Bringing together a diverse chorus of voices and experiences in the pursuit of collective bodily, emotional, and spiritual liberation, Practicing Yoga as Resistance examines yoga as it is experienced across the Western cultural landscape through an intersectional, feminist lens. Naming the systems of oppression that permeate our lived experiences, this collection and its contributors shine a light on the ways yoga practice is intertwined with these systems while offering insight into how people challenge and creatively subvert, mitigate, and reframe them through their efforts. From the disciplines of yoga studies, embodiment studies, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, educational studies, social sciences, and social justice, the self-identified women, queer, BIPOC, and White allies represented in this book present an interdisciplinary tapestry of scholarship that serves to add depth to a growing assemblage of yoga literature for the 21st century.

Transform strength training into a mindful, meditative practice • Explains how to induce a calm, meditative state through the movements, breathing, and focus of strength-training exercises • Contains illustrated instructions for 26 exercises to safely strengthen the neck, shoulders, arms, hips, knees, ankles, and torso • Offers themed meditations on the embodied experience of the exercises to facilitate a mindful state during your session • The perfect complement to a yoga flexibility practice Applying the wisdom of hatha yoga to weight-lifting exercises, Weight-Resistance Yoga reveals how to transform a strength-training session into a mindful, calm, and meditative yoga practice. Through 26 fully illustrated weight-resistance exercises using machines, free weights, and the body itself--along with an emphasis on coordinated rhythmic breathing, stability, stillness, and full absorption in the body’s movements against resistance--fitness trainer Max Popov explains how to access the tranquility that dwells within each of us while safely, effectively, and efficiently strengthening your neck, shoulders, arms, torso, hips, knees, and ankles. To support the meditative state of this practice, the author includes 20 themed meditations on the embodied experience of the exercises. The perfect complement to yoga flexibility practice, weight-resistance yoga allows you to fully inhabit your body, empty your mind of everyday preoccupations, and fill your soul with comprehensions of deeper realities, providing strength, calm, and spiritual illumination through your physical fitness work.

Maximize athletic performance and increase strength and endurance through the power of yoga. Incorporating yoga into your fitness regime can help you perform better on the sports field and in the gym! Learn how yoga works and integrate key yoga poses and routines to improve flexibility, core strength, and prevent injuries. For centuries yoga has been used to improve overall health and strengthen the mind and body. This yoga guide focuses on helping men perform at their highest fitness levels. Inside the pages of this yoga book you'll find: - More than 50 postures with full-colorr photos and step-by-step instructions. - Over 20 workout routines tailored to specific performance goals, such as endurance and power, or improving your running or weightlifting performance. - Focuses on the functional aspects of yoga, including sports performance and injury prevention. - Information on how yoga can specifically benefit men. - Easy-to-follow steps to execute yoga postures. Yoga is known to have plenty of benefits, but did you know that it also has benefits specifically for men and athletes? At the core, this ancient practice is based on stretching different muscle groups for greater flexibility, ease of movement, and greater power. And these benefits translate to sports performance, gym gains, and overall health - allowing your body to move as it should. No chanting required to master these yoga postures and workouts! Written by Dean Pohlman, sports coach and author, this yoga book for men is focused on yoga's functional fitness benefits and less on the spiritual or emotional aspects. A wonderful gift and fitness resource, Yoga For Men: Build Strength and Improve Performance will help men meet their performance goals, play harder and feel better.

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.

An indispensible resource for those interested in all forms of movement education, including yoga, pilates, dance, and more Somatic educator and writer Liz Koch has spent decades studying the principles of Core Awareness—a body-based approach to movement that utilizes attention to inner sensation as the key to increasing strength, gaining flexibility, preventing injury, and improving resilience. In this book, she shares her vast knowledge of Core Awareness with readers, providing movements, stretches, and mindfulness explorations that she developed herself. Her exercises are designed to enhance sensory development and shift readers from the standard paradigm of the body as an "isolated object" to a holistic paradigm of the human being as part of a living process of dynamic expression. This shift in perspective offers practitioners and teachers of movement, yoga, pilates, bodywork, exercise, and dance an empowering model for self-healing and the key to becoming stronger, more flexible, and more resilient. As Koch describes the practice of moving from one's core, she highlights the importance of engaging the psoas muscle—located on either side of the spine—to integrate the body, mind, emotion, and spirit. Koch also discusses how the pelvis is the foundation of our physical core, the vital connection with our bones, and crucial in gaining a sense of support, nourishment, joint integrity, skeletal balance, and healthy muscle tone. Rewritten with updated information, this revised edition includes 247 new photos and 25 new Core Awareness explorations—with 64 in total. A suggested reading list at the end of the book provides resources for continuing the development of the ideas presented within the book.

Suzan Colon, yoga teacher and former senior editor at O, The Oprah Magazine, digs deep into the spiritual philosophy behind yoga and distills thirty essential components to enrich your practice and revolutionize your life from the inside out. We live in an increasingly stressful world, and we know about the hazardous effects stress can have on our health. But meditating and mindfulness can sometimes seem elusive, unattainable, and impossible to fit into our busy days. Even the word “yoga” usually makes many people think of complicated, twisty poses—but that’s not everything. In its complete sense, yoga is a collection of life lessons for wellness and well-being and a spiritual technology from ancient times that is now more relevant, and necessary, than ever. In Yoga Mind, Suzan Colon shares thirty essential components to increase self- awareness and inner balance to use throughout your day—in traffic, on the train, at your job, and home. She outlines how we can use yoga to cultivate resilience in challenging times, reduce stress, and enrich our relationships with family, work, and ourselves. This guide contains a 30-day program designed to create subtle yet powerful shifts in awareness and attitude that lead to real, lasting change. Whether you’re a hardcore yogi or a beginner to the practice, Yoga Mind can help you unite your body, mind, and heart to become your best self and cultivate lasting happiness in your life.

This highly illustrated book explains the effects of scars and adhesions on the body through the lens of biotensegrity, a concept that recognizes the role of physical forces on their formation, structure and treatment. It includes contributions from specialists in the fields of fascial anatomy, biotensegrity, movement, surgery and other manual therapies. It takes a comprehensive approach to providing a better understanding of these complex issues and will be valuable to every hands-on practitioner. The text is supported with online videos demonstrating five ScarWork therapeutic techniques.

Perfect for those who want a total body and mind workout.

"Teaches you how to design strategies that make daily practice possible in your life"--Back cover.

It's no secret that yoga increases muscular flexibility and strength, but you may not know that yoga is a proven treatment for back pain, knee pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic pain conditions. Yoga also helps to ease the stress, anxiety, and depression that can create and reinforce pain, making you feel more comfortable in both your mind and your body. Written by a yoga instructor and former chronic pain sufferer, Yoga for Pain Relief is packed with gentle postures and practical strategies for ending pain. This complete mind-body tool kit for healing also includes deep relaxation practices drawn from the yogic tradition and psychological techniques for helping you make peace with your body and dissolve pain. As the ancient practice of yoga releases the hold that chronic pain has over your life, you will begin to feel more like yourself again.