The Weeks Well

Dr. Shyam Ranganathan holds an MA in South Asian Studies and an MA and PhD in Philosophy. He’s a strong voice on social media, and his is one of the few yoga handles that actually stops my scroll. That's for the same reason he kept me pretty rapt in our conversation. Here we talked about his research on understanding how Non-Western traditions such as yoga are marginalized in a Western world and how BIPOC traditions of philosophy can help understand colonialism and inform our way forward and away from it.

We discussed how he approaches the practice of yoga, which he basically equates with the word 'Bhakti' since both words point to devotional practices; he describes yoga as being about devotion to individual and personal autonomy or sovereignty. Since so many of us don’t speak or study Sanskrit as a language or study yoga the way Dr. Ranganathan has–it strikes me that there is a lot to learn here. He offers a fresh perspective on pre-colonial yoga and how we can reclaim threads of it into our modern understanding of what we’re doing and how we’re practicing. I absolutely loved this conversation and hope you do too. 

____

Terms:

1. Logos: an appeal to the audience's sense of reason or logic

2. Religio: A Greek term originally meaning an obligation to the Gods

3. Dharma: duty

4. Churning of the Milk Ocean: an event in Hindu mythology when the gods obtain immortality by consuming the elixir of immortality

5. Ishvara: in Hinduism, God understood as a person

6. Tapas: spiritual austerity

7. Svadhyaya: spiritual study

8. Samskara: mental impression

9. Puja: worship service

10. Virtue ethics: a philosophical approach that urges people to live a moral life by cultivating virtuous habits

11. Consequentialism: a theory that says whether something is good or bad depends on its outcomes

12. Deontology: the study of nature of duty and obligation

13. Bhakti: devotional worship directed to one supreme deity

14. Kaivalya: experience of absoluteness

15. Dharmamegha samadhi: cloud of virtue samadhi (contemplation); when you have lost even the desire for enlightenment

16. Brahmans: members of the highest Hindu caste

17. Asmita: ego sense

18. Vyasa: a revered sage in most Hindu traditions

19. Samkhyakarika: the earliest surviving text of the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy

20. Vrtti: modification

____

References:

1. Dr. Shyam Ranganathan's Yoga Philosophy website

2. Dr. Shyam Ranganathan's Instagram account

3. Hatha Yoga Pradipika, by Swami Muktibodhananda 

4. The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, by Thenmozhi Soundararajan

5. Anjali Rao's episode on The Weeks Well

6. Shannon Crow's episode on The Weeks Well

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

One thing that I took away from my conversation with Patty Townsend is a dead ringer for something I took away from my talk with Jillian Pransky. I almost named these two episodes part 1 and part 2 because of the intersection of a few things: that of giving and receiving both friendship in and wisdom—love, really—in the practice.

It was a delight hearing about Patty's early days with Ashtanga, and then Iyengar, and then Tantra, and her other influential teachers, but what struck me most was her relationship with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a movement artist interested in every type of healthy, holistic movement you can imagine.

Back to the friendship piece—Patty learned early on in her yoga career that there is no hierarchy in yoga, and no validity in the patriarchy to be sure. There is just co-creation, learning, and then more learning. Most of all, as she puts it: It’s not the mat, it’s the dishes and the children. I hope you enjoy this conversation with another maturing, great teacher who, in this case, has crisscrossed lineages to profound and inspiring effect.

____

Terms:

1. Purusha: the divine Self which abides in all beings

2. Prakriti: the Nature

3. Sushumna: the main energy channel of the subtle body

4. Chakras: seven energy points running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head

5. Hatha Yoga: the physical aspect of Yoga practice, including postures (asanas), breathing techniques (pranayama), seals (mudras), locks (bandhas), and cleansing practices (kriyas)

6. Shiva: God as auspiciousness

7. Shakti: power, energy or force

8. Samskaras: mental impressions

9. Koshas: the five layers (or sheaths) of the subtle body

10. Sarvangasana: shoulder stand

11. Sirsasana: headstand

12. Marichyasana 4: a twisting pose dedicated to the sage Marichi

13. Santosha: contentment; the second of the niyamas in the Eight Limbs of Yoga

14. Viveka: discrimination of the real from the unreal

____

References:

1. Patty Townsend

2. Bonnie Baninbridge Cohen

3. Ganga White

4. Ana Forest

5. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

6. Patabhi Jois

7. BKS Iyengar

8. Kofi Busia

9. Dona Holleman

10. Viktor Van Kooten

11. Angela Farmer

12. Richard Freeman

13. Beryl Bender

14. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino

15. Veronique Vienne

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

Have you ever thought about relaxation being a prerequisite to rest? Jillian Pransky does, and she says that relaxation is a prerequisite to listening. As we discuss here, it’s a process, and one that, thanks to science, we can now name and describe in detail. I would suggest that Jillian is part of a new cadre of experienced teachers exploring the art and practice of restorative yoga, which, yes, has its roots in Iyengar Yoga, but which is evolving beyond this original offering through such interdisciplinary health-span studies as the ones Jillian has been engaged in.

