WATCH NOW: Recording of Led Primary class, plus Conference

WATCH NOW: Recording of Led Intermediate class

Sharathji is undoubtably the foremost teacher of Ashtanga Yoga in the world today. If you’re unable to travel to India to study with him directly, these recorded classes are the next best opportunity to experience his teachings and the powerful benefits of the Ashtanga yoga practice under his guidance. You’ll get a chance to experience the atmosphere of his yoga shala in Mysore with the presence of many of his most dedicated students.

The Led Primary Class is followed by a conference in which this master of Ashtanga yoga answers questions from students from around the world. And the Led Intermediate recording offers a rare glimpse at one of Ashtanga yoga’s most challenging sessions.

WATCH NOW: Recording of Led Primary class, plus Conference
WATCH NOW: Recording of Led Intermediate class

If you plan to practice along with the recordings:

• For Led Primary, students should ideally be familiar with the Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series.
• For Led Intermediate, students should have been regularly practicing the Ashtanga Yoga Led Intermediate Series and be competent at least up until Dwipada Shirshasana.

“Everyone should practice yoga for their own well-being,” Sharathji says. “Once that happens, the whole planet becomes a spiritual place. The whole planet will become totally different. Everyone will realize their own responsibility in their life toward this planet, toward humanity. Yoga will give you that kind of knowledge.”

The post On-Demand: Watch Paramaguru Sharath Jois’s Recent Led Classes appeared first on Sonima.

Click here to sign up and reserve your spot. Class size is limited, so sign-ups are on a first-come basis.

This is a traditional counted Ashtanga Yoga Led Primary Series class. Ideally, students should be familiar with the Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series.

Hillam started practicing Ashtanga Yoga in 1994, and from 2001 travelled regularly to Mysore, India, to practice and study under Sri K. Pattabhi Jois and Sharath Jois. He continues to visit Sharath in Mysore whenever he is able. He has been the director of Jois Yoga since 2010. Hillam is also a long-term student of Sanskrit, yoga, and Vedic philosophy as well as Vedic chanting.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, the idea that I could teach yoga online seemed at best a short-term replacement for Iive classes,” Hillam says. “However, many students were able to practice more regularly, and those who did progressed nicely. Some were able to add the pranayama and meditation that they were unable to incorporate previously due to time constraints. I was also surprised how much I could perceive through the screen as the teacher. The lack of hands-on adjustments by me was replaced by more consistent and diligent effort by my devoted students, resulting in slow and steady progress.”

Sign up now for the next Led Primary Series class, which starts at 6:30 a.m. PT / 9:30 ET.

The post Online Ashtanga Yoga Led Primary Series With Andrew Hillam appeared first on Sonima.

Class will be live-streamed via Zoom at the following times:

• USA: Friday, February 11 at 7:30 p.m. ET / 4:30 p.m. PT
• India: Saturday, February 12 at 6:00 a.m. IST
• China: Saturday, February 12 at 8:30 a.m. CST
• Japan/Korea: Saturday, February 12 at 9:30 a.m. JST/KST
• Australia: Saturday, February 12 at 11:30 a.m. AEDT

Class size is limited, so sign-ups are on a first-come basis. Click here to sign up and reserve your spot, and follow @livesonima, @sharathjoisr, and @jois.yoga for updates.

This is a traditional counted Ashtanga Yoga Led Primary Series class. Ideally, students should be familiar with the Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series. Class will run for approximately 1 1/2 hours and will be followed by a one-hour conference, including question and answers with Sharathji about the Ashtanga Yoga practice and its philosophy.

“Everyone should practice yoga for their own well-being,” Sharathji says. “Once that happens, the whole planet becomes a spiritual place. The whole planet will become totally different. Everyone will realize their own responsibility in their life toward this planet, toward humanity, so that’s what we have to think about. Yoga will give you that kind of knowledge.”

Sign up now for the Led Primary Class and Conference with Paramaguru Sharath Jois.

The post Paramaguru Sharath Jois Livestream of Led Primary Class and Conference appeared first on Sonima.

It would be another seven years before he got his first clients, and another 11 before he opened his first clinic in San Diego. Today, he has 30 clinics across the world, millions of clients (including an impressive roster of professional athletes) functioning pain-free, and six best-selling books to his credit, with a seventh due out this week, a revised and updated version of his first, Pain Free.

