Following scandal after scandal, the founder of hot yoga refuses to pay court-ordered damages or admit wrongdoing. How is he still teaching?
It’s not just people of color who are traumatized by racial injustice. A therapist invites everyone to consider how yoga can help balance an overwhelmed nervous system.
Like turning metal into gold, you can transmute anger, hatred, and pain into powerful and transformative forces in your life. Here's how.
How to stretch, expand, and otherwise release all that tension.
The happiest parts of my life came when I learned the true meaning of brahmacharya.
It's time to allow the unfolding that comes with surrender.
It involves an iguana.
The insight comes from the longest happiness study in history.
How contemporary research and ancient tradition explain the unexpected emotional release.
You've heard again and again that it can. Science weighs in.
Got gut discomfort? This yoga sequence may be just the remedy you need to relieve uncomfortable symptoms and help restore balance in your belly.
Join Outside+ for exclusive access to all our stories, including our members-only Pose Library, sequences, teacher tips, and more.
Join Outside+ See AllSuddenly, your practice just became a lot stronger (literally).
Step away from the computer.
Hands shoulder-distance apart? Check. Lengthen through your back? Done. Here are other prompts to help you heighten your—and your students'—experience in this foundational pose.
Why exactly does the full moon have such an impact on your emotions? We untangle fact from fiction.
Patanjali's eight-fold path offers guidelines for a meaningful and purposeful life. Get to know this prescription for moral and ethical conduct, and self-discipline.
When's the last time you reminded yourself that you can do difficult things?
Working toward the full expression of Dhanurasana? These five poses will help you appreciate where your body is now.
Join Rina Deshpande—teacher, writer, artist, and poet—for an immersion into the richness of the yama, ethical practices outlined in the Yoga Sutra as the first of the eight-limbed path of classical yoga.
Ever notice how you tend to walk, lean, hunch, or otherwise propel yourself forward all the time? Your body needs more than that to remain flexible and pain-free. Here's how.
How are you reading this article? I don’t mean are you using your phone or your laptop. What I mean is, observe the position of your body as you read. Are you sitting or standing? Are you lying down? Are you holding whatever device you’re using? Where are your arms? What are your neck and head doing?
When we pay attention to how we spend our days, we start to notice that we’re often leaning, reaching, bending, and otherwise moving forward in space. We reach our arms forward to text, to drive, to cook, to shake hands (when we still do that!). We move our legs forward when we walk, run, climb stairs, even as we sit in a chair.
Here’s the problem with that: The human body is designed to be mobile in various directions. You might recall that saying, “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” It’s true when it comes to our bodies, which become flexible in the places where they are used the most and resist movement where they are used the least. This can lead to the stiffening of some joints and the overuse of others. Or muscles overdeveloping on one side and remaining underdeveloped on the other. Quite simply, we need to move in an array of ways each day to keep our bodies moving as they were designed.
(Photo: Getty Images) The three anatomical planes of movement
The predominant place of contemporary living, which takes us into forward motion, is actually just one of three primary planes in which our body is able to—and needs to—move each day: the sagittal (front and back motion), coronal (side-to-side movement), and transverse (twisting action) planes. It’s not just the body in its entirety that moves in these planes. Individual body parts—arms, legs, neck, back, knees—move in these manners as well.
As you go about your everyday movement and your yoga practice, observe what plane you spend the most time in, and which you spend the least. The latter is where your work lies. Following are several ways we move our bodies in our everyday lives, including in our yoga practice. Notice any that you tend to not engage in regularly? You know what you need to do about that.
(Photo: Andrew Clark) Sagittal plane
The sagittal plane comprises forward and backward movements. This can take the shape of either flexion—decreasing the angle of a joint, as in bending your front hip and knee in High Lunge—or extension, which is increasing the angle of a joint, as in the straightening of the back leg in both hip and knee.
