August 2010 Newsletter

Fall is slowly approaching, so be sure to enjoy the warm summer days of August. I am excited to be finishing up David Williams Ashtanga For The Rest of Your Life workshop, and am full of new inspiration and ideas to integrate into our practice back at Yoga Eight.

Schedule Changes

With September creeping up on us, we have a few schedule changes that are planned. We will post the fall schedule on the website by mid August, but here are a couple of changes we are planning: The Monday, Wednesday and Friday noon classes are going away for the fall. We are changing/adding to the Tuesday & Thursday morning class start times, adding an extra early morning class at 5:45am and a “later” class at 7:00am. The Monday & Wednesday 8:45am class will be moving to 8:00am. Also keep an eye out for a Sunday evening class or two!

Apprentice Program

We still have a space or two left in our apprentice program, so if you are interested in developing your own yoga practice and possibly expanding it to a teaching practice, please ask for more information.

Intro to Yoga Workshop

We are having our monthly Intro to Yoga Workshop next weekend, on Saturday from 1:00pm – 2:30pm. There are still spaces available, so if you are interested in going over some basics of your practice or know someone interested in starting a yoga practice and doesn’t know where to start, this is the workshop. (Plus it’s free)

Sanskrit term of the month

Hatha

When I first started yoga, I was told that hatha meant sun and moon, with ha = sun and tha = moon. Looking in Macdonell’s A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary, I found hatha to be defined as force, violence; obstinacy; (and more particular to yoga) forced meditation (a kind of yoga attended with great self-torture). Yikes! Thankfully, the yoga practiced today is a bit toned down from past practice (the dictionary was written in 1893). What I love to find in Sanskrit is cognates with English, and we can find one related to hatha. The ha part of hatha comes from the verbal root han, which is: to strike, destroy, kill, etc… In Sanskrit you can turn a verbal root into an agent noun with the addition of tr on the end of the verb. So taking han + tr, you have hantr – one who kills, which is cognate with hunter. Does this mean that the sun/moon meaning is not accurate? Not at all, the sun/moon aspect of hatha comes from a more folk orgin, retooling the term to incorporate the solar/lunar aspects of the body.

Closing Thoughts

On every email my statistics professor sent, he included this quote from Confucius:

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.
The second best time is now.

I think the same saying can apply to yoga:

The best time to start a yoga practice is 20 years ago.
The second best time is now.