The Top 10 Colleges for Yoga:

10. Ball State University, Muncie, IN: often quoted in Yoga Journal, home to an annual wellness summit that includes Laughter Yoga, and blocks from Lotus Alternative Pain Center. Well played, Muncie.

9. Pratt, Brooklyn, NY: more than just an elective PE credit or fitness program, Pratt sees yoga as part of a holistic approach to healthy learning. Namaste to that.

8. SUNY Purchase: they keep a Kundalini lecturer on staff at this artsy campus, and if you need the counseling center to work on your dosha, they’re down with Ayurveda.

7. Reed College, Portland, OR: situated in a super green, creative nexus with an entire curriculum dedicated to ‘inquiry and self-inquiry,’ with a populist approach to yoga.

6. Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT: in addition to the campus’ attitude of radical acceptance, they offer a course in AcroYoga. For credit. Seriously.

5. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO: the faculty is in the middle of a study on the benefits of Bikram and the students are winning Yoga Asana Championships. Go Rams!

4. University of New Mexico at Taos: in addition to the Holistic & Healing Arts degree program, UNM-Taos offers accredited yogateacher training on campus.

3. Oberlin College, OH: consistently rated one of the healthiest, most liberal, most veggie-friendly and best colleges for “Birkenstock-wearing hippies.” Case in point: Yoga for Singing?

2. University of Vermont: the word ‘yoga’ appears on nearly 1,700 pages of the UVM website, which sounds about right on a campus with a Mind-Body Wellness Department and local yoga/meditation center directory.

1. University of California at Santa Cruz: 7 faculty mind/body teachers, dozens of weekly classes from meditation hikes to warrior yoga, in a city with possibly the most yoga studios per capita and a sunny, healthy disposition year round. They even claim to be the birthplace of organic farming!

Via YogaDownload

If you aren’t dreaming of becoming a programmer—and therefore planning to embark on a lengthy course of study, whether self-directed or formal—I can’t endorse learning to code. Yes, it is a creative endeavor. At its base, it’s problem-solving, and the rewards for exposing holes in your thinking and discovering elegant solutions are awesome. I really think that some programs are beautiful. But I don’t think that most who “learn to code” will end up learning anything that sticks.

One common argument for promoting programming to novices is that technology’s unprecedented pervasiveness in our lives demands that we understand the nitty-gritty details. But the fact is that no matter how pervasive a technology is, we don’t need to understand how it works—our society divides its labor so that everyone can use things without going to the trouble of making them. To justify everyone learning about programming, you would need to show that most jobs will actually require this. But instead all I see are vague predictions that the growth in “IT jobs” means that we must either “program or be programmed” and that a few rich companies want more programmers—which is not terribly persuasive.

Via Slate and Chase Felker

A piece of advice we often hear when it comes to being successful is to “follow our passion.”  But before you can follow your passion, you have to find it. So where do you look for it?

You may have sought out clues to your passion in things like personality inventories, self-help books or career assessment tests. Today I am encouraging you to look for your passion somewhere else: in your suffering.

The original definition of the word PASSION is actually SUFFERING (referring to the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death). Over time, we have evolved the word passion to mean: “love; a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept.” So the word passion means two things: suffering and love. There is key information in this.

Just like we’ve evolved the word passion from suffering to love, see how you can evolve and awaken that passion inside of you by reframing suffering. When you truly understand that EVERYTHING that has happened in your life has been for your highest good, you will naturally be called to serve rather than experience any suffering. As we evolve from suffering to love, we naturally feel more passionate about everything in our life no matter what our job may be.  We see that true passion is love.  Loving who we are, loving what we do, loving each other and sharing love wherever we go.

Emerson’s journals, 1844–1845: “As we read the newspapers, and we see the effrontery with which money & power carry their ends, and ride over honesty &good-meaning, morals & religion seem to become mere shrieking & impotence.” It could have been written today.

Via Entheos and Christine Hassler 

Yoga is great for stretching. If you do it enough, you can touch your toes and improve your parallel parking skills by twisting to see behind you.

But, it’s also great for stretching and expanding things beyond your muscles—namely your mind. Through concentration and meditation, in particular, the mind becomes stronger and more agile, in the same way our muscles are strengthened by a Vinyasa class or trip to the gym.

Another way to stretch our minds is through svadhyaya or self-study, which encourages yogis to be students of their practice and the world. One easy way to do this is to read. Since you’re reading this now, you’re off to a smashing start. BRAVO!

I recently had a request to share my favorite yoga and meditation books, so here’s a quick sampling of the ones I turn to most.

Modern yoga resources:
Living Your Yoga (Judith Lasater)
Eastern Body, Western Mind (Anodea Judith)
Yoga for Emotional Balance by my friend Bo Forbes
Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga by the late Georg Feuerstein
Mudras: Yoga in your Hands (Gertrud Hirschi)
Anything by B.K.S. Iyengar…
Classical yoga texts (each with multiple translations):
Bhagavad Gita
The Upanishads
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Meditation books:
Wherever You Go There You Are by mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn (and dad to one my dearest friends).
When Things Fall Apart by no nonsense Buddhist nun Pema Chodron
As an English major, former English teacher, writer, and proud nerd founder of the Om Gal Book Club, it’s no secret that I’m a major bookworm. I even have the knots in my shoulder and neck to prove it from lugging 2-3 books in my handbag at all times. I think it’s time for an e-reader…

And since they’re not all yoga books (not even close), I’ll share what else I’ve been reading lately and what I plan to read next.