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But it was 50 years ago that he figured out why, despite a year of medical treatment for wounds incurred in Vietnam, he was still in pain and, with that knowledge, began developing the Egoscue Method by which he has helped so many, including himself, become pain-free.

As he writes in this latest book, indeed in all of his books, “Humans are designed as symmetrical bipeds.” Which means we should be symmetrical from side to side, that is, one shoulder or hip should not be higher than the other. We should also be aligned vertically, which is to say that in profile, there should be a straight line from our ears to our ankle bones that runs through the center of our shoulders, hips, and knees.

That is not the case with most of us, and it wasn’t the case with Egoscue 50 years ago. We have eight load-bearing joints—shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles—and he realized that when one of those joints is out of position, some other part of the body has to compensate to enable us to function, which led him to a major discovery that too many medical professionals today still ignore: The source of the pain is rarely the source of the problem.

Related: The At-Home Workout That Will Help You Live Pain-Free

For an event like a car accident or broken bone, yes, the source and site of the pain are the same, but for the chronic musculoskeletal pain that more than 50 percent of all Americans suffer from, the source and site are different and are the result of one part of the body compensating for what another part can no longer do. For instance, if you have back pain, it’s probably because your hip is out of alignment. And yet, most remedies for back pain treat the back, perhaps alleviating the symptom of pain but never addressing the actual source, and therefore never fixing the original problem.

That’s what Egoscue spent years figuring out how exactly to do. Knowing that “bones do what muscles tell them to do,” he experimented with an array of stretches and exercises designed to get our muscles to move our joints back into their proper position. Egoscue had learned that when our hips are where they’re supposed to be, our back stops hurting. Or when our ankles are functioning the way they’re designed to, our knees stop hurting. Or when our shoulder can move as it was intended, we no longer get tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome. It took time for him to learn how muscles move joints, but eventually he learned enough to develop the Egoscue Method, his revolutionary program to return our postures to their original design and thereby relieve ourselves of chronic pain.

Egoscue explores all of this anatomical and physiological information in his expansive new Pain Free, the revised and updated edition of his 1999 best-seller. The book is written in such engagingly accessible prose that one needn’t be a PhD in either field to readily grasp what he’s saying. But much of this information has been available since he wrote his first book decades ago. Why the revision?

“When I wrote my other six books,” he says, “we had a stronger tradition of self-reliance in our country. But we’ve lost a lot of that. We’re more isolated as individuals now than we’ve ever been before, and since the advent of social media, we’ve become more reliant upon the opinion of others in everything, including our pain. We’ve succumbed to this idea that somebody else knows more about our bodies than we do. That’s just not true. But we have to convince people now in ways we’ve never had to before that they really do have the capacity to relieve themselves of their pain.”

That gentle convincing explains, in part, the warmer tone in this updated version: less clinical, more consoling and encouraging.

But he also wrote this revision because, as a society, we are in a different place than we were when he first devised the Egoscue Method—and that place isn’t good. “Many Americans now are physically weak, and by weak, I mean they have lost the ability to remain upright,” Egoscue says. “It’s astonishing to me how many people cannot stand on one foot and, sadly, don’t even know they’re supposed to be able to. We have lost postural stability. Forty years ago, we could treat clients by focusing on strength because they were still stable. Now, we have to stabilize them first before we can strengthen them.” The culprit here is our sedentary lives.

Related: The Simplest Change You Can Make for Better Health

As Egoscue points out in the book, “In the 1920s, manual workers outnumbered knowledge workers by a ratio of 2:1. By 1980, that ratio was reversed.” All that sitting impacts our postures and leads to pain.

“Evolution didn’t stop once we got upright,” Egoscue explains. “It continues, and our evolving, or de-evolving, depends upon the stimulus of our environment.” Right now, for too many, that stimulus doesn’t involve movement. Sadly, that affects more than just our bodies, a mind-body relationship that Egoscue also explores in this book. “We know that exercise improves our endurance, strength, and cardiovascular health,” he writes, “but movement is also directly connected to feelings of hope, happiness, connection, and confidence.”

