Friday 1 November 2013
Saturday 28 September 2013
The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali
The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali
There are 196 Indian sūtras (aphorisms) that
constitute the foundational text of Yoga. Patañjali (C2nd BC) was not
the first to write about Yoga - other authors had written before him, and he
collected their writings to create his text, which became the authority on the
subject.
The 8 Limbs provide an eight-step blueprint for
understanding what yoga is really about.
1. Yama. The first limb, yama, deals with one's ethical
standards and sense of integrity, focusing on our behaviour. They relate
best to what we know as the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have
them do unto you."
The five yamas are:
Ahimsa: nonviolence
Asteya: non-stealing
Brahmacharya: using sexual energy wisely
Aparigraha: sharing
2. Niyama. Niyama, the second limb, is about self-discipline
and spiritual observances.
The five niyamas are:
Saucha: keeping different energies distinct, purity,
good intention
Svadhyaya: study of spirituality and of one's self,
awareness
Samtosa: contentment, enjoying the moment
Tapas: commitment to spiritual growth and self acceptance
Isvara pranidhana: open heart, surrender, see the divine in all
Tapas: commitment to spiritual growth and self acceptance
Isvara pranidhana: open heart, surrender, see the divine in all
3. Asanas, the postures practiced in yoga, comprise the
third limb. In the yogic view, the body is a temple of spirit, the care of
which is an important stage of our spiritual growth. Through the practice of
asanas, we develop the habit of discipline and the ability to concentrate, both
of which are necessary for meditation.
4. Pranayama.
Pranayama is the fourth 'limb' of the eight limbs
of Yoga mentioned in verse 2.29 in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Breathing
is the nearest thing to us, closer and longer lasting than any friend,
relationship, family member. The nearer a thing is, the more difficult it is to
perceive.
These first four stages of Patanjali's 8 Limbs of Yoga
concentrate on refining our personality, gaining mastery over the body, and
developing an energetic awareness of ourselves, all of which prepares us for
the second half of this journey, which deals with the senses, the mind, and
attaining a higher state of consciousness.
5. Pratyahara. The fifth limb is to make the conscious
effort to draw our awareness away from the external world and outside stimuli.
This withdrawal allows us to objectively observe our cravings: habits that are
perhaps detrimental to our health and which likely interfere with our inner
growth.
6. Dharana. As each stage prepares us for the next, the
practice of pratyahara creates the setting for developing concentration. We, of
course, have already begun to develop our powers of concentration in the
previous three stages of posture, breath control, and withdrawal of the senses.
In asana and pranayama, although we pay attention to our actions, our attention
travels. Our focus constantly shifts as we fine-tune the many nuances of any
particular posture or breathing technique. In pratyahara we become
self-observant; now, in dharana, we focus our attention on a single point.
Extended periods of concentration naturally lead to meditation.
7. Dhyana. Meditation or contemplation, the seventh limb, is
the uninterrupted flow of concentration. Although concentration (dharana) and
meditation (dhyana) may appear to be one and the same, a fine line of
distinction exists between these two stages. At this stage, the mind has been
quieted, and in the stillness it produces few or no thoughts at all.
8. Samadhi. Patanjali describes this eighth and final stage
of yoga, as a state of ecstasy. At this stage, the meditator merges with his or
her point of focus and transcends the Self altogether. The meditator comes to
realize a profound connection to the Divine, an interconnectedness with all
living things.
Delve deeper into Yoga with Tabitha
Wednesday 25 September 2013
Autumn Ayurveda - VATA
Autumn is the season of Vata (air, cool, dry, light, clear, changing).
If your dosha is predominantly Vata you're probably pretty healthy, creative, and exuberant. But when too much Vata accumulates in the body and mind, the imbalance may manifest as physical or emotional disorders, including insomnia, dry skin, arthritis, constipation, high blood pressure, anxiety, and depression. During the autumn/winter all body types become more Vata, so it's good to be aware of ways to help you stay more grounded and vibrant.
