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Podcast #1

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Yoga & the Zone

Have you ever been in "the zone"? Athletes talk about it reverently. It's that magical place where things slow down, the ball gets bigger, vision gets sharper, where difficult things become easy. Where that same shot that you've missed a hundred times now seems to just go right in eight, nine, ten times in a row? When defenders just seem to clear out of your way and the ball seems to be moving in slow motion? In interviews after the game, they talk about how it felt, how easy everything seemed. Before the next game they say how they hope that they can get into the zone again.

Yoga says that the zone...

What Are We Practicing Here, Anyway?

A cell phone goes off in the middle of shivasana. What happens inside your head? Are you annoyed? Do you open your eyes and look around to see who the idiot was who didn't shut off her phone before class. Are you affronted that you were disturbed from your peaceful time by this digital clatter?

Consider that the cell phone is part of your practice. That it's a teacher and a friend. Consider that the ability to cultivate equanimity and peace while sitting cross-legged in a candlelit room with soft music playing doesn't come in handy all that often. The world is loud, and distracting, and intrusive. In the outside world, where you really need them, those quiet rooms are hard to come by. That's why our vinyasa practice sets...

Reprogramming Your Central Nervous System, (take 1)

Here's basically how your brain works. Let's say your six-year old daughter is trying to learn how to catch a baseball. The approaching ball triggers a series of neurons to fire off, creating a response in the brain and in the body. At first, the response patterns are relatively varied, creating an uncoordinated set of movements, but you're a persistent parent and continue to practice with her. Repeated exposure to the stimulus of the approaching ball allow the brain to associate certain sets of neurological reactions with positive outcomes (i.e. a catch) and others with negative outcomes (i.e. a bonk in the head). Over time the brain uses a series of chemical inhibitors and exciters to stack the deck of reaction. The inhibitors make those neurological sequences that cause bad outcomes less likely to occur and the exciters increase the probability of sequences that cause positive outcomes. Think of it as 'burning in' the response. This is basically why practice makes perfect...

Reprogramming Your Central Nervous System, (take 2)

Emergence theory studies the way that groups of individuals, by reacting to each other and the environment, can develop a collective intelligence that surpasses in both efficiency and flexibility anything that could be designed with a centralized design model. The classic example is ant colonies.

Ant colonies are not directed by the queen ant. In fact, the queen is nothing more than a birthing machine as far as the hierarchy of the colony is concerned. The colony has no leader whatsoever, and individual ants have a very simple set of rules that govern their activity. Any given ant can take any of the roles at any time. For this example, let's simplify the activities of the colony to finding food, cleaning and building. Ants leave a pheromone trail as they move, and the chemical composition of the trail communicates the function that they're currently taking. So any given ant can tell...