The book also contains testimonials from beneficiaries of the Egoscue Method, some famous, some not, including a wonderful foreword from NFL Hall-of-Famer John Lynch, who gives a share of the credit for his success to Egoscue. “Quite simply,” Lynch writes, “Egoscue is the most brilliant person I have ever encountered when it comes to the human body and unleashing its vast potential.” When Lynch was hired as general manager for the San Francisco 49ers, he immediately incorporated the Egoscue Method into the team’s fitness regimen.

And of course, the book incorporates menus of E-cises (Egoscue exercises) to address the issues in your feet, ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders that are causing pain elsewhere in your body or reducing its ability to function at its full potential. The menus come with pictures and detailed explanations to make sure you’re doing the E-cises correctly.

Egoscue is notoriously reluctant to discuss himself, but when asked to reflect on his accomplishments these past 50 years, he said that his favorite fact is that he’s created competition. “You can imagine the ridicule and scorn I endured when I started talking about posture as a source of most of our pain. But now that thinking permeates the healthcare world, and we have competitors, and I think that’s wonderful. We’re figuring it all out together, and in the end, that can only benefit us all.”

True enough. But it all started with Egoscue 50 years ago, and this newest edition of Pain Free (available on Amazon) is the ideal commemoration of how far we’ve come in our understanding of the relationship between our posture and our pain.

The post Pain-Free Reading: The (Updated) New Book from Pete Egoscue! appeared first on Sonima.

Yes, we like to be heard, but deep down, we all know we could be better listeners. And when we think of self-improvement and healing, whether in modern science or traditional teachings, we think first about how to adjust the body, what to eat, or what medicines to take.

But what if simply listening more closely could unblock the essential areas of life in which we struggle?

In fact, we are all born with unique sound vibrations that can be powerful sources of strength, says Sanjeev Verma, Sonima’s meditation adviser.

“What I have discovered, through my meditative awakenings, is that every single human being is born with 108 sound vibrations,” Verma says. “These vibrations are embedded in you at the time of birth. As soon as you entered the whole world, the whole universe imprints on you not only the light of the planets, not only its electromagnetic fields and its energy, but also its sounds.”

But identifying and reconnecting with these individualized seed sounds can be difficult, especially in a multimedia world full of distractions. “Normally, these sound vibrations are not being recognized by us, because they are deep inside us,” Verma says. “We must try a meditative state to hear these inner sounds.”

The innovative new Ananta mobile application, which launched to the public this week, is specifically designed to help people find their inner sounds and incorporate them into meditations that can help them across all areas of life. The Ananta app is now available on both the Apple and Android platforms.

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Ananta is a Sanskrit word that means infinite and limitless, and this new meditation app focuses on using your sounds to more easily enhance your life, fulfill your desires, and become limitless with the practice of mantras that are unique to your goals.

While each of us is born with the 108 sound vibrations, Verma says, there are six to 10 that most influence all aspects of our lives. The unique feature of the Ananta app is that it guides users through an onboarding process that allows them to quickly identify their core six to 10 seed sounds, and then customize them around specific goals.

Once users have downloaded the app, they choose their birth details and then a specific purpose. Ananta then generates the appropriate seed sound and a related meditation mantra that Verma recommends people listen to for 10 to 20 minutes every day over a 28-day cycle for maximum results.

“The human cycle is 28 days, and so as you listen, it raises your vibrational field and then you start to have a higher experience,” Verma says.

Ananta is designed to support beginner, intermediate, and advanced mediation experiences, and it focuses on six overall areas, with more specific purposes within each:

• Relaxation and stress relief
• Reducing anxiety
• Focus and productivity
• Being more mindful
• Healthy lifestyle
• Manifesting effects in your life

Users can try one customized mantra for free ongoing, and two more for 30 days. A full subscription unlocks many more unique meditations and ways to customize your goals and is $3.99 a month or $37.99 annually.

Every experience is highly customized to the individual and their seed sound that will unblock their challenges. Take career, for example. “You’ll go on the purpose screen, click ‘career,’ and select from some options,” Verma says. “That then identifies and leads you to your sound, which is the vibrational feel of your career. And that will be fixed. That is for you, and it’s fixed. And if somebody else uses that sound for their career, it’s just not for them, because theirs would be different than yours.”

Ready to listen? Download the sound-breaking new Ananta mediation app from the Apple or Android platforms.

The post Tap into Your Seed Sounds to Unlock Your Full Potential appeared first on Sonima.