Don’t get too bent out of shape by all the recent who hah from the New York Times article about the dangers of Yoga. There may be some dangers in using Yoga to get yourself bent into shape, but that is no great revelation and nothing to fear. I’ve cautioned for many years, and wrote in YBB, asanas are tools, not goals, and they can cut both ways. Is a knife good or bad? Yes! Read the rest of this entry »
How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
January 15th, 2012Ganga featured in 805 Santa Barbara Magazine
June 25th, 2011
Click photo for complete view
How Do we know we are progressing in Yoga?
June 25th, 2011(Question from Yoga Teacher Training, June, 2011)
Real progress n Yoga starts when you learn to see and feel, for yourself, the actual effects of the various poses. A teacher can tell you what the benefits of a pose are, but when you actually feel it yourself, it is much more effective. It is like the difference between being told what the gears in a car do and learning to use them skillfully yourself and to feel their effects on the road and control of the vehicle. As you progress, or become more effective at using the tools of Yoga, you develop the ability to articulate joints, vertebra, tendons and nerves as you tune into more subtle aspects of what the internal actions of the postures are. You learn how to remove the imbalances created by other activities and to reduce the stress we all accumulate. It’s also important to remember that the essence of yoga is about awareness and consciousness. Real progress is expressed as mental clarity, happiness, and insight into living.
Yoga Beyond Belief reviewed in L.A. Yoga
January 23rd, 2011The following review was written by Dr. Lorin Roche and was published in the December issue of L.A. Yoga:
Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice by Ganga White.
This book comes with an introduction by Sting, who writes, “This book offers a flexible perspective,” which is definitely something you want in a book on Yoga. Ganga has amazing credentials; he is the only person I know who began studying Yoga with a Zoroastrian high priest, and has been teaching Yoga since 1967, when he opened the original Center for Yoga on Sunset Boulevard in LA. Read the rest of this entry »
The Yoga Break
October 8th, 2010By: Joanna Bateman, LuxEco Living
Woke up this morning to the roar of the 101 outside my bedroom window, quite a drastic difference from the crickets that hummed me gently to sleep in my yurt just one month before. That’s right–yurt. AKA a glorified ti-pi with three futons in it. But wait, let me back up – Ya see, I’m a mid-west girl who recently moved west to California to spread my wings and fly. And if it weren’t for this past August, I’d be one stressed-out-Sally in the big sea of crazy known as Los Angeles. I needed to ground myself so that I didn’t float away in La La land. I needed Yoga camp! Read the rest of this entry »
Yoga Beyond Belief
March 8th, 2010By Ganga White
Reprinted from Yoga Beyond Belief, Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter, circa 1676
Yoga’s growing popularity in the West raises many questions. For example, is yoga becoming “Americanized” and does that Americanization degenerate the purity or authenticity of the teachings? If yoga is being changed in the West, what right do we have to make these modifications? These concerns also raise deeper questions: What is the nature of tradition and authority? Can we truly know exactly what was taught and practiced in the past? Is there any actuality to the concept of “pure teachings” from the past? Read the rest of this entry »
