QUOTES:
- From Leslie’s work with Amy Matthews, which references her work with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen: “Alignment is a clear pathway of weight passing through balanced joint spaces.”
- T.K.V. Desikachar: “Your yoga practice must always be a little more clever than your habits (tapas).”
- Leslie Kaminoff: “If you can make even a tiny bit of positive change in something you do a lot of (breathing, walking), that’s a lot of positive change.”
- Leslie Kaminoff: “Figuring out (swadhaya) what is negotiable (tapas) and what is not (ishvara pranidhana) – based on your anatomy – is the basis of Yoga practice.”
- 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.”
- 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.”
- Leslie Kaminoff on teaching bandhas: “If you’re going to ask someone to engage a muscle, you better make sure they can release it first or it’s just tension on top of tension.”
- Leslie Kaminoff: “Flexibility without strength is instability. Strength without flexibility is rigidity.”
- T.K.V. Desikachar: “The success of Yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships.”
- T.K.V. Desikachar: “Whenever you are in doubt, it is best to pause. Few things are so pressing that they cannot wait for a moment of breath.”
WATCH/LISTEN:
- Prana chant video
- The Warrior Series: Upwardly Mobile video and article on Yoga Journal website
- Tom Myers’ Deep Front Line dissection video
- Gil Hedley’s courses and video clips
- Freeing the Breath: Health, Relaxation, and Clarity Through Better Breathing with Leslie Kaminoff
- YouTube channels: free shorts from YogaAnatomy.net online courses and Leslie’s Breathing Project Q&A series. Got a yoga or anatomy question you’d like Leslie to address? Send it to questions@yogaanatomy.org.
- Jessica Wolf’s Art of Breathing
- Yoga Alliance’s Yoga Talks with Leslie Kaminoff on Regulation
- Jill Miller – “Hip Replacement Surgery” on J. Brown’s podcast
- The Man Who Lost His Body, documentary about proprioception
RECOMMENDED READING:
- ANATOMY:
- Yoga Anatomy, 3rd edition
- Yoga Journal article: Anatomy 101: Understanding Your Tailbone by Amy Matthews and Leslie Kaminoff
- More Leslie Kaminoff content on Yoga Journal
- Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists by Thomas W. Myers
- Your Body, Your Yoga and Your Spine, Your Yoga: Developing stability and mobility for your spine by Bernie Clark
- HISTORY / BIOGRAPHY / PHILOSOPHY:
- Sri T. Krishnamacharya’s history of classical alignment in the Yoga Makaranda, part I (PDF) and Yoga Makaranda, part II (PDF)
- 100 Years of Beatitude – T. Krishnamacharya’s Centennary (low-resolution VHS transfer)
- Religiousness in Yoga: Lectures on Theory and Practice by T.K.V.Desikachar
- Claude Marechal’s article describing some of the teaching of Professor Krishnamacharya: Teachings
- Health, Healing, and Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of T. Krishnamacharya by T.K.V. Desikachar and R.H. Cravens
- Yoga Yajnavalkya (PDF) or book, by A. G. Mohan
- Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
- The “Yoga Sutra of Patanjali”: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books) by David Gordon White
- “Seizing the Whip: B. K. S. Iyengar and the Making of Modern Yoga” by Eric John Shaw, California Institute of Integral Studies, Asian and Comparative Studies
- “The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West” by Michelle Goldberg
- Leslie’s original post on providing certificates.
- Yoga Alliance “Statement on Yoga Therapy”
- Leslie’s blog post from 2008: “I’m Not a Yoga Therapist Anymore“
- SCIENCE / PAIN / MEDICINE:
- YOGA PRACTICE:
- The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice by T.K.V. Desikachar
- Yoga for Wellness: Healing with the Timeless Teachings of Viniyoga by Gary Kraftsow
- Intelligent Yoga: Re-educating Mind and Body by Peter Blackaby
- Wild Thing Is Not Impossible (but it still might not be worth doing) by Amy Matthews
- Teaching Inclusive, Safe And Ethical Yoga – Part 1: Empowerment by Yonnie Fung
- Students of T.K.V. Desikachar:
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.
