Yoga Practice

Have you ever reached a quiet moment in your meditation only to find yourself falling asleep? Rolf Sovik offers tips to keep drowsiness away, including lifestyle suggestions and a combined practice of breath awareness and mantra that tames the urge to sleep.

Lengthening your meditation allows your mind to become quieter and self-awareness to deepen, as you experience the delight of simply being. Learn how to stretch your sitting time, looking not only at meditation posture and method, but also at motivation, self-study, and the importance of daily practice.

Breathing strategies are an excellent tool for relieving emotional pain because breath and emotion are strongly intertwined. Rolf Sovik explains the core practice of breath awareness and then offers specific breathing strategies to manage anger, anxiety, and sadness.

Do you find yourself dwelling on unpleasant, anxious thoughts? You’re not alone. As Mark Twain is famously credited with saying, “I’ve suffered many misfortunes, most of which never happened.” Neuroscience explains this tendency, and yoga offers solutions for restoring and maintaining mental and emotional clarity.

Yogis attribute their extraordinary feats of body and mind to the power of prana, and tell us that access to our pranic life force is through the breath. Working with the breath in pranayama practice can awaken the astonishing powers of the mind. Read on for inspiration and tips to get started.

Taking time to practice short periods of silence helps us to slow down and quiet our mind. It brings a peaceful, meditative awareness and greater self-understanding into the rest of our life. Pandit Tigunait offers tips for structuring our silence time in the most beneficial way.

How can we help students reclaim the inherent wealth of the body? Shari Friedrichsen shares insights from the Yoga Sutra on using asana to increase prana shakti, awakening the body’s four inherent gifts: beauty, tastefulness, vitality, and inner healing power.

Given the many commitments of everyday life, how do we convince ourselves to meditate daily? One approach is to examine our conception of time itself. How we think about time, it turns out, affects how we use it.

We have a drive for wholeness—for the inner experience of unity that is the source of all religions. Swami Rama explains why this unity is needed to move humanity forward and how religious doctrines highlight differences between us, sowing discord rather than unity.

Does your meditation practice ever feel uninspired, like you are showing up for it but nothing is happening? Rolf Sovik explains how reviewing the two core features of meditation—concentration and mindfulness—can revitalize your practice, and he offers an illuminating review of each and how they come together.

Sri Sukta—a cluster of 16 Vedic mantras—is one of the greatest gifts of the sages to humanity. Reciting Sri Sukta attracts the forces of health, peace, and prosperity while displacing conditions of emptiness, loneliness, and other forms of inner poverty. Learn about the three stages of practice.

Silence is calming, refreshing, and restorative. It cleanses and quiets our mind and heart. Rolf Sovik offers five simple yoga practices to reconnect our body and breath, and center our mind in a peaceful, nurturing silence.