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Exercise is the best way to prevent Alzheimer. Rotate your arms; rotate your legs; twist your spine and activate your hippocampus to prevent Alzheimer.
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Amit Ray (Yoga The Science of Well-Being)
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As much as I enjoyed yoga courses, it was hard to make time for them. Generally speaking, my work arrangements were flexible, so it was mostly a psychological problem: it was hard to convince myself it was acceptable to go twist my body into knots for two hours when there was work to be done.
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Josh Kaufman (The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast)
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I feed my captive vegan,” he growled.
The force of his voice stilled me.
“She spends her days doing yoga and playing in the yard and her nights reading classics by the fireplace.” His sardonic tone lacked humor.
I couldn’t decide if he was insulting me or showing he did care in his own twisted way. I wanted to hear more, but all I could do was turn around and accuse, “You’ve been spying on me.”
“Be quiet,” he snapped. “This is my monologue.”
I closed my mouth.
“Keeping you here is a slap in the face to my men, but it seems I don’t give a fuck about that.” The eye contact seared. “The longer I put off revenge, the closer I get to another war with your papa. And I don’t give a fuck about that either.”
My throat tightened at the thought I was a source of that kind of violence. I had no idea my presence here had caused so much trouble.
His gaze narrowed. “You pull a trigger on me, and I can’t even leave you out in the cold for fifteen fucking minutes. So you tell me, Mila, who cares more here?
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Danielle Lori (The Darkest Temptation (Made, #3))
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7:50 a.m. Core Power Yoga Lot, Berkeley. I’m in my Prius finishing up a phone call before class. Suddenly a large black SUV whisks into the space next to me, so achingly close I can no longer open my door. I roll down my window, giggling. “You’re kidding, right?” I say to the girl, pointing at the almost empty lot. “I mean, really? Why here? Why me? Did ya just want to get to know me better?” She looks at me blankly, shrugs her shoulders, gets out of the car, and strolls upstairs. 7:52 a.m. Wow. Wedged behind wheel, momentarily fuming. 7:53 a.m. Wondering: Do I want to be mad and waste the morning with this? Does my body need the assault of even momentary resentment while on the way to yoga of all places? Or . . . do I want to feel compassion, plus a dose of good-humored astonishment, by just rolling with it all? 7:54 a.m. I spend a full minute contemplating how to twist myself like a true yogini over the gear shift to slither out the other door. But then, I have the Life-Changing Realization: I can MOVE THE CAR. 7:55 a.m. I move.
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Tosha Silver (Change Me Prayers: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Surrender)
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although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.
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Margaret Atwood (The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2))
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Bernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.
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Margaret Atwood (The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2))
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Don’t get it twisted. Key behavior of abusers? They almost always blame you for it. Like you deserved it. Like you had it coming. People can justify just about anything. They don’t generally have a lot of accountability or self-reflection. Make sure you don’t take that on yourself.
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Maranda Pleasant (Origin: Music, Art, Yoga & Consciousness)
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Maybe it’s something to do with the movements: the Cat and then the Cow, the twist to the left and then to the right, the reaching up, and then bending to the ground, the constant training of the body to move one way, and then to move in the opposite way. Hatha: sun, moon opposites, dark and light, yin and yang. This must be key in the way yoga shapes the mind and heart, in the way it helps one to understand that every movement has a counter movement, that every action has an opposing action, that the happy parts of life will be met by the sad, and the sad, in turn will be met by the happy.
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Kathryn E. Livingston (Yin, Yang, Yogini: A Woman's Quest for Balance, Strength, and Inner Peace)
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At forty-two, I was still holding up pretty well, but my once effortlessly lean body now look as though it belonged in a Dove firming cream ad -- the one where they give women permission to have thighs. When I unbuttoned my jeans at night, I swore I heard the same sound that Pillsbury dough made when I twisted the cylindrical container. My hair was beginning to gray, and when I smiled, the parentheses around my mouth remained. My least favorite position in yoga class was the downward dog because, as I hung my head downward, I always felt the skin from my face was about to splatter against my mat like a pancake batter hitting the griddle. So being called the top model by a young Italian was a wonderful souvenir, though cheaper than the toys sold outside the Pantheon in Rome.