Jillian's teaching is most influenced by the Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chӧdrӧn. We go deeply into her experience as the yoga teacher for Chӧdrӧn's years of retreats at Omega Institute, when she "rewired her brain" to teach the way she does now. Like many, Jillian grew up ambitious, athletic, and professionally successful, and what she has found through years of practice is a sweet spot of nervous system and body-based regulation that comes from aligning the somatic layers of the body—these in the South Asian philosophy and practice are the physical, mental, emotional, breath, and bliss layers, or the koshas.

I can't recommend her Deep Listening enough, and I remain astonished that she was even able to use it as a title because isn’t that what all yoga practice is? I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! Send feedback!

____

Terms:

1. Yoga asana: yoga postures

2. Guru/Shisya: spiritual guide or teacher

3. Tantra Yoga: a practice using yantra (a figure representing a particular aspect of the Divine) and mantra (a sound formula for meditation) to experience the union of the masculine and feminine within the individual

4. Chakras: seven energy points running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head

____

References:

1. Jillian Pransky

2. ⁠Deep Listening, by Jillian Pransky⁠

3. Dr. Gail Parker on The Weeks Well

4. Transcendental Meditation

5. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, by John Bradshaw

6. Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession, by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

7. Alan Finger and Mani Finger

8. ISHTA Yoga

9. The Connected Yoga Teacher Podcast

10. International Association of Yoga Therapists

11. Jon Kabat-Zinn

12. Deepak Chopra

13. Omega Institute

14. Swami Vivekananda

15. Hatha Yoga Pradipika, by Swami Muktibodhananda

16. JJ Gormley

17. Tara Brach

18. Sharon Salzburg

19. Sylvia Boorstein

20. Seane Corn

21. Metta Institute

22. Eddie Stern

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

Shannon Crow started her podcast, The Connected Yoga Teacher, in 2017. She did so after taking multiple teacher trainings and finding herself disconnected from her fellow trainees right after the training ended. This disconnection was something she also found as she started getting to know yoga teachers out in the world: From competition to cults, she found that teachers were not able to discover their true selves in teaching. So, she decided to help teachers feel more connected and to define their niche which, she says, gets rid of the competition because a) niching helps you do what you are most interested in and passionate about, and b) it enables you to be more collegial with other teachers as you refer students to the teacher you know works best for them. Shannon is also now deeply engrossed in pelvic health, which is why she has started the organization Pelvic Health Professionals. In this inspiring conversation, Shannon and I explore how yoga teachers can teach to their passion, and she encourages listeners not to give up.

____

Terms:

1. Bhakti yoga: yoga of devotion; a path containing practices to unite the practitioner with the divine

2. Mantra: a sound formula for meditation

3. Sadhana: spiritual practice

4. Mula bandha: the root lock located at the base of the torso

5. Endometriosis: a condition in which endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus

6. The eight limbs of yoga: the eightfold path described in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, including yamas (abstinence), niyamas (observance), asana (postures), pranayama (breathing practices), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), dharana (concentration), dhyana (mediation), and samadhi (contemplation)

7. Ahimsa: non-harming or non-violence

8. Koshas: the five layers (or sheaths) of the subtle body

9. BKS Iyengar: the founder of Iyengar Yoga

10. Guru: spiritual guide

11. Shishya: succession from guru to disciple

12. Baddha konasana: lying down bound angle pose

13. Savasana: corpse pose

____

References:

1. Shannon Crow Yoga and Consulting

2. The Connected Yoga Teacher podcast

3. Pelvic Health Professionals

4. Anatomy of Hatha Yoga: A Manual for Students, Teachers, and Practitioners, by H David Coulter

5. Kathryn Bruni-Young's Mindful Strength

6. Abhijata Iyengar

7. Hatha Yoga Pradipika, by Swami Muktibodhananda 

8. Amanda Kingsmith on the Weeks Well podcast

9. Shelly Prosko of Physio Yoga

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

How many black men in their late 40s do you know teaching yoga and wellness? I met Reggie about 10 years ago as he began his mindfulness and wellness journey at the age of 40. Our conversation here, about what it means to practice being well, had all the threads of love, health, grace, peace, and joy (words he used in an email exchange after our talk). It’s a different kind of talk than the ones I normally have on this podcast, and that's because Reggie's emergence into this practice has come from half a lifetime of pain, grief, disappointment, and other feelings he says are necessarily ones you can't shy away from.