*Eat primarily sweet, sour, and salty foods. Avocados, bananas, mangoes, peaches, lemons, pumpkins, carrots, beets, asparagus, quinoa, rice, mung beans, almonds, sesame seeds, and ghee are excellent Vata-pacifying foods
*Eat warming, soothing, and easily digested meals, such as soups
*Drink warming herbal teas such as ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon tea
*Get enough sleep - Vata types tend to push themselves to the point of physical or mental exhaustion
*Learn to meditate. For the over-active Vata mind, meditation is one of the best ways to find calm and stillness.
*Keep warm and avoid drafts. Vata is a cold, dry dosha, so it’s important to make sure that your home and work place are warm and that the air has enough humidity
*After a bath or shower give yourself a rub with a warming oil like almond or sesame
Wednesday 4 September 2013
Parsley - don't pass it off as a garnish!
Parsley is perhaps one of the most commonly used but therapeutically underrated of all herbs. It's often one used as a garnish in restaurants, and the customer rejects it as mere decoration.
Parsley contains more vitamin C than any other standard culinary vegetable, with 166mg per 100g (4oz). This is three times as much as oranges and about the same as blackcurrants. The iron content is exceptional with 5.5mg per100g (4oz), and the plant is a good source of manganese (2.7mg per 100g) and calcium (245mg per 100g). It is also exceptionally high in potassium, with one whole gram of potassium in 100g (4oz) .
Parsley also possess chlorophyll that is naturally derived from the rich organic soil it is grown in, along with natural sunlight and environmental conditions.
Parsley is a valuable therapy for kidney stones, as a diuretic, for rheumatism, menstrual insufficiency and as a general stimulant. It settles the stomach and improves the appetite. The high content of vitamin C is not only useful in its own right, but also assists the absorption of the valuable quantity of iron.
Parsley contains more vitamin C than any other standard culinary vegetable, with 166mg per 100g (4oz). This is three times as much as oranges and about the same as blackcurrants. The iron content is exceptional with 5.5mg per100g (4oz), and the plant is a good source of manganese (2.7mg per 100g) and calcium (245mg per 100g). It is also exceptionally high in potassium, with one whole gram of potassium in 100g (4oz) .
Parsley also possess chlorophyll that is naturally derived from the rich organic soil it is grown in, along with natural sunlight and environmental conditions.
Parsley is a valuable therapy for kidney stones, as a diuretic, for rheumatism, menstrual insufficiency and as a general stimulant. It settles the stomach and improves the appetite. The high content of vitamin C is not only useful in its own right, but also assists the absorption of the valuable quantity of iron.
Best of all it's cheap and easily accessible.
Friday 23 August 2013
Breath Of Life
Would you believe that the simple act of breathing can solve a lot of your health problems? We breathe all the time—it's automatic yet there's a big difference between regular breathing (shallow) and deep breathing. Regular breathing comes from the lungs and uses the chest muscles but over time causes a constriction of the chest and lung tissue, decreasing oxygen flow and delivery to your tissues. Deep breathing involves learning to slow and deepen the in and out breath and use the diaphragm (the cone shaped muscle located beneath the lungs) expanding the lung’s air pockets, invoking the relaxation response, massaging the lymphatic system and not just the chest muscles.
10 Major Benefits of Long Deep Breathing.
It will:
- Relax and calm you, whilst also preparing the mind for clarity and positivity
- Increase circulation
- Help regulate the body's pH (acid/alkalinity)
- Pump the spinal fluid to the brain, giving greater energy
- Reduce and prevent toxic build up in small air sacs (alveoli) of the lungs
- Stimulate the production of chemicals (endorphins) in the brain, which eliminate the tendency to depression
- Cleanse the blood
- Energize, give greater alertness and awareness due to the life force (prana) in oxygen
- Aid in releasing blockages in meridian energy flow
- Combat adrenal fatigue
Friday 19 July 2013
Meat free - benefits our bodies, our minds, our souls and our planet
This is a choice that only benefits our bodies, our minds, our souls and our planet. It is an offering to the values of peace, non-violence, compassion and environmental preservation.
Albert Einstein "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
Approximately 750,000,000 animals and 650,000 tons of fish are slaughtered each year for food in Britain. And in the US alone 10 billion animals (not including fish) are killed each year for food consumption. This is much higher than the total number of people on the planet, yet more than a third of the world goes to bed hungry each night.