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Jennifer Coburn (We'll Always Have Paris: A Mother/Daughter Memoir)
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Look,” says Zafar, “suppose you’re a young couple. It’s spring and desire is rushing through your veins. Lying side by side, you reach out and touch one another under the sheet. But you have to be careful, ma-in-law’s bundled up asleep just a few feet away. Your brother’s kids are sleeping in the same room. You must wait till everyone else is asleep, and after you’ve lain quietly awake trying to reckon their breathing, you’re obliged to proceed with minimum movement, no scrapes or rustles, uttering not the smallest sound. To be erotic in such circumstances, this is what makes it an art.” “Might even be,” says Gaurilal, “that these very restrictions on the poor, need for breath-control plus twisting about of the body to fit cramped and unlikely spaces, are what gave rise to yoga.
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Indra Sinha (Animal's People: A Novel)
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Usually, when people hear the term Yoga, many of them associate it with various physical exercises where they need to twist, turn and stretch their body in complex ways that are known as Asanas, but this is only one type of Yoga, called “Hatha-Yoga”. In reality, Yoga is an umbrella term for various physical and mental exercises that lead to the overall well-being of a person.
By origin, Yoga has mainly five forms:
1. Raja Yoga - The realization of divinity through intense meditation
2. Karma Yoga – The realization of divine bliss through your own daily activities and duties
3. Hatha Yoga – The realization of divine well-being through various physical exercises
4. Jyana Yoga – The realization of inexplicable bliss in the pursuit of knowledge
5. Bhakti Yoga – The realization of ecstasy through love and devotion for your Personal God
The purpose of all Yogas is to set your consciousness lose into the vast domain of the unknown, where your brain circuits simulate various fascinating mental states that are usually unimaginable and unattainable in your everyday consciousness. But the whole yoga thing has nothing to do with God or something of that sort. It is all about various states of the human mind.
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Abhijit Naskar (Autobiography of God: Biopsy of A Cognitive Reality)
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Yoga just ain’t that type of enterprise. It is ten thousand rain droplets rather than one holy spring. The postures are being innovated. The ideas reorganized, reinterpreted, and reimagined. And there is a long, hearty history where long individuals have appointed themselves all-knowing gurus and deliberately twisted facts to their own satisfaction and cosmology. So throw your ideas of authenticity out the window.
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Benjamin Lorr (Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga)
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Be Careful of Potentially Unsafe Exercises While it is true that any bone in the body can fracture when exercising due to a fall or some other mishap, some exercises pose a higher risk for people with osteoporosis. As we learned in Chapter 1, fractures of the spine are the most common fractures that people experience, especially as they get older. Therefore, when we engage in controlled exercise poses or routines—for instance, in yoga or strength training—it is vital to protect the spine. Following are some of the exercises that are not recommended for people who have a moderate or high risk for fractures: • forward bending • shoulder stands • twists (rotational moves for the spine) • jackknife (legs bent over the head)
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Lani Simpson (Dr. Lani's No-Nonsense Bone Health Guide: The Truth About Density Testing, Osteoporosis Drugs, and Building Bone Quality at Any Age)
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When you are connected to your co-workers, you don’t have to coerce them.
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Shar McBee (Leadership with a Twist of Yoga)
“
In some languages, the word “devil” means to divide.
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Shar McBee (Leadership with a Twist of Yoga)
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Some people smoked when they were upset, some did yoga, or drank, or paced, or picked fights, or counted to one hundred. Georgia cooked.
As a small girl growing up in Massachusetts, she'd spent most of her time in her grandmother's kitchen, watching wide-eyed as Grammy kneaded the dough for her famous pumpernickel bread, sliced up parsnips and turnips for her world-class pot roast, or, if she was feeling exotic, butterflied shrimp for her delicious Thai basil seafood. A big-boned woman of solid peasant stock, as she herself used to say, Grammy moved around the cramped kitchen with grace and efficiency, her curly gray hair twisted into a low bun. Humming pop songs from the forties, her cheeks a pleasing pink, she turned out dish after fabulous dish from the cranky Tappan stove she refused to replace. Those times with Grammy were the happiest Georgia could remember. It had been almost a year since she died, and not a day passed that Georgia didn't miss her.
She pulled out half a dozen eggs, sliced supermarket Swiss and some bacon from the double-width Sub-Zero. A quick scan of the spice rack yielded a lifetime supply of Old Bay seasoning, three different kinds of peppercorns, and 'sel de mer' from France's Brittany coast. People's pantries were as perplexing as their lives.
