Yoga

10 Ways to Cultivate Self-Love During the Holidays

10 Ways to Cultivate Self-Love During the Holidays

Most likely, if you live in the United States you’re being bowled over by the gusts of spirit, cheer, and all the warm and cozy feels that roll over us like the first icy breeze of the winter season. These powerful gusts are conduits ofread more

On Repeat

On Repeat

When I felt I’d reached a true low point in my life at the ripe age of 26, apathetic about my career, regretting all the choices I’d made leading up to it, and feeling the physical ache of constant low-grade stress gripping my hip flexors and shoulders, Iread more

Sing Along

Sing Along

I grew up signing, rocking out to boy bands on my discman during car rides to Long Island, performing in choirs, and knowing that it felt good in my body to sing even if it wasn’t “good enough” (according to me, that is) to warrantread more

Blind Spot

Blind Spot

My yoga teacher has arranged our arms in Gomukhasana, Cow Face Pose, with a small looped strap around our wrists. It feels like a straight jacket in reverse, but she starts drawing circles with her elbows in a pattern that makes me miss my childhoodread more

Belly Breath

Belly Breath

In his book Being Peace, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat-Hanh describes the right way of perceiving in the classical mediation manual for Buddhists: “The practitioner will have to contemplate body in the body, feelings in the feelings, mind in the mind, objects of mind in objects of mind.”read more

Perfect Imbalance: Reflections on the Winter Solstice

Perfect Imbalance: Reflections on the Winter Solstice

In my childhood bedroom, my bed was almost always pushed into a corner in some configuration to maximize floor space—a design strategy my parents employed regimentally throughout the house. It took until my preteens to insist upon a more feng shui arrangement with the bedread more

How to Be Enlightened: The Nonduality of Catholicism and Yoga

How to Be Enlightened: The Nonduality of Catholicism and Yoga

 This essay was originally published in a slightly different form in America Magazine Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu…. I sit on my yoga mat, ankles crossed in a Half Lotus pose, eyes closed and struggling to form the shape of these foreign sounds in my mouth. Hornsread more

On a Clear Autumn Day: Seeing the Sat in Satire

On a Clear Autumn Day: Seeing the Sat in Satire

 College is known for those uber-cliche moments where some incredibly brilliant person says something that changes your entire worldview. A professor’s genius insight that sends you on a path of intellectual inquiry, a classmate’s drunken/high/late-night eureka moment on the meaning of life, the day youread more

Fire Log

Fire Log

Fire Log Pose. You may call it Double Pigeon or Ankle-to-Knee Pose, but as we all know there’s not much in a name, more like a being’s sweet smell is its identity. The smell of this pose is an unmistakably smoldering one. Agnistambhasana, which literallyread more

Steeped: The Magical Ritual of Tea

Steeped: The Magical Ritual of Tea

“More tea?” My best friend at work ping each other with this message countless times every day, so much so that when I try to search my inbox for a real work-related email by her name it’s a hopeless quest to find the relevant message.read more