Whether taking a yoga class, practicing on your own at home, or following along to one of our top yoga classes online at YogaToday, there are a few essential yoga poses poses that you are almost guaranteed to see. While there are over 300 positions in the physical yoga practice (asana), these ten basic yoga…
Yoga for Veterans: A Vet Explains the Healing Power of Yoga
Ann Richardson Stevens, a certified Adaptive Yoga teacher and member of the Exalted Warrior Foundation, provides adaptive yoga classes to veterans returning from combat. She began teaching yoga for veterans at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia and has since moved her yoga for veterans classes to her studio, Studio Bamboo Yoga. Alex was one…
Yoga Breathing Techniques: The Basics of Pranayama
The aim of both yoga breathing techniques, or pranayama, is to help us live more fluidly in partnership with the world around us. In many ways, our life begins with our first conscious breath and ends with our last. The breath is said to carry a person’s life force, and our lives are dependent on…
The Granthis: Untie Your Emotional Knots
What are the Granthis? The Granthis are psycho emotional knots that are housed along the Shushumna Nadi and correlate with the seven main chakras along the central nerve channel. The Shushumna Nadi translates to a hollow reed and is a channel that runs through the central axis of our body and is where energy either…
Setting Yoga Intentions On and Off Your Mat
The Importance of Setting Yoga Intentions As a yoga instructor, I give students time and space at the beginning of each class to set an intention, or sankalpa. Rod Stryker, the founder of ParaYoga and author of The Four Desires, explains that to create the life we were born to live, we must enlist the…
Stress Less: The Science Behind Cortisol
Cortisol is the stress hormone. It is made by the adrenal glands along with other hormones including norepinephrine, epinephrine, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and aldosterone. In times of stress, the hypothalamus signals the pituitary gland to tell the adrenal cortex to release cortisol. When there is enough cortisol, the hypothalamus and pituitary stop communicating, and cortisol…
4 Yoga Poses (With Props!) for Athletes
As an athlete, stretching and yoga can be amazing allies. This article, highlighting recent Olympians who practice yoga, certainly attests to that! If you want to be an athlete on the top of your game, stretching and rest are all part of a successful training program. These four yoga poses with props will soothe the…
What is Kundalini Yoga?
Kundalini yoga has become popular in recent years, and even if you have already attended a class, you may wonder, exactly what is kundalini yoga? Like any yoga style, the discipline varies given different teachers and studios, but the underlying message and techniques are the same. This guide will help familiarize you with Kundalini yoga:…
Can I Do Yoga While Pregnant? Follow These Do's and Don'ts
Whether you’ve got a serious yoga habit, or just picked it up once baby was on the way, doing yoga while pregnant requires some adjusting of the practice. With all of your body’s changes, and that little babe growing inside, you’ve got to be smart–and safe–every time you hit the mat. And while there are…
Yoga Nidra For Deep Sleep
There is a lot of talk about meditation, the different meditation techniques, and the benefits of meditation in the media. However, we should be aware that simply doing a meditation exercise and actually being in a state of meditation are two different things. Yoga Nidra, or yoga sleep meditation, can help. Anyone who has ever…