In brief, several reasons why vegetarianism can be a great life choice:
One of the main principles in yoga is non-violence. Killing animals for food is not only violence to the animal but harms the environment and creates more hunger in the world.
Albert Schweitzer "The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies."
Humane Farming Association “The average farm animal is characterised by acute deprivation, stress and disease. Hundreds of millions of animals are forced to live in cages or crates barely larger than their own bodies. Unable to groom, stretch their legs, or even turn around, the victims of factory farms often exist in a relentless state of distress.”
Even ‘white meat’ is not harmless. More than 300 million baby male chicks (the total population of humans currently in the USA) are systematically, senselessly and painfully killed every year by the egg industry, because, as males, they are useless at laying eggs.
Gandhi “To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.”
Food is a major source of the body's chemistry, and what we ingest affects our consciousness, emotions and overall well-being.
Imperial Cancer Research Department at the University of Oxford “Western vegetarians have a lower BMI (by about 1kg/m2) and 25% lower mortality from IHD (coronary artery disease). The association between consumption of red and processed meats and cancer, particularly colorectal cancer, is very consistent.”
Before factory farming took off in the 1960s meat was generally free of antibiotics, added hormones, feed additives, flavour enhancers, age-delaying gases and salt-water solutions. Mad cow disease and the deadliest strain of E. coli — 0157:H7 — did not exist.
Today‘s industrialised process reduces the nutritional value of the meat, stresses the animals, increases the risk of bacterial contamination, pollutes the environment and exposes consumers to a long list of unwanted chemicals. If that‘s not enough, when an animal is about to be killed its body is flooded with stress hormones and other toxins which remain in the animals‘ tissues. You ingest and absorb these.
Each day 40,000 children starve to death and the number of people worldwide who will die as a result of malnutrition this year is around 20 million. Dr George Borgstrom, a specialist on the geography of food, estimates that one third of Africa's nut crop (nutritious and high in protein) ends up in the stomachs of cattle and poultry in Western Europe.
Every day the USA alone produces enough grain to provide every person on earth, yet at least 80% is grown to feed livestock. It takes around 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of animal flesh. If the USA reduced its meat intake by just 10% 100 million people could be fed.
In 'Diet for a Small Planet' Frances Moore Lappe encourages you to imagine bring served an 8 ounce steak. "Then imagine the room filled with 45-50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the 'feed cost' of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a cup of cooked cereal grains."
Eating meat causes almost 40% more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and aeroplanes in the world combined. For each hamburger made from rainforest beef, 75 kg of carbon dioxide is released into the air - the equivalent of driving a car all day long for many days. To support cattle grazing, Central and South America are chopping down rain-forests (home to almost half of all the species in earth, including thousands of medicinal plants). In addition to global warming, more than a thousand species a year and becoming extinct. Chemically based farming methods are also contaminating the water.
A United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow states that eating meat is:
"one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." It concludes that the meat industry should be a major policy focus when dealing with land degradation, climate change, water and air pollution, water shortage and loss of biodiversity.
It requires 3.5 acres of land to support a meat-centred diet, 1.5 acres to support a vegetarian diet and just a sixth of an acre to support a vegan diet. It takes approx 2500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. It takes approx 4000 gallons to provide a day's amount of food per person on a meat based diet, 1200 on a vegetarian diet, 300 on a vegan diet.
Albert Einstein "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
Approximately 750,000,000 animals and 650,000 tons of fish are slaughtered each year for food in Britain. And in the US alone 10 billion animals (not including fish) are killed each year for food consumption. This is much higher than the total number of people on the planet, yet more than a third of the world goes to bed hungry each night.
In brief, several reasons why vegetarianism can be a great life choice:
AHIMSA
One of the main principles in yoga is non-violence. Killing animals for food is not only violence to the animal but harms the environment and creates more hunger in the world.
Albert Schweitzer "The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies."
Humane Farming Association “The average farm animal is characterised by acute deprivation, stress and disease. Hundreds of millions of animals are forced to live in cages or crates barely larger than their own bodies. Unable to groom, stretch their legs, or even turn around, the victims of factory farms often exist in a relentless state of distress.”
