The latest edition of Harvard Medical School's Healthbeat endorsed yoga for its widely known mental health benefits such as alleviating anxiety and depression and also recognized it for its lesser known attribute of improving brain functionality. Harvard Healthbeat even emphasizes that this helps people as they age. As anyone who practices yoga can tell you, yoga does indeed enhance your cognitive capabilities, learning new skills, and memorization.

"Studies using MRI scans and other brain imaging technology have shown that people who regularly did yoga had a thicker cerebral cortex (the area of the brain responsible for information processing) and hippocampus (the area of the brain involved in learning and memory compared with nonpractioners. These areas of the brain typically shrink as you age, but the older practitioners showed less shrinkage than those who did no yoga. This suggests yoga may counter-act age-related declines in memory and other cognitive skills.

"Research also shows that yoga and meditation may improve executive functions such as reasoning, decision making, memory, learning, reaction time, and accuracy on tests of mental accuity." - Harvard Healthbeat, August 21, 2021

It's the birth of the Christ impulse that we celebrate today not "Jesus's birthday". It's the softening of human hearts that comes with the Christ impulse that we acknowledge and celebrate. It's this softening that is needed more than ever in a world grown rigid with fear in 2020.

The Christian impulse is most radical - an alternative to the hyper-materialistic society that is now very similar to the heights of power of the Roman Empire more than 2,000 years ago.

Structure and materialism ruled to great affect as they do now, and with it came a hardness, a hardening of the human heart that Jesus Christ softened with love, compassion, and truth. He wasn't afraid to die; he wasn't afraid to speak up, he wasn't afraid to confront those most powerful with truths.

Truth is light, light is information, and information feeds our consciousness. Consciousness with its free thoughts build our great connection to life beyond the material, to Spirit, to our compass. Merry Christmas!

"She can't stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans. Her sons have known only luck so far, though suffering will surely come for them. She feels it nearing, the midnight of humanity, Their world is so fully of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness." - Lauren Groff, "Florida"

Maybe not beauty, but certainly amusements.

Theme parks, video games, ice cream cones in winter, bouncy castles; Thomas the Tank trains, Legos and other endless toys; soccer and baseball and basketball and golf and tennis and shoes for each sport. School with friends and fun. Music, saxophones and funny hats to wear in Jazz Band performances. Swimming in summer and skiing in winter, and chicken nuggets with ten kinds of sauces after each.

Kids' days until these days.

Until these days how much could it continue, really? Endless pleasure, not much pain. The complete inverse to grandparents' kids' days in WWII, rations, and worries.

Even in these days, so far, the pain has been minimal. Loads to eat and with XBox and iPhone by their side maybe it's been more pleasurable for them than we realize.

I know kids around the world might never have had the abundance of these materialist blessings, and yes, I am speaking from the comfort of my air-conditioned privilege (that's a judgment by the way and I'm noticing how these judgments become internalized and censor us. Or at least try to).

But I am speaking about a world I see, the U.S.A. It's a world I know and there's no point in these days talking about worlds you don't know.

This photo was taken at Universal Studios only 15 months ago when I went there with my son and another mom and her son, and it seemed like the roller-coasters would never end and the ice cream sundaes would stay fluffy in the hot Florida sun forever.

The Fear Virus is bigger than the Coronavirus, and is spreading far more rapidly and doing so much more damage to people's insides than the Coronavirus, SARS, MERS, and H1N1 combined.

It's clear people have no idea what a true crisis or emergency is on a mass scale. Yes, on an individual level a few of us might have experienced a trauma or two, but on a collective scale, we haven't. Because many, especially in the West, haven't gone without, haven't experienced deprivation or lack, and haven't had to test their survival instincts through war or natural disaster. Even when nature strikes, the infrastructure is still in place to support and help.

Because we haven't experienced a collective crisis, our Monster Mind fills in the dots with all kinds of predictions, forecasts, and obsessions about knowledge like needing-to-know and needing-to-be-certain. Sometimes this is referred to as a "wild imagination".

Hollywood and mass media have done a fine job, worthy of an Oscar in the category of "Predictive Programming", in priming the public for a pandemic. It doesn't take much now for mass media's imaginations to go absolutely wild. The Pope's public sniffles are an example; how many movies and shows have had plot-lines that include the public figure going down before the virus spreads to the hoi polloi? The Pope was one of the markers that helped spin this news story out of control. Italy in general also contributed. Mandatory testing for nearly everyone coming to and fro your borders will of course uncover more disease, allergies, and problems than if you aren't testing in the first place.

