Pure Yoga Texas, November 7-9, 2025

Workshop handout (PDF)
Signed certificate (Fillable PDF)
Student Survey

Group photo: you are welcome to use this as you wish. If professionally, please credit me (Lydia Mann).

QUOTES:
  • T.K.V. Desikachar: “Sthira is alertness without tension; Sukha is relaxation without dullness.”
  • T.K.V. Desikachar: “The recognition of confusion is itself a form of clarity.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “Flexibility without strength is instability. Strength without flexibility is rigidity.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “Breathing is shape change. Desikachar taught that spinal movement is shape change in your cavities — you cannot breathe without those movements.”
  • T.K.V. Desikachar: “Your yoga practice must always be a little more clever than your habits.”
  • T.K.V. Desikachar: “You cannot have yoga without viyoga.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “If you can make even a tiny bit of positive change in something you do a lot of (like walking or breathing), it leads to a lot of positive change.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “Proprioception is the ability to sense – within your connective tissues – your position, location, orientation, and movement.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “The benefit of learning a new breathing technique is unlearning your old way of breathing.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “As educators we must balance technique with inquiry.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “Asanas don’t have alignment, people have alignment. Asana is something people do, it does not exist outside of an individual’s body.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “Breath (and thus yoga) is the great teacher of tapas, svadhyaya, isvarapranidhana. Tapas refers to that which you can change; isvarapranidhana relates to the stuff you can’t change; svadhyaya refers to self-reflection, the introspection that allows us to distinguish one from the other.”
  • T.K.V. Desikachar: “The form of an asana must serve its function.”
  • Leslie Kaminoff: “It is far more powerful to engage someone in an inquiry than issue a series of instructions and corrections.”
  • Amy Matthews, paraphrasing Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen: “Healthy movement is well-distributed: a little bit of movement from a lot of places.” This was further clarified by Leslie: “a little bit of movement, coming from a lot of places, repeated a reasonable number of times.”
  • Conversely, Leslie Kaminoff says “Unhealthy movement is too much movement coming from too few places repeated too many times (repetitive stress).”
  • BoS : CoG : RoM – Leslie’s movement philosophy: start with BoS before moving on to changing your center of gravity (core in motion) before RoM (full expression of the pose). If at any point you experience difficulty, go back to the prior step:
    • BoS: Base of Support
    • CoG: Center of Gravity
    • RoM: Range of Motion
WATCH/LISTEN:
RECOMMENDED READING:
Tuesday November 11 7:30-9:30pm
Interactive Talk: Toward a Rational Yoga: Spirituality without Mysticism
at Sukha 1305 Oltorf Street
(behind the ABGB) Austin
KNMLabs.com next lab August 9-15, 2026
Should We Keep Mula Bandha All The Time?
Should We Keep Mula Bandha All The Time?
Have you heard advice about maintaining mula bandha all the time? Have you heard advice about maintaining any body position all the time? Join Leslie and students as they examine well-meaning advice, habits, and practices you can follow to honor the balance into your system.

WHAT IS FLEXIBILITY, AND HOW MUCH DO WE REALLY NEED?
Do you do yoga to live a better life, or do you live to do better yoga? Your answer may surprise you, and it will help you learn where to set healthy limits in your own practice.

HONESTY IN YOGA CREDENTIALING
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