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Jenny Nelson (Georgia's Kitchen)
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If you ask an average yoga teacher what yoga is, you usually get a little talk on “union” and how the practice is five thousand years old. They may have some poses and sequences of poses that they practice and teach, along with some information on breathing and meditation. Where did they get this information and these practices, and what relationship do they have with the great river of yoga knowledge and techniques? Without much more than an ounce of questioning we have acquired so much misinformation on yoga from our teachers. It is easy to hand down these myths and stories that twist and turn from their original form and meaning, and often lead us away from the essence of a specific lesson or practice.
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Richard Rosen (Yoga FAQ: Almost Everything You Need to Know about Yoga-from Asanas to Yamas)
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In facilitated stretching, we intentionally contract the muscle we are stretching. This increases firing of the Golgi tendon organ and augments the relaxation response. The response peaks at about two to three seconds after we stop contracting the target muscle, during which time we can take advantage of the “slack” that has been created and lengthen the muscle. The
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Ray Long (Anatomy for Backbends and Twists: Yoga Mat Companion 3)
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The muscle spindle reflex arc tapers off if you hold a stretch for a minute or so. It also diminishes if you contract its antagonist muscle. You can accelerate the acclimatization of the muscle spindle by backing off slightly from a deep stretch for three or four breaths. The muscle spindle will decrease its firing just as if you had held the stretch for a minute. You can then engage the antagonist muscles to go deeper into the pose.
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Ray Long (Anatomy for Backbends and Twists: Yoga Mat Companion 3)
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The Psychopathology of CCD
What am I doing tomorrow? Don’t ask me.
Just follow the dance of my double helix,
its sinuous spiral twisting like an impetuous nursery
of stars on a collision course with the child care nebula.
Maybe you can read my palm pilot for my schedule --
I’m just a drone serving the queen bee, serving some
other queen, in some master plan unknown to me,
possibly unknown even to the Omniscient Beeing,
no longer smug in Her certainty, her kids rooting for the teat
of extinction, thirsty, hungry, wet and gone clubbing all night.
I can’t handle the stress anymore, pesticides, cell phone radiation,
genetically modified crops, a Starbucks on every other block,
global warming, gay marriage and now this economic crisis.
Fuck it! I’m not going back to the hive. I’ve flying to Bali
and opening up a yoga/dance studio with an organic café.
“Wait! I’m coming with you.”
“Me too!
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Beryl Dov
“
Therein lies the promise and potential danger of yoga: under its deceptively soft exterior lies a deep, sensual strength that calms and rebalances; but because it does not ground itself in functional physical challenges in the real world, its practitioners have a tendency to get twisted up into knots. For yoga to return to the realm of functional fitness, rather than simply perpetuate abstract movements that one yogi passed down to another, it would have to be regrounded in some real-world activity. Given yoga’s history, the natural choice would be sex. Based on a number of high-profile sex scandals between male yogis and their female students, that process appears to be well under way.
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John Durant (The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health)
“
The Golgi tendon organ detects increases in tension in the region and relays this information to the spinal cord, which then inhibits the muscle from contracting.
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Ray Long (Anatomy for Backbends and Twists: Yoga Mat Companion 3)
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Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A
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Rick Perlstein (The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan)
“
Moving through the postures stimulates the release of neurotransmitters called endorphins. These molecules interact with the same receptors in the brain as pain medications such as morphine, producing a sense of well-being and comfort.
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Ray Long (Anatomy for Backbends and Twists: Yoga Mat Companion 3)
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yoga positions. She's got all the curtains and blinds in her living room lifted, which exposes her half-dressed body as it twists itself into sexual positions. Of course they're sexual positions. You chicks may call it 'yoga' but it's really nothing more than sex practice. When else would you need to be that flexible except in someone's bed?
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Xavier Neal (Just Out of Reach (Just Series #1))
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MATCHING YOGA-BASED STRATEGIES TO GOALS FOR INTERVENTION Challenge Goal Chair-based Yoga Posture Feeling frozen, rigid, holding on to things (hoarding, constipation) Letting go Forward Fold Anxiety, tension, panic Decreasing hyperarousal Neck Rolls, Ratio Breathing, Belly Breathing Isolation Building relationship Mirrored mindful integrated movement; group practice Defensiveness, avoidance of intimacy Opening boundaries Sun Breaths Dissociation Grounding Mountain pose, noticing feet on floor Feeling off-balance, conflicting feelings Centering Seated Twist, Seated Triangle, Seated Eagle, balanced movement, bringing awareness to core Emotionally overwhelmed, unprotected Containment Child’s pose (adapted) Stuck, unable to make decisions or take action, unable to defend self Unfreezing; reorganizing active defenses Movement-based postures Somatic dissociation, emotional numbing Awareness of body Any mindfulness practice Reenactments, revictimization Boundaries Sensing body, creating physical boundaries Feeling helpless, disempowered Empowerment (feeling core power) Lengthening spine, Leg lifts, moving to standing posture Emotionally numb or shut down, low energy Decreasing hypoarousal Activating postures (standing), breathwork
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David Emerson (Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body)
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You don’t have to twist yourself into a pretzel. You don’t have to out-do or even match the person next to you. All you have to do is take care of yourself, in whatever way is appropriate for you today.