If there was a true mass emergency, it's apparent that our infrastructure - the Federal Government, the authorities, the WHO, the CDC, the IMF, central banks - are not exactly in the strongest positions to help. The mixed messages coming out of them aren't helping either. We are also all assuming these organizations and authorities will always be there, always be in place, and always attract the right people with the right energy to sacrifice themselves for the public good. These are big assumptions about our future.

We take a lot for granted about society. We assume our basic needs will continually be met on large scales. We don't just have grocery stores, but super-stores stocking every exotic, organic, gluten-free, vegan and seasonal ingredient no matter the time of year. We assume airlines will continue to fly across the world, hundreds of times a day, uninterrupted and that the whole balletic air traffic control dance in the sky will continue non-stop. When there is the slightest interruption to any layer of the complexity, there is a collective freak-out. The Coronavirus does reveal how fragile the whole system is. Perhaps this is what we're really fearful about? 

I do encounter in my line of work a proportion of the public who is always on high alert for getting sick, getting diseases and constantly monitoring health. These news stories only exacerbate their triggers and internal crosses-to-bear, and my sympathies are with them as it's not easy worrying about your body even during the best of times. But as I said in my video (see "Videos" above, or type Move Within Yoga on YouTube), until it actually affects your life, there is nothing to do or worry about. If it does affect you, trust that you will adapt to the situation. This is why we have instincts and intuition - start cultivating those. And as a plug for what I do, this is why eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, drinking distilled water or spring water, and staying active and fit are musts in a lifestyle: None of this will prevent a disease or crisis, but they will lessen the toll they take on your body, aid the recovery time, and provide peace of mind.

I've been driving cars in the US for 25 years, but when I decided to get my British license I had to take driving lessons all over again. Driving in London is really different than driving in American cities. I had to re-learn how to drive from the beginning and I had to rid myself of habits, like spacing out and rarely checking mirrors. None of that will work driving stick-shift in this congested, labyrinthine city with 10 hazards on every corner.

George, a former London bus driver, was my teacher -- and my guide. He didn't just repeat 'The Rules of Road' booklet and explain how the gears worked. He encouraged, scolded, teased, cheered me on, helped me through tight spots, and yelled at me when I hit curbs. He taught me to be considerate on the road and not over-react. He calmed me down when I was spazzing out and picked me up when I was feeling low. In other words, he acknowledged emotions, respected them and was a master at managing them. He helped lift me out of them and transform all that energy so I always felt better than ever.

Reading the 'owners manual' wasn't going to help me transcend emotions in that learners' car, and it sure won't in the midst of life's experiences. If I'm forced to suddenly detour way over there, I'm frustrated and bitter, with an anger emerging that I just don't want to confront. How will memorizing quotes or the rules help? If someone I love leaves, no matter how much I've read on psychology, neither the number of books on spirituality  lining my shelf nor how much I talk to a confidante can possibly match, let alone overcome, the tidal force of emotional energy.

Thought can sometimes (particularly during traumas) trigger emotions, those powerful, subterranean energies that defy reason, understanding, and logic. Many in the New Age world have mantras, rules and rituals; formulas and methodologies, but I don't find this helpful once in an emotional grip. They're not mutually exclusive: I can practice headstands, and ritualize mornings with candles and incense and still be emotionally off kilter. I can get realizations and hits on all kinds of stuff, yet still be unable to balance out decades-old emotions.

This is where other disciplines and practices have helped. I've been forced to meet other teachers who are masters at transcending emotions (like George), and it's certainly informed my yoga practice. It's the emotional triggers that I'm in the process of diffusing, that I need to diffuse. I still hear the 'Oh, you're not doing enough' of my monster mind, but fear and other emotional reactions are less and less pronounced and as a result I'm less inclined to act on it.

We all build or adopt one coping mechanism after another until we're armed with an arsenal of coping mechanisms, or sometimes addictions. These is our under-armours, beneath the professional masks and gloss of a life contained. But it's such a relief not to carry all that gear around, the spear up, my shield held tightly. I'm done with driving around in life, trying to 'understand' my emotions or make sense out of any of them or narrate a pretty, little logical story out of them. I welcome the unpleasant and challenging in a new way, because the worse it feels, the further I get to deep-sea dive. It's precisely out of the uncomfortable that we find the pearl of great price.