Of note for me, as I continue to learn about the wellness and yoga world in Denver: Reggie found his practice here in Mile High at a yoga studio called Kindness Yoga. Incredibly, given Reggie's deep and subtle work in this world, this studio has closed because its white male owner was canceled in 2020. Growth in any industry is difficult, and social accountability in the early 21st century is particularly swift and deep (if you're willing to be accountable!), and I want to bring up this interesting intersection because the Kindness closing is something I've wanted to explore on this podcast as well.

Reggie and I discuss all kind of things in our talk: the racism, the microagressions, and the sorrow and grief that he has had to get through to begin teaching what he has to say. His organization Active Peace Yoga launched about a month before George Floyd was murdered, for example. Since then, he has been talking nonstop about activism, peace, and yoga in his lived experience in his body. Enjoy!

____

Terms:

1. Asana: postures

2. Sadhana: a spiritual practice or way of life

3. Karma: the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, which help decide their fate in future existences

4. Ahimsa: non-violence or non-harming

5. Sadhakas: someone who follows a certain sadhana with the aim of achieving a certain goal

6. Bija sound: a single-syllable sound that can be used in meditation

7. Satya: truth

____

References:

1. Active Peace Yoga with Reggie Hubbard

2. Reggie Hubbard on Instagram

3. Kripalu event - Permission and Refuge: A Meditative Livestream Experience

4. Harlem Shake by Baauer

5. Toni Carey

6. The Weeks Well episode with Eddie Stern

7. The Weeks Well episode with Seane Corn

8. Kindness Yoga

9. The Weeks Well episode with Monique Schubert

10. Activist in Residence Program At Kripalu

11. Sonya Renee Taylor

12. The Weeks Well episode with Jivana Heyman

13. The Weeks Well episode with Anjali Rao

14. Pamela Stokes Eggleston

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

I decided to keep going with Doug Keller, whose first talk continues to be one of our most popular episodes. We did a minor review of his first talk, which was as dense and captivating as this one. Then, Doug explored what became a set of expanded precepts whose inclusion into modern practice could, in my opinion, change the game. These are 20 yamas (restraints) and niyamas (observances), rather than the 10 that nearly every yoga teacher at least touches on in a teacher training. Doug points to the Natha Yogis, who in the 9th-10th centuries carried on with these behavioral suggestions for living a good life and, in doing so, embraced the tradition in yoga of practicing, experimenting, sitting with those experiments, and practicing some more. I think it's time in modern yoga to consider some grounded experimentation and reflection as Doug and I explored here. We got into politics, social issues, and all kinds of other aspects that I hope delight you as much as the last episode did.

____

Terms:

1. Prakriti: the Nature

2. Upanishads: Hindu religious texts in Sanskrit that make up the Vedas

3. Mahavira: founder of Jain spiritual system

4. Vedas: the most ancient Hindu scriptures, written in Sanskrit

5. Mahabharata: a Sanskrit epic poem, which includes the Bhagavad Gita

6. Pada: portion

7. Kleshas: obstacles; the kleshas are considered the cause of suffering and are to be actively overcome

8. Henry Thomas Colebrooke: a Sanskrit scholar and orientalist

9. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: a German philosopher who is considered one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy

10. Ralph Waldo Emerson: an American writer and philosopher who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century

11. Henry David Thoreau: an American wrier and philosopher who was a leading transcendentalist

12. Neo-Vedanta: also called Hindu modernism, the Hinduism that developed in the 19th century

13. Swami Vivekananda: the first Hindu teacher to arrive in New England and taught Vedanta

14. Chakras: seven wheels of energy in the body located from the base of the spine to the crown of the head

15. Hatha Yoga Pradipika: a 15th-century Sanskrit text on hatha yoga

16. Western Esotericism: combines spirituality with an observation of the natural world while also relating humanity to the universe

17. Samadhi: contemplation; the final limb of the eight limbs of yoga

18. Jivanmukta: someone who has gained complete self-knowledge and self-realization and has attained liberation

19. Dharma: one's duty

20. Kama: pleasure, enjoyment, desire

21. Kaivalya: a state of liberation reached by realizing that one's consciousness is separate from Nature (prakrti)

22. Natha Yoga: a variation of Tantric yoga; melded principles from yoga, Buddhism and the Shaivism branch of Hinduism

23. Bindhu: a point, drop, or dot

24. Purusha: the divine Self which abides in all beings

25. Muktananda: the founder of Siddha Yoga

26. René Descartes: a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

27. Tantra: a type of yoga using yantra (a sacred geometrical figure) and mantra (a sound formula) to experience the union of the masculine and feminine within the individual

