The American Reinvention That Made Yoga a Workout In the late 1980s, yoga in America was widely perceived as gentle stretching for hippies and the spiritually inclined. Classes moved slowly, emphasized meditation, and seemed designed for the already flexible. Then something shifted. A new generation of teachers, trained in the demanding Ashtanga tradition but attuned […]

The Controversial Practice of Awakening the Serpent Power Walk into a Kundalini yoga class and you enter a world unlike any other corner of the Western yoga studio landscape. Practitioners dressed in flowing white garments sit cross legged on sheepskin rugs, heads wrapped in turbans. The teacher chants in an ancient Punjabi script called Gurmukhi. […]

The Healing Art of Supported Stillness In a world that prizes productivity and celebrates exhaustion as a badge of honor, the invitation to do nothing feels almost subversive. Yet this is precisely what restorative yoga offers: a practice built around the radical premise that rest itself is healing. In dimly lit studios and quiet corners […]

The Controversial Hot Yoga Practice That Changed Western Fitness In studios around the world, practitioners arrange their mats in neat rows facing wall length mirrors. The room is heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit with 40 percent humidity. For the next ninety minutes, they will move through exactly twenty six postures and two breathing exercises in […]

The Slow, Still Practice That Targets the Body’s Deepest Tissues In a world of yoga classes set to pulsing music and rapid transitions between postures, Yin yoga asks practitioners to do something radical: stop moving. For three, five, or even ten minutes at a time, students settle into passive floor poses, surrendering muscular effort and […]

The Ancient Eight Limbs Path and Its Modern Revival Through the Mysore Tradition In the early morning hours before dawn breaks over Mysore, India, practitioners file silently into a shala where they will spend the next ninety minutes moving through a demanding sequence of postures. There is no music, no instructor calling out poses. The […]

A Journey Through the Philosophy, History, and Practice of Yoga’s Most Popular Flowing Style Walk into almost any yoga studio in the Western world and you will likely encounter it: a room of practitioners moving in fluid, dance-like sequences, their breath synchronised with each transition from pose to pose. This is Vinyasa yoga, one of […]

When you walk into a modern yoga studio and see “Hatha Yoga” on the schedule, you’re looking at the echo of a tradition that goes back nearly a thousand years. But what you’ll experience in that class bears only a distant resemblance to what Hatha Yoga actually was—and what it was designed to accomplish. Let […]