You’ve practiced with them on YogaGlo. You’ve followed them on Facebook. You might even take their classes in person once in awhile if they travel to or live in your city. But how well do you know our YogaGlo teachers? We’ve created a new series, Ask a Yogi, so you can learn more about them by asking questions you’ve always wanted to ask.
From favorite poses and tips for beginners to deeper questions about how their practice has changed their worldview, our teachers will collectively answer a new question each week. If you have a question that you’d like to “Ask a Yogi”, let us know in the comments or email us at hello@yogaglo.com and we’ll add your question to the list. Today’s Ask a Yogi question is:
- Elena Brower: How delicious it always is, every single time.
- Kathryn Budig: That it is always there. Regardless of age, energy, injuries, time, moods—it is always there for us. It’s simply if we’re willing to let it in.
- Jason Crandell: I’m not sure if I should say that this surprises me or amazes me, but I’m awed by the fact that nearly everyone—no matter what they experience during class—feels better after class. Everyone. And, even more, everyone feels—more or less—like everyone else feels after class. There’s always this very even, balanced energetic tone across the room when practice is over. The person that does the hardest arm-balances feels about the same as the person whose feet never left the floor all class; the person that had the most restriction in their backbends feels about the same as the person that looked like an image of pure perfection in each backbend. Everyone feels about the same as everyone else and they all feel better. It’s a pretty amazing experience.
- Tiffany Cruikshank: Even after almost 2 decades of practice it never ceases to amaze me the extent of which yoga affects us and how it changes peoples lives. I love getting stories from students about how it has transformed their life.
- Steven Espinosa: It never ceases to amaze me how you can walk into a yoga class feeling one way, and in an hour and a half or so, you can walk out feeling completely transformed. And the best part is, it’s legal!
- Marc Holzman: That after all these years there still ARE surprises!
- Amy Ippoliti: Yoga never fails to make me just a bit more sparkly then I was before I started.
- Tara Judelle: That it is infinite, vast, and includes everything. My yoga is the way I treat others, the way I think about things, the way I conduct business, my capacity to feel, and my desire to connect to collective. The postures themselves are simply one arena for practice, a good one, but only one. I gave up being a writer/director of films to teach yoga, because it seemed to me the only thing I couldn’t possibly ever “succeed” at. There is no end game. If I knew the wormhole that would open when I stepped into my first yoga class, I’m sure, I would have gone there much much sooner.
- Kia Miller: Yoga, for me, offers the direct path to our inner truth and vastness. I grew up in the Falkland Islands in a very remote place with very few people (2,800 total in the whole islands), just lots of land and animals. There was a natural peace and connection to the rhythms of life. Stillness and simplicity were inherent in my life there. I find the practice of yoga takes me into that same simple quiet place within, it tunes me into what one of my teachers calls ‘the thrill of the subtle.’ When I first started practicing, the only stillness I enjoyed was savasana after a long hard class. Now my practice has matured – it is the sweet moments between poses that surprise me, where I experience such profound moments of YOGA, of union of mind, body and spirit. Here it is possible to sense the interconnectedness of all life. There is nothing we cannot achieve once connected on a regular basis to the deep inner wellspring of our true identity, our SAT NAM.
- Christina Sell: I am not really surprised by yoga, truth be told. I am sometimes a bit surprised by the people who practice yoga! For instance, I am very interested in how many different kinds of people practice yoga and in the variety of styles that those various people practice and how much everyone really loves the yoga they do and yet how different their actual relationship to it is, person to person. So as we all sit around and talk about yoga, I find it surprising we are not more aware of the fact we are often using the same words to talk about something that is very different person to person. Of course, these various differences have long been addressed in the tradition with some schools being aimed devotionally, others intellectually, and still others physically, etc. Personal temperament and preference has always had a place in terms of how one might enter the tradition and through what door one might go to get to the heart of the matter. There are also lots of things that delight me about yoga- like how deep the philosophical dimensions reach and how that interacts with our experience of our physicality and how these different layers are being affected whether we talk about them or not, and how much better I always feel after an asana practice and how I never get tired of teaching people to do postures they didn’t know they could do and so on on, but those are not surprising, just delightful. It’s a good question. I am actually rarely surprised in life and that alone gives me something to think about!
- Sianna Sherman: Most surprising… hmmm… There’s always more and I’m forever a beginner. AND the more I learn, the more I turn to the essence of my heart. All the teachings that resonant with me most are a call to the power of my own heart and the global heart. The learning field of yoga is infinite, yet it all comes back to the integration of my whole being in the core of my heart. And I must say, every day I’m surprised that my hamstrings can feel tight the next morning even after all these years. What a comical gift of humility this is!
- Jo Tastula: Yoga is slippery… like an avocado seed. Just when you think you have it in your fingertips, it slips right out! From the outside it seems rather constant, but the truth is it’s constantly changing and immensely challenging. That’s very surprising… because you’d think after 15 years I’d have worked it out by now?!
- Harshada Wagner: In asana practice, it surprises me how much of a difference it makes to pay attention to subtle detail. Sequencing, breathing, intention, all these things can make the difference between mental serenity and mental aggravation after practice. For yoga in the broader sense, it surprises me just how ordinary God is. And how wonderful.
