From the category archives:

Upward Blog

Yoga and Mental Health: 45 Years Later

September 17, 2010

Yoga May Improve Social, Occupational Functioning in Schizophrenia Patients | Psych Central News. Baba Ram Dass and the late Tim Leary left Harvard after working with mental illness and psychedelics. Perhaps yoga practice presents a less violent means of psychic reintegration from those suffering from mental diseases.

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Real Men Do Yoga: The Growing Trend for Guys

September 17, 2010

Real Men Do Yoga: The Growing Trend for Guys Right now, 85% of Yoga Journal’s conference-goers are female. Male boomers, however, may well be the source from which American yoga ceases to be gender-biased. There may be something more at stake as well: older persons may well have psychological capacities and accumulated experience such that [...]

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Lululemon: Is Commercial Success Yoga Success?

September 17, 2010

Lululemon more than doubles profits. Does the success of lululemon spell ‘success’ for the yoga community and movement? Or is it merely a consumerist debasement of the tradition, an attempt to supplement practice with enough ‘gear’ to get us kali-yuga materialists good and excited about the yoga-image? So here’s the question: can cynical business enterprises [...]

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A Guru with an Empire of Products!

September 16, 2010

Kimberly Fowler aims to make yoga accessible for everyone – The Daily Breeze. this person is exactly what is wrong with yoga in america. if she has her way, the practice will become simply another exercise fad that fades out like the counterculture and the short-lived *new age* twenty years later. and she is a [...]

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Stripping the Gurus

September 15, 2010

Stripping the Gurus. Why do so many great *spiritual leaders* behave in such insanely foolish ways as Falk describes in great and fascinating detail? Are they all predators? Have they deceived themselves into believing their own snake-oil? Or are they just as confused as the rest of us regarding the nature of our strange world [...]

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Trading Gurus for Celebrities?

September 15, 2010

American Psychosis The American yoga community seems to have traded its old-style gurus for new-style celebrities. What with the extensive scandals of the past decade, it’s hardly surprising that guru-guidance has received some scrutiny. But I think we’ve re-imported that model, just substituted celebrities with a ‘body-beautiful’ mentality for highly trained, well-educated yoga teachers that [...]

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Yoga and Nature: Good, Bad and Ugly

August 26, 2010

Class brings yoga into nature zone | mydesert.com | The Desert Sun. Yoga and nature immersion are parallel practices. There is a mysterious term in the first chapter of the Yoga Sutra – the term is prakrti-laya, or ‘absorbed in nature.’ I have been fascinated by this term for many years, since it seemed to [...]

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Silva Mind Control – hmmm…

August 26, 2010

Learn Meditation with The Silva Centering Exercise. Why do all e-z zen pages look the same? Check out anything by any “the Secret” followers – or perhaps the notorious “Quantum Jumping” sales program – you’ll see they use exactly the same kind of hard-sell “squeeze page” technique to sell their water by the river. That’s [...]

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Fox (!) Cites Yoga Health Benefits

August 26, 2010

Yoga Shows Potential to Ward Off Certain Diseases Physiologists have detected lower levels of stress hormones in *expert* (check the definition in the article – it’s pretty darn loose!) yoga practitioners. It will be interesting to see how these findings dovetail news-wise with Fox’s well-known bias in terms of what we might call ‘culture’ and [...]

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California Approves First U.S. Thermal Solar Plant – NYTimes.com

August 25, 2010

NYTimes.com. California leads the way in creating renewable energy. However, as a native Texan, I do still wonder about the Lone Star State’s huge wind-farms and their immense potential. Here is one place where competition might actually provide benefits to our human community.

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