Even ‘white meat’ is not harmless. More than 300 million baby male chicks (the total population of humans currently in the USA) are systematically, senselessly and painfully killed every year by the egg industry, because, as males, they are useless at laying eggs.
Gandhi “To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.”
YOUR HEALTH
Imperial Cancer Research Department at the University of Oxford “Western vegetarians have a lower BMI (by about 1kg/m2) and 25% lower mortality from IHD (coronary artery disease). The association between consumption of red and processed meats and cancer, particularly colorectal cancer, is very consistent.”
Before factory farming took off in the 1960s meat was generally free of antibiotics, added hormones, feed additives, flavour enhancers, age-delaying gases and salt-water solutions. Mad cow disease and the deadliest strain of E. coli — 0157:H7 — did not exist.
Today‘s industrialised process reduces the nutritional value of the meat, stresses the animals, increases the risk of bacterial contamination, pollutes the environment and exposes consumers to a long list of unwanted chemicals. If that‘s not enough, when an animal is about to be killed its body is flooded with stress hormones and other toxins which remain in the animals‘ tissues. You ingest and absorb these.
Each day 40,000 children starve to death and the number of people worldwide who will die as a result of malnutrition this year is around 20 million. Dr George Borgstrom, a specialist on the geography of food, estimates that one third of Africa's nut crop (nutritious and high in protein) ends up in the stomachs of cattle and poultry in Western Europe.
LIFE
In 'Diet for a Small Planet' Frances Moore Lappe encourages you to imagine bring served an 8 ounce steak. "Then imagine the room filled with 45-50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the 'feed cost' of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a cup of cooked cereal grains."
EATING UP RESOURCES
A United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow states that eating meat is:
"one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." It concludes that the meat industry should be a major policy focus when dealing with land degradation, climate change, water and air pollution, water shortage and loss of biodiversity.
It requires 3.5 acres of land to support a meat-centred diet, 1.5 acres to support a vegetarian diet and just a sixth of an acre to support a vegan diet. It takes approx 2500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. It takes approx 4000 gallons to provide a day's amount of food per person on a meat based diet, 1200 on a vegetarian diet, 300 on a vegan diet.
Worried about iron and protein?
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Tuesday 11 June 2013
Organic Apples - Delicious & Super Healthy
If there ever was a “classic” fruit, one whose popularity and benefits never wane, it’s the apple. Apples don’t only keep the doctor away, they can provide a wealth of varying health benefits—from weight loss to heavy metal chelation. They are able to do this, in part, because of the various beneficial compounds within the fruit.
The fibre found within apples is known as pectin. This lowers cholesterol levels, can stabilise blood sugar, and help ward off diabetes and insulin resistance. Like most fibre rich foods, the pectin in apples also helps fill you up, making you feel full for a longer period and discouraging over-eating. It's also great for detoxing as pectin helps remove heavy metals and other toxins from the body where they can cause inflammation and disease. This is called chelation.
Another powerful compound in apples is the flavonoid quercetin. This antioxidant is found particularly concentrated in apple peels, where it gives the apple its rich colour. It’s a natural anti-inflammatory and a natural antihistamine that has been found to help combat all sorts of health issues including cancer, high blood pressure, stroke, and much more.
Water-soluble polyphenols are often found in apples as well. These are another form of powerful antioxidants with numerous benefits. Diets high in polyphenols are associated with lower cancer rates, better heart health and enhanced immune function.
These components, and more, work together to deliver a synergy of amazing health benefits. Among those are:
Water-soluble polyphenols are often found in apples as well. These are another form of powerful antioxidants with numerous benefits. Diets high in polyphenols are associated with lower cancer rates, better heart health and enhanced immune function.
These components, and more, work together to deliver a synergy of amazing health benefits. Among those are:
- Improved asthma symptoms
- Reduced cancer risk
- Increased weight loss
- Increased stamina
- Increased endurance
- Reduced risk of diabetes
- Skin protection
- Cardiovascular protection
- Blood sugar regulation
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