There are endings in life that come with parties, leaving-dos and good-bye toasts and roasts. Then there are those endings that slip through the cracks of life unnoticed, unmentioned, uncelebrated.

There was a last time you pushed one of your kids or nieces or godchildren in a swing. When was that? Or took your pre-teen nephews down to the park to play frisbee? What was the very last book you read to your kids before bed? The last lullaby your mom sung to you? The last time you put a cartoon-charactered band-aid on a booboo? What ended your teenage friendships? Is it in the nature of dis-solutions that our memories fail us? Dissolving in a miasma of mixed emotions and mental pre-occupations, it's easy to lose the contours of a moment. What about your adult relationships? Some people fade in forcing others to just...fade. Fade: to gradually grow faint and disappear; the process of becoming less bright. The process of disappearing down the pinprick of a drain or through those old-fashioned analogue TVs that you shut off with a thud.

What was the last meal your grandmother prepared for you? What was the last thing a parent told you? What was the last thing you bought from that Greek grocer at the Continental provisions store before you moved neighborhoods? I remember the last movie I saw with my father (that fab pic on Edith Piaf starring Marion Cotillard). I cried and cried, because Edith's music is swollen with love and loss, just like her life. I wasn't in tears knowing this would be the last movie of a lifetime of movie-watching with my dad. There was no special announcement or champagne flutes raised like "Hey, this is our last movie together - Forever!"

I mentioned parks because they were the fabric of my life when I lived in London with my babies. London was an idyllic place to have babies. I say 'was' because things have changed there so much, and not for the better. But in the 2000s, it felt like the last vestiges of Edwardian Mary-Poppinsesque child-rearing: nannies and Regent Park, red double-deckers that you could hop on and off, the zoo, neighborhood walled gardens only a few could access through secret paths, loads of children's activities, and the beauty of socialist-city governments: a plethora of collectivized mom-and-baby groups to join for tea and sympathy. Embedded in London was a deep recognition of the need for mother and baby to bond with others. But when was the last time I saw those women who were so integral during those early childhood years? I went to Antrim Gardens nearly every afternoon, me and dozens of other Belsize Park moms, filling the dead-zone between post-nap and supper. Again, they were an essential part of my life, and yet? The last time I was there did I blow a tasseled trumpet and yell: "Hear ye, hear ye! Stephania, mother of Michael and Nicholas, is moving across the heath to West Hampstead. She shall not be seeing you lovelies ever again." No. Just one day I stopped going. Unmentioned. Uncelebrated. Gone.

This is where melancholia envelops us, knowing the sweetest moments of our life will end and perhaps we won't even notice. There won't be good-byes or bells-and-whistles to some endings that we know will just gone like the wind. Summer can feel like this. Summer is like being on Bittersweet Lane. On our annual Great Family Trek up to Michigan my sister wasn't just melancholic, but in a full-blown depression almost the entire time, the bitter overcoming the sweet. It would be over. We would be gone. This was so perfect, but it wouldn't last. The boys would be bigger next summer, there would be fewer games with them. This meal, this sunset, this time together laughing, this game of Pictionary, well, that would be the last in the sunshine near the lake this summer of 2019.

Many people go to the other extreme of my sister, barely noticing the above-mentioned examples and refusing to feel the melancholia of the bittersweet. Instead of sleep-walkers we are Think-Walkers. Our plotting, planning and calculating over-rides and is almost dismissive of these very delicate encounters and interactions. Instead of Bittersweet Lane, it is Revolutionary Road with our mind's non-stop comparisons, measurements, and survival tactics running roughshod, stirring discontent, unsatisfied, questing for more, distracting ourselves. The movies in our heads dominate instead of just looking out at precisely these encounters that offer so much in terms of energy and challenges, and point the way ever-so-beautifully to what we are meant to see and hear, and to our purpose on the path.

Partner poses are popular in kids' yoga. Kids of all ages love the choice of picking the pose and then picking a partner. Lizard-on-a-Rock, Rainbow Bridge and Dancing Goddesses are just a few of the almost endless combinations of poses to do in pairs.

