What yoga is is a personal decision to be made by each of us (and other hogwash that’s liable to get you nowhere) It was recently suggested to me—by a yoga teacher no less—that what yoga is to you, is a very personal decision. Each and every one of us, he said, needs to decide what yoga is for us. (As you ponder that question, feel free to visualize yourself sitting in a crystal pyramid with double rainbows and prancing unicorns while surrounded by a love circle of beaded, se

Here's the Good News: I’m a problem solver, and chances are, you are too. How do I know? Well, it’s because good old Mother Nature has taken care of it by having the foresight to hardwire it into our nervous systems. You see, long ago it became clear that the ability to identify and prioritize threats in our environment was a key ingredient for keeping us on the right side of the daisies. Zeroing in on threats while remaining undistracted by everything else turns out to be th

I spent the last week visiting New York, bouncing around the perpetual hustle of the island known as Manhattan. It was here that I decided to conduct a little experiment. As anyone who has been there knows, the inhabitants of this place are typically a harried bunch, and for someone visiting from far-off lands (like Phoenix), they can come off as brusque at best and downright rude and miserable at worst. So as I trundled about through subways and stairwells, sidewalks and sho

“What if…” That’s the phrase that’s been weighing on my mind this past week. In recent days, two horrific acts of violence were beamed into our homes courtesy of the national media machine: first, the on-air murder of television reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward in Virginia; then, the cold-blooded assassination of Sheriff Deputy Darren Goforth near Houston, Texas. And of course, for anyone who has been paying attention, it’s obvious that these are just the very s

Energy is everywhere. In fact, our whole world is made up of the stuff. Taking a dazzlingly wide variety of expressions—from the most energetic, like that pink bunny hawking his batteries on TV, to the least energetic, like say, the Rock of Gibraltar—each form has its own unique qualities that derive from its own distinctive vibration. Yes, vibration is at the heart of everything in our world. It’s for this reason that this concept is so important from the yogic perspective—a

We human beings are creatures of habits. Literally. And frankly, this is more than a quaint aphorism, it’s a statement of neurobiological fact. The more often you repeat a thought or behavior, the more likely it is to be repeated. Neurobiologists refer to this process as synaptic plasticity; the ancient yogis called these networked neurons samskaras. Yes, the nervous system it seems is a programmable mechanism. It the most simple of terms, a samskara is an ingrained mental pa