Stay up-to-date on the latest from Asheville Yoga Center with our blog! Meet our teachers and hear them share more about their lives and yoga practice. Read tips on how to integrate yoga more deeply into your life off the mat. Learn more about inspirational teacher training programs, and discover new ways to deepen your practice!
Teaching and sharing yoga is an integral part of my personal yoga practice. Not everyone needs to teach and share yoga in order to practice yoga. After years of teaching yoga, it’s become a discipline, and in some ways has informed how I understand myself and the world around me.
Teaching and sharing yoga is an integral part of my personal yoga practice. Not everyone needs to teach and share yoga in order to practice yoga. After years of teaching yoga, it’s become a discipline, and in some ways has informed how I understand myself and the world around me.
We can practice ahimsa or non-violence with others, mother Earth, and also ourselves. When we notice thoughts of judgment or criticism, there’s an opportunity to return to the breath, witness those thoughts and emotions, and allow them to flower. This momentary gap enables us to choose how we respond – ahimsa lives in our breath, that dynamic and divine pulsation of inhalation and exhalation that we share with all living beings.
We can practice ahimsa or non-violence with others, mother Earth, and also ourselves. When we notice thoughts of judgment or criticism, there’s an opportunity to return to the breath, witness those thoughts and emotions, and allow them to flower. This momentary gap enables us to choose how we respond – ahimsa lives in our breath, that dynamic and divine pulsation of inhalation and exhalation that we share with all living beings.
Did you know that Ada Limón, the extraordinary 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, loves yoga? And yet, in a recent On Being podcast, she laughed while sharing the following:
When I lived in New York City, my two best friends, I would always try to get them to go to yoga with me. And they would say, “I don’t want to go to yoga.” And I was like, “Why?” And they said, “I just don’t want anyone telling me when to breathe.”
I know, right?! Breathe in—do this. Breathe out—do that. Enough already!
A short time after I moved to Asheville, NC in 1996 I stumbled upon a little yoga practice room above an antique shop downtown. There was no sign outside advertising it as a studio or practice space. At the top of a narrow and creaking staircase there was simply a wooden bowl for donations.
Here is the first limb of Yoga. It is a set of skillful means (upāya) that we can adopt to create a space where we can practice Yoga. These five great vows (Mahāvrata) appear to have originated with the Jainadharma tradition c.600 BCE, yet have been adopted by many other traditions.
Bhakti means devotion, a deep yearning to experience love in its purest form. According to Dr. Shyam Ranganathan, Bhakti is identical to Yoga as a basic ethical theory that originated in South Asia. Although it is often confused with Theism, a decolonized view of Yoga or Bhakti does not require any beliefs.
– Mary Oliver
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