According to the Happy Planet Index, Costa Rica is the happiest place on Earth. A tiny country with a population of about 4.9 million, Costa Rica is sandwiched between Nicaragua and Panama in Central America. I had the opportunity to visit this magical place last week and spent 5 days...
During my last visit to India, I studied yoga in Chennai for more than 2 ½ months. During that time, focusing on breath and body and mind and observation, I noticed things I had never noticed before, as if I was seeing them for the first time. Yoga tends to...
What is it about the natural landscape of our earth that opens us up, grounds us and then brings us back to ourselves? When we pay attention to waves slowly making their way into the shore, cliffs soaring over vast sea, emerald green trees surrounding us on all sides, the...
Pic Courtesy: Kalamkari artists featured in exoticindia.com Lately, I have been reflecting a great deal about meditation. Over the past 15 years, I have had a relatively regular but constantly shifting meditation practice, but in the past few weeks, I have had a slew of extremely frustrating and challenging moments...
My friends are karma yogis. This past weekend, they helped me to move from one home into another, knowing that I felt that I was in a state of disarray and chaos, understanding that my heart was experiencing much sadness and grief, confident that their support would help light a...
I have not always known that I was the silent type. When I was growing up in Edmonton as a young child, I was surrounded by a myriad of wonderful people who shared exciting and meaningful moments with me. But, the people around me, whether in school, at home, or...
The other day I heard that there was something called “Rage Yoga” up and coming in the West. Here we go again! Yet another tragic manipulation of ancient yogic wisdom and practice, rage yoga uses swearing, screaming, and anger release techniques during a yoga practice in order to allegedly release...
Several years ago I gradually started to pay attention; pay attention to the sounds and movement in that tiny room in my heart that was starting to reconstruct, to decorate its walls, and to invite me to enter. This special and sacred room that had always existed from the beginning...
Breathing happens naturally and automatically from the moment we are born into the world until the moment we die, so why practice? Well, let’s start with the question, why do we breathe? I am not asking this as an existential question! Really let’s stop to think about breathing, one of...
Wellness isn’t something that happens on its own. Wellness is something that takes practice. It must be cultivated and nurtured. How many of us have planted a bean seed, or tried to grow a flower only to realize that we were unable to create the circumstances for it to thrive...
