From a recent talk by Ganga:

Life is a journey with growth, change, and responsibility–response ability in the sense of refining our ability to respond appropriately. Asana, pranayama and meditation can be wonderful tools we continuously learn to use to tune and rebalance our bodies throughout our journey. This is what I mean by learning to use the techniques of yoga to serve our bodies, rather than using our bodies to attain a particular pose. We don’t necessarily just want to do yoga, but rather learn use yoga. We use it for our well being and to tune, refine, hone, sharpen, balance, relax, energize, and more.

A broader perspective of Yoga includes attuning our bodies and our lives. As we advance in Yoga we become more adept at, and sensitive to, what practices our body, and our life, need to re-balance and re-tune from the stresses and activities of living. Similarly there is no one fixed Yogic lifestyle. We often hear people speaking of how they are living the Yogic lifestyle. While there are certainly general principles, attitudes and intentions, there are myriad expressions of Yogic living in the same way that nature shows herself as diversity. Each person find his or her own unfolding expression and reintegration of Yoga with insight, kindness, sensitivity, intelligence and awareness.   You are your path.

Cheri Clampett, leader of our Therapeutic Yoga Training, recently posted Ganga’s Yoga Journal article done several years ago. We had several requests to make it more available so here it is on BLOGanga:
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To experience a profound opening of the heart, imagine yourself near life’s end.

By Ganga White
On my first trip to India in 1971, a yogi friend took me to the funeral pyres near the river Ganges. He told me that cremation is common in India and that some yogis make a meditation practice of watching the fires and the burning bodies, which he suggested we do.

We sat by the sacred river and watched a body, crackling and charring, disappear into its essence of dust and light. It melted into a film of ash and floated downstream.  As I watched the body burn on a pile of logs, my revulsion slowly began to subside. I felt sadness and joy, ending and beginning. My heart began to soften and open, and I saw deeper into both life and death through the doorway of flames. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent Yoga competition and the push to get Yoga into the Olympics has many yogis up in arms, in a nonviolent way of course…

I was recently interviewed about it on a PBS radio show (link to mp3) with many callers expressing opinions. It is commonly the case that many yogis are upset and voice that the “purity” of Yoga is being compromised by competition—which they assert should never be part of Yoga. Or they assert that competition isn’t “spiritual”, isn’t in accord with the eight limbs, or that it strengthens ego. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t get too bent out of shape by all the recent who hah from the New York Times article about the dangers of Yoga. There may be some dangers in using Yoga to get yourself bent into shape, but that is no great revelation and nothing to fear. I’ve cautioned for many years, and wrote in YBB, asanas are tools, not goals, and they can cut both ways. Is a knife good or bad? Yes! Read the rest of this entry »

The following review was written by Dr. Lorin Roche and was published in the December issue of L.A. Yoga:

Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice by Ganga White.

This book comes with an introduction by Sting, who writes, “This book offers a flexible perspective,” which is definitely something you want in a book on Yoga. Ganga has amazing credentials; he is the only person I know who began studying Yoga with a Zoroastrian high priest, and has been teaching Yoga since 1967, when he opened the original Center for Yoga on Sunset Boulevard in LA. Read the rest of this entry »