Understand your body. Understand your practice.

Yoga grows lighter when we know what we are doing and why. Understand is the place to study it, slowly and with care: the body as it is built and as it moves, and the ideas that have shaped the practice over centuries.

There are two doors, and they open into the same room.

The Body

Anatomy, biomechanics and alignment, one question at a time.

What is the shoulder doing when a posture feels good? Where does the weight travel? Why does this cue help one person and not another? With labeled anatomical drawings, simple tests you can try in your own body, and cues that follow from what the joints are doing, we look at a posture from the ground up.

The first course, on Downward Dog, is in preparation.

The Mind

The philosophy of yoga, read as living ideas.

The Yoga Sutras, Samkhya, Vedanta and the Hatha texts, the five koshas, the way attention works. We read them with a philosopher’s habits: which text is this, from which century, and what was it for? Then we ask what the idea offers to a practice today.

How we study

• We look before we correct.
• One idea at a time, held with care.
• Every idea is tried in your own body.
• Sources are named, and what is tradition and what is interpretation stays clear.

A good place to begin

Read the Mauna Notes: the Downward Dog series for The Body, and the series on the five koshas for The Mind.