The Hugger Mugger Yoga Blog

Are you a yoga teacher? What inspired you to share yoga with others? Who have been your most influential yoga teachers? Teaching yoga is an honor....

    Every living being breathes. This includes all animals—even single-celled ones—and all plant life. Human beings take an average of 23,000 breaths each day. Our...

Hatha Yoga is the combination of postures and breathing practices. For centuries, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika defined physical yoga practice. Most of the 15 poses described...

Forward bends are asana staples. In yoga practice, we bend forward while standing, sitting and even lying down. Actively lengthening the hamstrings and muscles of the...

Every July since 2014, my life partner and I have attended an 18-day metta/insight meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. We signed up again last...

When your first leave the comfort of your bed each morning, what’s the first thing you want to do? Like other animals—think about your cat or dog—our instinct is...

Asana, the physical practice, is the most recognizable of the eight limbs of yoga. If you mention “yoga,” most people will automatically picture a person in...

“Listen to your body” has become a widely disseminated instruction in the yoga world. It’s an important one, a skill that reaches out into life off...

Before I began teaching yoga, I assisted in classes for about four years. My job was to walk around the room and make adjustments while the...

Lotus Pose (Padmasana) may be yoga asana’s most recognizable pose. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy or accessible to every body. Lotus Pose requires a whole...

Much is made of hip opening in yoga. Maybe this comes from the iconic photos of East Indian yogis we all admired when yoga became popular...

I’ve only injured myself once in 38 years of yoga practice. It happened when a teaching colleague told me my Headstand (Sirsasana) was incorrect because I...

Many years ago, I read an interview with Rajiv and Swati Chanchani in Yoga Rahasya, an Iyengar Yoga publication from India. In the article, they shared...

I like to sequence my asana classes in an arc. This means that we start slow, work up to more complicated poses, and then cool down...

Yoga gossip. No matter how big our small our yoga community is, it seems there’s always some sort of buzz. We are competitive beings, after all....

In a recent post, I wrote about the Eight Limbs of Yoga. The Eight Limbs are a framework for practicing all aspects of the system of...

Many years ago, my mother fell and broke her hip. Or maybe her hip broke and she fell as a result. Sometimes it’s impossible to know...

Yoga teachers often describe yoga poses in terms of their heating and cooling qualities. Heating yoga includes standing poses, backbends and core work. Cooling yoga involves...