Yoga Poses... Learning, Growing and Staying Young

What!!! Smiling while doing yoga?

Hi. I'm Neil Keleher and that's my daughter beside me having fun rolling around in navasana.

Somedays she tries things and won't let me help. Other days she gives up and asks for help. Then there are the days she gets something new, like the day she learned to walk up a slight incline. She went up and down, up and down, enjoying her new found skill until I finally dragged her home (it was dinner time and I was starving).

More often than not I'm there just to make sure that she's safe. I give her the environment to explore and learn about her body and how to use it.

And that's what I try to do when teaching (or writing about) yoga poses. Give you clear limits, boundaries to play within so that within those boundaries you are free to play and free to learn your body. And then you can learn new boundaries.

In Sensational yoga poses the boundaries I help you to learn are clearly defined yoga poses. And also, since yoga poses require the use of your body, I've also included exercises so that you can learn the real limits of your body. Then, whether doing yoga poses or something else, you can enjoy your body to the best of your ability.

This site is a work in progress but hopefully what you'll get from it is tips and tricks for feeling your body, controlling it, and doing yoga asana.

And there's stuff to help you understand your body. Why? Because understanding and experience are two sides of the same coin. The more you understand the better you can make your experiences and the more you experience the more you can turn that experience into understanding.

About This Website

The Yoga Blogs and Other...

The yoga poses blog is where I help you keep track of latest additions to this site. Generally new pages or updated pages. The latest tips blog is where I write quick notes on things I've discovered as I practice but haven't yet had time to write a full page on.

The "elsewhere..." links are to articles I've written elsewhere, usually on my zeroparallax websits.

Yoga Central

Yoga Central covers what I believe to be the essentials of any physical yoga practice. One place to start is learning how to create stability. If you have stability in your yoga pose you will more than likely find that it is easier to control your body, especiall while balancing.

Balancing looks at how to feel your center of gravity and control it. This can be a great place to start if you want to learn how to feel your body and control it.

Sensitivity or "feelng your body" expands on the idea of feelng your body. Part of that is via learning how to relax your body and one place you can practice relaxing is while doing meridian stretches.

As I develop this site, the content of the anatomy section (below) will move to the sensitivity and control sections.

Inversions are a form of balance however since they are upside down poses, and I've written a lot, I've given this group of poses their own section.

Anatomy

Even before I started doing yoga I've been interested in anatomy. Part of it was from when I used to lift weights. (I once dreamed of being a body builder.) Later on I got attracted to the eidea of being able to draw my anatomy.

And then I found that being able to draw (or trying to learn to draw) my anatomy (or someone elses) helped me to understand yoga poses as well as the body.

And so most of the anatomy drawings on this site, though not quite beautiful, hopefully convey information on where a muscles is and how you can use it. How do I use my anatomy understanding? To help me feel my muscles and control them. You can learn to feel your anatomy too. All you have to do is steer your awareness and put it in the right place. Want to learn how to draw your own anatomy? It's simple and the same ideas can be applied to learning yoga poses. Notice the relationships.

Yoga Poses and Stretches

The Yoga Poses and Stretches section contains direct links to different yoga poses and stretches categorized by either body position or part of the body worked on or by type of action.

Yoga Basics

Yoga Basics covers some of the basics for doing yoga whether it is learning to control your muscles or breathe. Look at the yin and yang article to get a better understanding of the three tenets. And look at basic principles to understand the five basic principles that can be applied to each of those tenets.

Ashtanga Yoga

I first started yoga by doing Ashtanga. The nice thing about this practice is that it is a set sequence of poses. Once you've learned the sequence you can focus on doing the poses and moving between them with sensitivity and control.

This section contains notes on workshops I've attended with other teachers.

Interviews

Interviews with people who teach (or do) yoga.

Questions