, she traveled with camera in tow to many of India’s sacred destinations along the Ganges, from high in the Himalayas at the river’s source at Gangotri, to the great Kumbha Mela festival held in Allahabad, to the cremation ghats in Varanasi. Prugh explores the stories from the heroic epics that provide the backbone for contemporary yoga philosophy, as well as the sacred wisdom that animates India’s spiritual legacy. Part history, part mythology, and part travel narrative, this is a visual and written account of the trials, tribulations, and personal discoveries of an American female yoga practitioner. River of Offerings serves to broaden our understanding of how to live our lives meaningfully, with passion and purpose. A visually compelling and beautiful journey from cover to cover, this book will be a cherished source of inspiration for years to come.

Inspirational reflections on life and yoga for on and off the mat—from a leading expert in yoga training, therapeutics, and philosophy Judith Hanson Lasater has been teaching an annual yoga retreat at Feathered Pipe Ranch, in Helena, Montana, for twenty-eight years. When Lasater learned that one of her students was collecting her thoughts—which she called “Judith’s aphorisms”—Lasater decided to compile them into this inspirational book for yoga practitioners of all levels. Featuring one thought for each day of the year—along with a suggested practice—these brief, powerful insights reflect the author’s knowledge of classic yoga philosophy and years of experience. Humorous, inspiring, and surprisingly down-to-earth, they guide seekers both on and off the yoga mat. These aphorisms address love, asana, fear, trust, expectations, pranayama, suffering, laughter, presence, the Yoga Sutra, and much more. They emphasize the experience of being present to one’s self and to life’s ups and downs—day by day, breath by breath, moment by moment. A Year of Living Your Yoga is a gentle invitation to readers to know themselves on a deeper level.

Christina Sell knows the difference between a surface buzz in the yoga business (for a better, more beautiful "ME"), and its roots as an ancient practice of ethical life and spiritual transformation. With over twenty-five years "on the mat," her voice of courage and sanity has never stopped urging yoga students and teachers alike to take a deeper dive: to confront media hype about body-image and the promise of any quick-fix in favor of a lifelong commitment to wholeness and freedom. This book is both an epitome of that call, and a practical guide to ongoing self-discovery. As the author of two previous books: Yoga From the Inside Out (2003) and My Body Is a Temple (2013), Christina Sell holds an international reputation as a gifted and compassionate teacher and trainer of yoga. As a former gymnast who dealt with eating disorders and addictions in her early years, Christina knows how to redirect thoughts and habits of negative body image toward spiritual practice and inner-awakening. A Deeper Yoga is for any practitioner or teacher who wants tools and support in finding a loving, expanded relationship with his or her body, mind, emotions and spirit. Her book is for anyone on the path of yoga. Newer yoga students will benefit from the compassionate explanations of the inner journey and find direction in building a stronger foundation of practice. Experienced yoga practitioners will find a refreshing and honest exploration of both the hype and the heart of the work. Teachers of all traditions will benefit from the ongoing reminder that yoga is not only for the body, but for transformation of consciousness and spiritual unfolding. This is a book for the long haul! A Deeper Yoga is uniquely aimed at practitioners who initially found help from yoga, but who are now experiencing impatience, discouragement or even disillusionment. It leads the reader to yoga's more esoteric teachings, using language without jargon or unnecessary details. The tone is compassionate, yet strong and authoritativeinviting us to empower our own deeper knowing, yet without watering down the traditional teachings. Topics of body image, self-hatred, eating disorders, addiction and emotional imbalance are considered throughout. Christina skillfully dismantles the illusions and early conditionings that lead to unrealistic norms of perfection and empower a media-driven standard of beauty. A Deeper Yoga offers an alternative view of genuine beauty.