Posts Tagged ‘North American yoga’
the girl effect: revolution girl style now
I’m excited to be taking part in The Girl Effect, an awareness-building campaign driven by girl champions around the globe. On October 4, a whole network of bloggers from all backgrounds will write to increase awareness of girls in the developing world, and play a small role in eradicating poverty, creating thriving communities and slowing the spread of AIDS.
What does the future hold for therapeutic yoga? What do healthcare experts expect from therapeutic yoga? What can yoga teachers do to develop effective practices to support traditional medicine?
These are some of the questions that will be explored at the first Montreal International Symposium on Therapeutic Yoga (MISTY), October 29 – 30, 2011. As yoga becomes an increasingly important alternative health practice, this is the first time in Canada the medical and yoga community will converge with a purpose.
The event will be co-chaired by Dr. Loren Fisher and Montreal’s own Dr. Madan Bali, and the faculty includes leaders in the field such as Ray Long, Leeann Carey, Neil Pearson, Antonio Sausys and Jill Dunkley. Montrealers Carina Raisman and Patrick Salibi will represent new voices and views in the growing discipline of therapeutic yoga.
In 16 thematic sessions and four keynote presentations, the topics to be covered include anxiety, stress and depression; yoga for seniors, cancer survivors and those with persistent health concerns; the technical aspects of teaching therapeutic yoga; supporting traditional medicine; yoga for chronic pain; and how yoga can help spinal issues, knees and hips, and osteoporosis.
The vision for the event is to integrate therapeutic yoga with modern medicine as a partner in health, for the physical and mental body. By sharing experiences and research to better support people with special needs, the event can help foster inter-connectedness between traditional and alternative medicine, practice settings (hospitals and health institutions) and practitioners.
Expected attendees include yoga teachers, students, doctors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, as well as educators, policy makers, professors, research scientists and all others interested in health.
Registration is still open, but spaces are filling up. To register, visit the MISTY website. MISTY is proudly organized by H-OM Yoga Events. I’m excited to be featuring faculty interviews and profiles in the upcoming weeks on it’s all yoga, baby.
This appears to be the current state of yoga in the West. It can only get better, right? (image via yogajournal.com)
“Where is yoga headed these days?” asks Forbes.com blogger, Alice G. Walton. She checked in with Seane Corn, Gary Kraftsow, Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman at last month’s Being Yoga conference at the Omega Institute.
“That yoga has lost some of its oomph as it becomes more a business and less a practice is no secret,” writes Alice. “But whether this change is a good or bad thing is up for debate.” It’s a large and wide-ranging debate, and these teachers present merely three insights into the .
Seane Corn is apparently unfazed by the shift. “Sometimes the spiritual message is diluted,” she says, “but this can draw people to the practice in the first place. It’s offered in churches and synagogues and schools. That’s incredible.” Continue Reading
“Yoga morons” on a New York City subway train get on gawker.com‘s nerves! “Isn’t their little public performance so joie de vivre and spontaneous and FUN? NO, it is not. It is dumb and obnoxious. We would rather sit on a train car full of shoe lickers than have to endure one of these.”
Oooh, sharp. But kind of true. I have to admit that I felt a little embarrassed watching this acroyoga demonstration, with accompanying giggles and homeless jokes.
How would you respond to seeing this on a crowded subway car? And what is the most embarrassing public display of yoga that you’ve seen?
Gawker.com: Yoga Morons Pose All Over NYC Subway Car, Make Homeless ‘Joke’
So I’m back from Yoga Festival Toronto! The intention, as usual, was to blog live from the event, but that didn’t happen, as usual. I was too busy going to workshops and lectures, making new friends, and reconnecting with old acquaintances, instead of typing blog posts on my phone or laptop.
The weekend was rich and full, with many great conversations, new ideas and fantastic people. I was especially excited to share it with my Yocomo partners in crime, as we conspire to create a similar event in Montreal next year. We’ve all come back to our fair city feeling inspired and pumped about the task ahead.
Every workshop, keynote and lecture that I attended was enjoyable, but here are the three events which left the strongest impression on me:
Mark Singleton ~ This scholar and yoga practitioner based in New Mexico recently released Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, considered by many to be a seminal text on yoga. He presented two morning lectures, complete with slides and a little laser light, and was interviewed by Priya Thomas in a keynote conversation. He started off by explaining that he wrote the book because he had seen a disjunction between what he was doing in yoga class and what he was learning in textual study. His extensive research was motivated by the observation that there was something missing from the story, and the book was his attempt to understand how “yoga” has become synonymous with asana.
He made it clear that the book is a cultural history about the derivation of yoga postures, but not the origins of them (despite what the title implies). Over the course of two lecture sessions, Mark took a small, eager group of attendees (who were mostly yoga teachers and bloggers) on a condensed journey through Yoga Body, starting in the 19th century, when Hatha Yoga was associated with magic in the West. He also detailed the influence that developments in the northern European physical cultural movement had on asana practice in colonial India, and its ties to Indian nationalism (with the underlying agenda to build better bodies to forcefully resist colonization). Continue Reading
