Listen to the audio version of this post on my podcast Sermons From the Mat! When I entered my first yoga class at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale, I entered an ugly, utilitarian room. I found a teeming, swarm of humanity. I did not see the 40 people the written class description claimed as…

When I began my application to the Kripalu School of Yoga, I came to the question: “What form of yoga do you study?” I went to my teacher in New Haven, (at the time I was studying at Yale Divinity School), and I asked her: “What kind of yoga do we do here?” She said…

The new year brings with it the earnest, hopeful and eager desires of our hearts to do things differently. Some decide, at the turn of the calendar, to begin yoga or to begin yoga again. Here then, from my nearly forty years of studying yoga, is a humble offering of ESSENTIALS as you begin or begin again…

About fifteen years ago, one of my yoga students brought her husband to a class. He had never taken yoga before. An older man, though in no way “old,” he practiced next to his wife as I led the class. When we began to move through some balance poses, this person started to fall, to…

In the classic Dr. Seuss book, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, there’s a page about one of the places we often end up in: The Waiting Place. Here you’ll find a brilliant description of a place some of us stay in for too long, a place where everyone is simply waiting, waiting for something, for anything,…

If you know me, you know I love a metaphor. Probably I live by metaphor. The other day, after visiting a church, and thinking about my life as a progressive minister/spiritual/yoga teacher, I finally had the image in mind. Being a progressive minister is just like getting on the Titanic after hitting the iceberg and…

When I got married, my first husband and I decided that I would stay home with the children. Every one has their reasons. Ours certainly came out of the financial situation. What I made would barely cover daycare costs. But it also came out of a value-heavy conversation. I wanted to stay home with the baby. My…

I learned the other day that one of my mother’s Christmas novels, Let It Snow, is being made into a Hallmark Christmas movie. A very exciting announcement for a woman who, at the tender age of let’s say less than eighty but in shouting distance of it, enjoys a fantastic success. Her thirty four novels…

When the police man pulled me over the other night, the baby screaming in the car like a hungry, exhausted little person who’d spent too many hours at the county fair, I thought to myself: I will not cry. And I did not cry. For the first two minutes. When he walked away with my license,…

Modern American yoga primarily belongs to women. Not so for earlier yoga or for the yoga of India or the yoga of long ago—the details of which are mostly lost to us. It is a feminist issue then, not simply because it is made of so many women, but because the modern practice is obsessed…