28. Mukti: spiritual liberation

____

References:

1. ⁠⁠Doug Keller⁠

2. ⁠⁠J-aim⁠⁠

3. ⁠⁠Christopher Key Chapple⁠⁠

4. ⁠⁠Raja Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda⁠⁠

5. ⁠⁠The Weeks Well episode with Seane Corn⁠⁠

6. ⁠⁠Doug Keller's guide to the yamas and niyamas⁠⁠

7. ⁠⁠The Weeks Well episode with Eddie Stern⁠⁠

8. ⁠⁠The Weeks Well first episode with Doug Keller⁠

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

Seane Corn is one of the most influential people in modern yoga. Her journey in yoga teaching and service work started after her teacher training and at the moment she "niched" into a student group she believed she could help. When she met her students at Children of the Night, a non-profit serving girls between 12-17 who had been sex trafficked, she says they served her, rather than the other way around. Since then she has taken her career into many important areas of the yoga market: She has raised millions of dollars for the various organizations she has founded and/or served (see: Off The Mat Into The World), written a popular book (Revolution of the Soul), and continued to teach her heart out. Now, after 25 years of teaching yoga, she is starting a teacher training program. In this conversation, we dive deeply into the shadow work she has done to evolve her practice—to drive her pain into purpose. Seane talked to me about how wonderfully adjunctive both psychotherapy and the map of the energetic body have been as she continues excavating and embracing the fact that a spiritual path means recognizing that we’re all capable of hurting and being hurt.

____

Terms:

1. Vagus nerve: responsible for the regulation of internal organ functions, such as heart rate and respiratory rate, as well as vasomotor activity, and certain reflex actions, such as coughing

2. Tantrika: relating to Tantra (a practice using yantra and mantra to experience the union of the positive and negative forces with an individual)

3. Prana: the vital energy

4. Chakras: seven energy points running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head

____

References:

1. Seane Corn

2. Revolution of the Soul, by Seane Corn

3. Mona Miller

4. Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

5. Children of the Night

6. John Schumacher

7. Rob Schware

8. Kali (Hindu goddess)

9. Eddie Stern

10. Stephen Cope

11. Off the Mat Into the World

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, ⁠Substack⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

Eddie Stern has been a spiritual seeker and curious contemplative his whole life. He has spent most of his time in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition and was a student of Pattabhi Jois, but along with many in the school, he has worked hard to heal traumas and elected to expand his view of practice participation in the world for the greater good. He recently decided to get his Masters degree (but he skipped college; listen in for the full details), and his dissertation was titled "Can Yoga Reduce Anxiety and Increase Perception of Purpose in life?" This work speaks to the heart of where he sees himself participating in the world for the rest of the time he's got here. The actions he’s taking in the world—such as inventing and sharing the popular The Breathing App, putting on a multi-month program with Deepak Chopra, and actually wanting to get into the ring and debate what he feels are incorrect and frankly harmful academic theories that have been promoted about yoga—are inspiring and, it seems to me, a function of his tireless intellect and desire to "do the work." It was that part that inspired me the most. Enjoy!

____

Terms:

1. Sangha: community

2. Ardha matsyendrasana: half lord of the fishes pose

3. Asana: postures, the third of the eight limbs of yoga

4. Pranayama: control of the breath, the fourth of the eight limbs of yoga

5. Pratyahara: withdrawal of the senses, the fifth of the eight limbs of yoga

6. Dharana: concentration, the sixth of the eight limbs of yoga

7. Dhyana: meditation, the seventh of the eight limbs of yoga

8. Kaivalya: experience of absoluteness, non-qualified experience

____

References:

1. Eddie Stern

2. The Broome Street Ganesha Temple

3. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

4. Swami Vivekananda

5. Yogananda

6. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa

7. Sir Isaac Newton

8. Leonardo da Vinci

9. Aristotle

10. Ramana Maharshi

11. Think on These Things, by Jiddu Krishnamurti

12. Dharma Mittra

13. Ravi Singh

14. Kundalini Yoga

15. Amrit Desai

16. Kripalu

17. Deepak Chopra

18. Chopra Foundation

19. Suicide prevention

20. Holger Kramer

21. Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory on Connection, Consciousness, and Being, by Neil Theise

