The Wheel In My Warrior

IMAGERY abounds in yoga.

The asanas alone make a fantastic tableau of creatures: camels and crows, cats and cows, locusts and baby grasshoppers, dolphins and seals, and many others whose ancestors must have once had the good fortune to find rest in Noah’s ark. Add to this the other glories of Nature—the trees, the mountains, a solitary lotus, even the geometry of triangles and side angles.

Funny Wrong Words

WHAT do you do when you consistently hear a teacher open a class with a grammatically garbled phrase? You could, like me, dwell on it momentarily and let it pass. Yoga, after all, is the practice of sharpening your focus and forgetting “y’all thoughts and y’all worries.”

Ribs In, Girl!

THE last time I wrote about handstands, I was obsessed with holding it for one second longer, or at least, thinking along those lines. The mental focus helped for someone whose practice seemed to mock the “stand” in the “handstand”: nothing about it was stationary,

Fly or Monkey, Call It What You Will

YOU’RE not even anywhere near the yoga studio and already it greets you in the bus that’s just turning off from Sixth Avenue to Holland Road. “Sharks, I forgot my water bottle!” With an intake of breath and a slow, conscious sigh, you shake it off

Playing It Like a Magician

CALL him Gician. It’s not a stage name, but a real one. Like a deft magician, he had made the first two letters of magician go poof so long ago, coining a name like no other just because he disliked his given name. That those letters would spell “Ma” resonates with a certain symbolism: it’s as if he were taking flight from his nest, going “So long, Ma!” just as he spread his wings and caught an upwind, going up, up, and away.

His up-and-away story was distilled right before my eyes this holiday of high festivity and merrymaking