As the kids get older, certainly in early teenage-hood, these poses come with lessons on what it means to be in a partnership: Equality, support, encouragement, and interacting with the other; becoming more attuned to the other, "reading" them so to speak and witnessing the interaction on many levels -- physically, emotionally, mentally and the Grand-Daddy of them all, energetically. Witnessing energetic interactions with the other, without judgment, as we follow the geometry of our incarnation on Earth is the cornerstone of my life and work.

The kids also learn about the beauty of resistance stretching techniques this way, too. If one pulls your arms, you must pull back to strengthen your body and maintain the integrity of the shape. Imagine a real-life metal bridge with only one side anchored down. The whole thing would collapse.

Adults like partnership poses, too. Remember our weight-lifting duo a few blogs back? But sometimes we're just too inhibited, ego-bound, convenience-bound, task-oriented and thinking we know everything to admit it, let alone do much about this most of the time in our fitness regimes. When I started teaching, I taught friends (Future Face, remember The Rooms Above?) and they were more like partners in those early days than students. We exchanged support and help in equal measure.

Much of my own work is done solo now, but the value of getting another perspective and set of perceptions as you embark on challenging situations cannot be overstated. Recently, I was forced into admitting this to myself. I had decided to participate in a Guinness Book of World Records' attempt at the most people doing a handstand in NYC's Summer Streets festival. I set the alarm for 4:00 AM and when I woke up in pitch-darkness, the threat of rain nowhere in sight (damn! as that would've been the greatest excuse to not get out of bed), I said out loud: "I wish I had a friend  going with me." Because I knew if I had a friend or group to meet, I would've had no choice but to get up out of that bed - the decision would've been made. Instead I equivocated and debated in the dark, wrestling with the doubts in my head: this is stupid and cheesy, there probably won't be enough people, this is a waste of time. Blah blah.

I ended up going because I could not not go, and met a partner, a stranger, who also could not not participate in such a stunt. Monica "Buff Mango" and I met on our way to the Foley Square, and became official handstand buddies for the next few hours. It was like the universe answered my wish, not with a friend, but a partner. I definitely felt better, worked harder and had so much more fun and laughs than I had had I been alone.

Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote recently about the importance of partners in achieving our fitness goals and keeping us on the path to better health. Love him or hate him, there is no question the Terminator has devoted his life to the body.

"A healthier future is every tiny step we take, or every little rep that ultimately leads us to our goal," Schwarzenegger said. "We all think we can do it alone, but no one does anything alone. As I always say, no one is self-made. We all need support - even the Terminator.

"I'm simply asking you to...inspire someone you care about to join you. It's a simple resolution and it's not as sexy as having a six-pack, but it's the key to fulfilling the unfulfilled promise of our fitness crusade and repairing this broken industry. Don't chase the next big thing. Be better. Today. If you and your training partner walked 5,000 steps yesterday, walk 5,001 today. If you did a pushup for the first time today, do two tomorrow."

Downard-facing triangle has to be one of the most popular poses of the social media age. Otherwise known as Down Dog, it's a core part of many styles of yoga and is treated almost as a 'resting' pause in more vigorous vinyasa sequences.

In Move Within Yoga, all our poses are 'resting' to some extent. By adopting poses for a period of time, blockages in our physical body are released. By observing the free flow of breath and actively guiding our body into further openness, we also release congestion in our prana, or etheric body - the invisible sheath around our physical being that belongs to nature and is interwoven with our thoughts. Prana literally means life-energy.

Downward triangle looks like a triangle and, just like any other triangle pose, is a representation of the three planes of human existence: our body, our soul and spirit. On a more physical level, all triangle poses consist of the Big Three: light head and neck, stable legs and hips, and an active dynamic middle or solar plexus chakra. The mid-area corresponds to the apex of our triangle. The more we guide the middle, the more perception we develop about this chakra. The more we can gather attention to the solar plexus, the more force is concentrated here and the more dynamic the pose becomes.

To get more of an expansion out of this rather closed-in-on-itself pose, slowly lift one leg up until it meets natural resistance. Don't push the leg up higher than it's naturally able to move. Instead, continue to build focus in the solar plex, straighten the standing leg and then test the raised leg. I say test because it's a checking in with the raised leg: has the body softened and opened to allow a further gradual guiding up? Usually, the student finds it can indeed raise the leg a little higher without force or strain. Return back to the solar plexus and again test the leg. No matter how high you manage to raise the leg, observe the expansionary quality of the solar plexus and the triangle pose.