Lessons from a Tree
Vrksasana, Tree Pose, may be one of the yoga poses most familiar to people who don’t practice yoga. Stand on one leg, bring the foot of the other leg up on the inside thigh of the standing leg, hands raised overhead, palms pressed together – Tree Pose. Balance, strength, centering, are just a few of the…
Read MorePushing and Pulling
Yoga begins with an exploration and understanding of the importance of breath in all we do. And our breathing plays a critical role in maintaining balance. One of the reasons the binary equation of work and life doesn’t help us achieve balance is that it is too rigid a frame of analysis. During my yoga…
Read MoreBalance
As you might have guessed from past newsletters, I’m a word nerd. I’m fascinated with their history and the multiple uses in our language. While I don’t actually read the dictionary, I clearly turn to it as a starting point often. Today when I looked up balance, I found that it has two primary definitions as a…
Read MoreInternal Strength
When I designed the Leadership Yoga workshop, I picked four basic standing poses : Mountain Pose, Tree Pose, Triangle Pose, and Warrior Pose II. I’ve written about Mountain Pose and we’ll learn about Tree Pose later. I chose Triangle Pose, Trikonasana, because it’s an unusual posture as it asks us to move and bend to the side…
Read MorePracticing Yoga
This morning didn’t go quite as planned. Nothing major, just a series of small computer frustrations added to reading the morning news and writing that wasn’t going well. So, I stopped. I stopped trying to make this newsletter format properly. I stopped reading the news. I stopped trying to make the morning go the way I…
Read MoreTadasana – The Mountains We Face
Tadasana One of the virtues we often ascribe to mountains is strength. It is also one of the attributes we want in leaders. But it is important to remember that there are many kinds of strength. Our current campus situation is a great example. In March, campus leaders needed the strength to make difficult decisions…
Read MorePosture or Posturing
What most of us know about yoga before ever taking a class are the postures. Only one part of a complex system, these postures, called asanas in Sanskrit, were designed to help practitioners develop strong, flexible bodies to enable sitting for extended periods in meditation. Now, whether or not we wish to practice meditation, they…
Read MoreStrength
“Do you ever have to yell at your staff?” The question was posed to me some time ago by my dance instructor. A dance studio is its own mostly self-contained world and I had been taking lessons for sometime before people learned that I was a vice president at a local university. Only a few…
Read MoreBeginning Well
Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about the three elements that are, for me, an important part of a yoga class. In the hour, hour and a half of a yoga class, it is usual for these elements to take no more than five to ten minutes. And yet, I think each element is…
Read MoreDetermining Purpose
When you walk into a yoga studio it’s easy to tell immediately that this is not your usual exercise class. It’s quiet. There’s no up-tempo music playing, there are no pulsing lights, there’s no peppy instructor trying to rev you up to get you ready to push yourself. If there is music playing, it’s calming,…
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