I watched a mind blowing BBC Documentary the other night on The Man Who Los His Body. Ian, an Englishman woke up one morning and found himself unable to move. He was not paralyzed but he experienced nerve damage in the part of his brain responsible for proprioception. His sense of touch was gone completely, yet he was not paralyzed. Doctors were baffled. There was no diagnosis for this odd condition (only 10 cases reported in the world!) and doctors concluded that Ian would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Through tedious hours, weeks, months and years of rehabilitation Ian was able to bypass his own nervous system relying solely on his vision and his memory of movement. Eventually Ian was able to teach himself to sit up, stand and walk again. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

Yoga, pranayama, asana, dharana....these words generally do not elicit anxious and hormone ridden middle school or high school students. Why not? Yoga isn't an 18+ modality. On the contrary, yoga is beautifully available to anyone and everyone at any time and now Y.O.G.A. for Youth is making this possibility a reality!

Between now and November 15, 2011 Y.O.G.A. for Youth is giving away a FREE quarter (10 weeks) of yoga classes to ONE lucky Los Angeles County
School on Sunday, December 4th, 2011.

After a Sunday of allowing myself the brief indulgence of wallowing in my perceived afflictions, I stumbled upon a special on a Discovery Channel special: Did God Create the Universe?   I've always been a philosophy junkie so I was hooked immediately. The argument presented by Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant scientific minds of our century, goes something like this: The law of gravity was the catalyst for the Big Bang Theory; the Big Bang literally spawned something out of nothing; therefore spontaneous creation is the reason that something, rather than nothing exists, that is why we exist. If this is indeed the case, there is no need to invoke the notion of a Divine Creator. Pretty radical stuff!

Over the centuries human beings have been able to utilize the laws of nature to make mind blowing discoveries like learning that the Earth actually orbits the Sun and not the other way around. The laws of nature are observable and tangible phenomena that create the fundamental reality of our existence; a reality studied tenaciously by scientists in hopes of one day understanding it fully. The fact that other planetary bodies have been found orbiting stars other than our own sun also make "coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable." The Big Bang Theory marks the beginning of time in the history of our universe and if Hawking is correct, a God could not have created the universe because there would be no time reference for the universe to be created in. This theory simultaneously shreds the possibility of an afterlife. The manifestation of our physical existence is it. Are you grateful? Are you sad? Are you angry? What if this is all she wrote folks?

Human nature is such that if we desire something, we will find a way to obtain that special something. Usually, this entails vinyasa krama or a logical progression of events .  “Vi” means “to arrange” and “nysasa” means “in a particular manner.” Krama  translates into “steps” we take in order to usefully execute a vinyasa. So it isn’t surprising that yoga offers us the Eightfold Path towards physical and spiritual enlightenment. The yoga sutras of the sage Patanjali dates back to around 200AD and is perhaps the savviest psychology I’ve tried on. Intellectually combing through the eight-limbed path is almost like peeling off the layers of an onion as it moves from simple, gross and tangible towards complex, subtle and intangible. The Eight Limbs of yoga emphasize that despite our human desires to obtain this or that, we learn the most not from attaining the desired end but from the voyage we took to arrive at our goal.