ABOUT THE SHOW

The Yoga Room is a place for exploring the meaning and relevance of yoga in the here and now. Appreciating yoga as a holistic practice, we actively engage ideas from within and outside the yoga-verse – from science and mythology, pedagogy and politics, aesthetics and ecology, and most of all from the experience of living – all with the aim of deeper understanding, clearer awareness, and more meaningful lives.

Tens of millions of people worldwide do yoga. With a seemingly infinite array of styles and techniques to match our diverse conditions and intentions, there are many ways people connect with yoga – and just as many ways that we can consciously connect yoga with our larger lives. Mark’s monologues and conversations with well-known and hidden or emergent voices from around the world evoke a rich expression of ideas about nuances of yoga and our relationships with ourselves and one another.

Sally Kempton

Episode highlights:

• Tuning into spirituality as the graceful, loving, omnipresent awareness of deeply benign energy one can tap into amid all of life’s circumstances;
• Bringing spirit, shakti, eros, into everything;
• Tantra as a diverse array of practices;
• Having a daily yoga practice that pertains directly to daily life;
• Cultivating complete awareness of being fully and brightly alive;
• Receiving teachings from an inspiring source;
• Being a feminist while living the life of an initiated swami;
• Tantric initiation and matters of caste and gender;
• Opening to all of what we feel and experience in ways we can face with abiding love.

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Alison Tomotsugu

Tune in here for a conversation that asks about why yoga works and takes you on a tour through yoga practices, human physiology (including "vagal toning"), and living fully in the modern world.

Episode Highlights: 

• Different styles of yoga, primarily Ashtanga Vinyasa and  Budokon 
• Svadhyaya and self-inquiry 
• Safe sequencing, modifications and props
• Set sequences and creativity 
• The nervous system and the vagus nerve 
• Living a full and balanced life as a mom and in the modern world 

Bernie Clark

Science, Myth, Anatomy, Fascia and Yin Yoga

• The contrast between the yoga of outer appearance and the yoga of inner experience, what Bernie calls functional yoga.
• How teachers and students engage in a dance around forms, feelings, and intentions in yoga practice.
• The development of new ideas about human anatomy, alternative "maps" in describing and understanding the body, and the proposal that a "fascial system" can be a useful map in practicing yoga.
• How new ideas can lead to new paradigms of knowledge or contribute to pseudoscientific distortions.
• How myth can inform and guide us along our various paths on and off the mat.
• Yin, yang, and diversity of human beings and beneficial practices.