22. Richard P. Brown

23. The Breathing App

24. Resonance frequency breathing

25. Nature Journal article on resonance breathing

26. Doug Keller's guide to the yamas and niyamas

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and to our latest regular content community, Substack. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

Kino MacGregor manages to walk a fine line between the scroll-stopping stuff of Instagram and the deep practice of belonging, discernment, and freedom in yoga. If you do just take her in on Instagram, I wonder if you look past her flawless yoga asanas and pictures of the far-flung places she teaches, and read what she writes about her practices and experiences. She says repeatedly that yoga is not about the poses, which she calls the "grammar" of yoga; it's about looking deeply inside and freeing yourself through sensation, experience, and love. The poses do teach you how to learn to be in and understand your body, but they, along with the myriad other practices of chanting, pranayama, meditation, deep relaxation, and more, teach you how to move from the dissociation of daily life to getting closer to your experience of God.

In this conversation, we talked primarily about: 1) the responsibility of yoga teachers to protect the practices and lineages, 2) how 200 hours of training prepares you only to know whether you want to teach or not, but not how to teach, 3) how deep immersive study is the only way NOT to appropriate these practices, 4) how Ashtanga Yoga can be an accessible practice, and 5) how devotion to teacher and your own practice, largely through tapas or burning zeal, is the only way you will grow in the practice. We covered a lot more, and I hope you enjoy!

____

Terms:

1. Asana: postures

2. Mantra: a sound formula for meditation

3. Sadhana: spiritual practice

4. Tapas: spiritual austerity or burning zeal

5. Arjuna: a main character in The Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu scripture)

6. Samskara: mental impression

7. Vasanas: the impression of actions that remains unconsciously in the mind and induces a person to repeat the action

8. Viveka: discriminative discernment of the untrue from the true

9. Abhinivesha: will to live

10: Koshas: sheaths of the body

11. Anamaya kosha: one of the five koshas, the food body

12. Manomaya kosha: one of the five koshas, the mind sheath

13. Pranamaya kosha: one of the five koshas, the vital energy or life force sheath

14. Anandamaya kosha: the last of the five koshas, the bliss sheath

15. Pranava: OM, the sacred sound

____

References:

1. Kino MacGregor

2. Miami Life Center

3. Omstars

4. Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health

5. The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran

6. Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda

7. The Road Not Traveled, by Robert Frost

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.

Rob Schware and Chelsea Roff are doing so many interesting things in yoga that I don't know where to start in these show notes. First, they are disruptors in an industry that since its modern inception has served a small group of suburban and urban women and the cultural elite. Give Back Yoga Foundation, the organization they run together as Co-Executive Directors, is in the business of serving people in need: those working with addiction, cancer, eating disorders, and those in prison. Schware says, in fact, that he thinks yoga is only about service.

Second, before she started working with Schware, Roff went on a yoga strike to raise money for her first organization, Eat Breathe Thrive. She did this to raise $50K to fund a research study on a yoga intervention for eating disorders. This speaks to the heart of Give Back Yoga: Disrupting a marketplace with care and a family-based approach to service those in need, but also, with scientific research. Those at Give Back wake up every day aiming to deliver more yoga services to those in need with interventions backed by research, and Roff's Eat Breath Thrive is just one of several organizations that Give Back fiscally sponsors to do their work. The organization also has donated more than 35,000 mats to teachers to help get the communities they serve practicing.

Finally, Give Back has launched a university for teachers all over the world to educate them on best practices for teaching the communities their sponsees have taught them how to work with. Schware says they are drawn to teachers and professionals with a “fire in the belly;” that phrase could well have been the title to this episode. Enjoy! Check out all the links from Give Back below, and I hope you consider working with them!

____

Terms:

1. Randomized Control Trials (RCTs): prospective studies that measure the effectiveness of a new intervention or treatment

2. Maitri: Sanskrit word meaning friendliness

3. Ahimsa: Sanskrit word meaning non-harming or non-violence

4. Bhakti yoga: yoga of devotion or love that unites the practioner with the divine

5. Samskara: Sanskrit word meaning mental impression

____

References:

1. Give Back Yoga Foundation

2. Eat Breathe Thrive

3. Mindful Yoga Therapy

4. Prison Yoga Project

5. Yoga of 12-Step Recovery

6. Yoga4cancer

7. The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute

____

Episode credits:

Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

____

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Weeks Well newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more info on Kim Weeks, visit www.weekswell.com.

Follow Kim on Instagram (@weeks.well), Facebook (@weeks.well), Twitter (@weeks_well), YouTube (@weekswell), Patreon (Weeks Well), and TikTok (@weekswell).

Copyright © 2023 Weeks Well®.