Yoga Sequencing
How Yoga Will NOT Wreck Your Body
Mark Stephens
Date: Monday, October 22, 3-5 p.m.
Bring a yoga mat if you have one.
Price: $40, ($35 members) This price includes a copy of the book Yoga Sequencing: Designing Transformative Yoga, Mark Stephens.
Will yoga wreck your body? Yes. Or no. Eating chocolate can make you fat (or not) and reading this on your computer can strain your eyes (or not). Similarly, the effects of yoga have everything to do with how one approaches this ancient practice of body, mind, and spirit.
How and why has the practice of yoga become controversial? With an estimated 15.8 million afficianados in the US, hot button articles highlighting the dangers of the practice pop up in the media every few years, focusing on subjects like poorly trained teachers to the suggestion that yoga causes migraine headaches.
Acclaimed yoga expert Mark Stephens, author of the bestselling Teaching Yoga: Essential Foundations and Techniques, offers a timely antidote to the wreckless yoga thesis with Yoga Sequencing: Designing Transformative Yoga. Stephens argues that the idea that yoga can wreck your body reifies yoga – makes it into a thing that is given power to affect other things (say, your body), rather than recognizing yoga as a world of practices that one can do. His point: you do yoga, yoga does not do you.
In this two-hour class, Stephens will discuss the debate over risk versus wellness in doing yoga, exploring and puncturing myths about yoga as he draws equally from the ancient literature of yoga and the contemporary insights of somatics, functional anatomy, and kinesiology. He'll then lead participants through a series of yoga postures and breathing practices, offering a sense of what a sustainable yoga practice can be.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Mark Stephens is the author of Teaching Yoga: Essential Foundations and Techniques. An esteemed yoga guide who has trained over a thousand yoga teachers, he conducts classes and workshops worldwide. In 2000 he received Yoga Journal's 1st Annual Karma Yoga Award for his non-profit work with Yoga Inside Foundation, which created on-going yoga programs in inner city schools, juvenile institutions, treatment centers, prisons and mental hospitals across North America. He lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, California, and is the founder and director of teacher training at Santa Cruz Yoga. Visit www.markstephensyoga.com