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Lisa Shea (Yoga for Stress Relief and Forgiveness (Nurturing Calm, Health, and Happiness through Yoga and Meditation Book 1))
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He had once waited for Ginger outside the yoga studio and surreptitiously watched through a window. She and her friend Caroline had twisted themselves into positions that made him hurt just to watch.
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Mar Preston (On Behalf of the Family (A Detective Dave Mason Mystery Book 3))
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The Patañjali yoga system is called aṣṭāṅga-yoga. Sometimes impersonalists pollute the Patañjali yoga system because they are monists. Patañjali describes that the soul is transcendentally pleased when he meets the Supersoul and sees Him. If the existence of the Supersoul and the individual is admitted, then the impersonalist theory of monism is nullified. Therefore some impersonalists and void philosophers twist the Patañjali system in their own way and pollute the whole yoga process.
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Anonymous
“
If you live well, you will be shocked and surprised to see how, at the end of your life, it all turns out. But like any great novel, the clues have always been there and the plot twists and turns were hidden in plain sight.
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Darren Main (The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living)
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Christians have made too much out of work in the same way that Americans have begun engaging in yoga competitions—twisted-up versions of a purer thing. Christians want to make a difference. So we do, and we do, and we do, and then we find ourselves exhausted. In
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Shauna Niequist (Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living)
“
So, tell me. If you don’t like EDM, what do you like?”
“Don’t listen to much music.”
“A hobby? You must have a hobby.”
He didn’t answer, but the brief flash of wariness in his eyes told me all I needed to know.
“You do have one! What is it? Let me guess, knitting. No, bird watching. No, cosplay.”
“No.”
“Stamp collecting? Yoga? Pokémon—”
“If I tell you, will you shut up?” he said crankily.
I responded with a beatific smile. “I might.”
Rhys hesitated for a long moment before saying, “I draw, sometimes.
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Ana Huang (Twisted Games (Twisted, #2))
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Dancing in a Hawaiian-print shirt? Joining me for sunrise yoga? Giving up red meat? The possibilities are endless.”
“Stella.” He leaned forward, his face serious. “The day I wear a Hawaiian-print shirt is the day cows fucking fly.
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Ana Huang (Twisted Lies (Twisted, #4))
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All the asanas fall into one of five categories: bending forward, bending to the side, bending backward, twisting, and balancing. These five actions can be done standing, sitting, lying face down, face up, on one’s side, or inverted. These five bodily positions correspond to the pancha mukhas (five faces) of Lord Shiva.
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Shandor Remete (Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga: The Principles of Hatha Yoga)
“
The art of yoga has nothing to do with bending and twisting your body, and everything to do with unbending your mind.
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Abhijit Naskar (Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One)
“
This other colleague invited me to a yoga class. I was not, in any way, shape, or form, a yogi. I was, if anything at that point, a gym rat, and gym rats don’t bend or twist easily. I didn’t want to go, but I did, remembering James’s words that I would “cold-bloodedly” have to go through the motions of being happier in order to actually become so.
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John Kaag (Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life)
“
A good generic sequence to use for your asana practice is — Warm-ups, standing poses, inverted poses, backbends, forward bends and twists, ending with Savasana.
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David Frawley (Yoga For Your Type: An Ayurvedic Approach to Your Asana Practice)
“
she couldn’t drag me to yoga class with her. Do you know what happens when seventy- and eighty-year-old women try to do yoga poses? I’ll tell you what happens: They fart. Repeatedly. And somehow, through this session of twisted old bodies and passing gas, I was supposed to NOT LAUGH.
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Erin Fry (Secrets of the Book)
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Spine rotation = Lie down on your back. Move your pelvis to the left and your head to the right side. Both to the other side. Twist on this way several times your spine.
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Nils Horn (Yoga Basic Knowledge: Exercises, Stories, Meditation and Enlightenment. Yoga for Beginners, Inner Peace and Happiness.)