Author: 8 Limbs Yoga

Back in 2014 I decided to finally travel to India, the primary source of yogic teachings, to spend ten days meditating in a shrine to Sri Vidya, the Tantric lineage of my teachers. Sri means “most auspicious, beautiful, joyful”; vidya means “knowledge.” I didn’t really know at the time why exactly I was going, how I’d get there, […]

Attention. It’s a valuable resource. When we pay attention we are stretching toward the object of our attention. Whatever we pay attention to, be it an ideology, a social media post, or a person, we are spending (thus the term pay!) that resource. And as many of us have discovered, our modern lifestyles – often […]

4 Little-Known Reasons to Study and Practice Mindfulness Meditation  1. Differentiation: The classical guidelines for practicing mindfulness meditation, according to the   Sutta (Four Foundation of Mindfulness), is to chunk our experience into categories, a process called “differentiation” in psychology. By categorizing our experience, life becomes more manageable, and self-awareness increases. For example, imagine a person […]

To our 8 Limbs community in West Seattle, When I took over the reigns of 8 Limbs Yoga Centers in January 2020 and a lease at W. Seattle set to expire a month later, my goal and hope was that by extending the lease and some investment and TLC, I would be able to revitalize […]

Almost ten years ago 8 Limbs started an annual ritual called the 28 Day Commitment. We chose February, a bit removed from the resolution madness of January and the shortest month of the year, and have continued in some form or another ever since! Our aim was to invite rather than challenge, and empower, a […]

There are multiple health benefits of doing “breath hold.” An average healthy person with no special training can hold his (or her) breath for about half a minute. Increasing the hold time gives more opportunity for the inhaled air to pass through the thin lining of the air sacs and into the blood vessels which […]

Our minds, they are tough to control. I know mine is! And that’s why I’m a yoga practitioner. When I was introduced to the practice in 1996 it was immediately clear that the combination of postures, with attention to breath, gave me a clearer mind, one more able to focus and concentrate. I was able […]

Our senses – they are our link to the world outside of ourselves. They guide us, and they distract us. They lead us to what we like, and turn us from what we don’t. They keep us alive, and can also do quite the opposite. We continue our journey through the eight limbs of yoga […]

The power of one breath never ceases to amaze me. I can be tightly wound, worried, or on alert, and one slow, deep breath, especially one into the back of my body, leaning back in my chair, or dropping into my heels, and I am on the path back to presence, moment-to-moment mindfulness, relief. Our […]

3 Reasons to Meditate when the Sh#t Hits the Fan According to the field of complexity science, complex systems all go through periods of chaos, chaos defined as a system that is “difficult to predict.” If we look at history through this lens, what we see are times of Order and Chaos: Dickens began an […]