Lately…
Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers by the inimitable Anne Lamott
Lean In by Facebook COO and feminist superhero Sheryl Sandberg
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, also known as the book that changed my life most this year. (If you don’t have time to read the book, watch her TED Talk).
Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield
Buddy: How a Rooster Made me a Family Man by my friend and editor of the Boston Globe, Brian McGrory.
Undiet by Candian gal pal and nutritionista superstar Meghan Telpner
New & Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (which I could read every day and still have my breathe taken away at least once on each page).
Up next…
Learning to Breathe by my friend Priscilla Warner
Running with the Mind of Meditation by Sakyong Mipham
A literature heavy hitter… like Infinite Jest or Anna Karenina. If I start now, I can finish by Christmas, right?
The September issue of Vogue—seriously, have you seen this thing? Magazine doesn’t cut it. Definitely a book.
What about you? What are you reading? Which yoga and meditation books expand your mind, and which works of prose or poetry stretch your soul and fill your handbag?Originally published on my website, Om Gal.

Via Intent Blog

The Internet’s last decade and a half of development as a forum for short, zippy, and often snarky writing has taken place in large part on platforms built by Ev Williams. A farm boy from Clarks, Neb., Williams, 41, dropped out of the University of Nebraska and worked his way west to California, first as a copywriter and then, once he’d taught himself enough, as a freelance coder. He founded the pioneering blogging network Blogger in the late 1990s, giving anyone with a stray thought a way to express it to the vast audiences flocking online. He sold that company for an undisclosed amount to Google in 2003 before going on to co-create Twitter, which initiated the era of disembodied 140-character snippets.
Now Williams, who left Twitter three years ago yet remains on its board, is trying to push the Web the other way. Medium, his year-old startup, seeks to create a home for something all too rare online: well-reasoned articles that can generate meaningful compensation for their authors. (In most cases so far, though, that doesn’t include pay.) “We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say to get those ideas and stories out there, and to tie it into a network where it has more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the audience it deserves,” he says.
The company, backed by Williams and fellow Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who declined to say how much they’ve invested, has 40 engineers and editors in San Francisco and a small office in New York. Employees describe a culture of rapid experimentation: Unlike on most blogs, readers can attach comments to specific paragraphs; the team’s also working on ways to let multiple writers collaborate on an article through the site’s interface à la Google Docs, Williams says. Medium’s audience remains small. A ComScore spokeswoman says the site doesn’t register on her company’s traffic scale.
On Medium’s spartan, mostly white home page, stories are grouped not by authors, but in collections with broad themes like “This Happened to Me,” memoirs of brushes with danger, and “Better Humans,” ideas for self-improvement. The site has been relatively choosy when inviting writers to contribute. On a recent day, its home page featured a personal account by a former Google employee of the awkwardness of leaving the company, a concise analysis of why chewing gum improves cognitive ability, and a 10,000-word story, “The Mercenary,” about an ex-Vietnam veteran investigating a gold theft in the Peruvian Andes. Despite the general lack of pay, writers commend Medium’s ease of use and the level of interaction with readers it provides. “For me, it’s a great opportunity,” says longtime war correspondent David Axe, who uses the site to post eyewitness accounts and photos from Afghanistan. Medium “is a great, solid, easy-to-use platform that deliberately limits style choices in the interest of simplicity,” he says.
Medium doesn’t always choose well. On Aug. 14, Peter Shih, a San Francisco entrepreneur, posted to the site the kind of thoughtless, list-based Internet fare that Williams says he created Medium to counter. Shih’s caustic piece, titled “10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition,” was widely panned for the author’s disgust with the city’s homeless and a misogynistic undertone in his comments about the local dating scene. (Shih withdrew the story and apologized.) Far from expressing embarrassment, Williams says the article filled Medium with intelligent responses from offended readers. “We do not expect every piece of content published on Medium (or even every piece that gets attention) to be thoughtful,” he wrote in an e-mail. “That is incongruent with being open and democratic, which is core to our philosophy.”
In part, Williams says, his two years atop Twitter led him to take another stab at stitching together that kind of longer dialogue. He says he’s disenchanted with the economics that lead news sites to chase reader eyeballs with little consideration for editorial quality. “The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It’s utter crap,” he says. “They create a culture that is superficial and fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are self-destructive and unsustainable.” Williams adds that he’s “pessimistic about the state of media, and that’s why I want to work on this problem. The economics of media are pushing things in a bad direction, but at the same time there’s more great stuff [being written] than ever before.”
Medium isn’t developing a conventional ads-for-page-views model—Williams says he can’t imagine a banner ad on the site. To change the dynamic of online writing, however, the company has to figure out a way to make money and pay its writers. (Matter, a similarly minded science and technology journalism site that Medium acquired earlier this year, charges readers 99¢ per month and pays contributors.) Evan Hansen, a former Wired editor who joined Medium as a senior editor last spring, says the startup is exploring approaches that include reader subscriptions and ad sponsors for specific article collections, a model similar to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet.
There’s plenty of uncertainty about whether the company will offer publishing tools for writers or employ journalists (or both). One of Medium’s more ambitious ideas is to create a marketplace for editorial services, such as fact-checking, copy editing, and photo editing, through which authors or Medium can pay pros to do those jobs on individual stories. Online media consultant Jeff Jarvis says it’s hardly unusual for a startup to experiment its way to a business model. “They didn’t know what Twitter was going to be at first, either,” he says.
Williams recognizes that he faces something of an uphill challenge with Medium. Snarky tweets and gossipy blogs are popular for a reason: They give busy readers a quick, dopamine-style kick and a break from their day jobs. (Gossip site Gawker pulled in about 7.3 million unique readers in July, according to ComScore.) By contrast, Williams says the statistic his team watches most closely is the average time per day its readers spend on the site, which he says is increasing; he declined to provide numbers. “We don’t pretend that we can make people eat their vegetables when there’s potato chips on the table,” he says. “But we want to provide an alternative for those who want some diversity in their diet.”

Via Bloomberg