Authenticity. Did you know that the word “authentic” literally means to be your own author?

Be you. Don’t pretend to be anything else.

Via Entheos

TimeLAX travels across the sprawled city of Los Angeles, connecting some of the city’s most iconic landmarks – Disney Concert Hall, the Griffith Observatory and John Ferraro Building – with over 200 locations that reveal the true essence of the city’s fabric.

Could B.K.S. Iyengar win the Nobel Peace Prize? He should, says a novelist and correspondent for Bloomberg’s World View in New Delhi as well as the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States who have initiated a worldwide effort to nominate him. But what does yoga have to do with peace, anyway?

According to Chandrahas Choudhury, who wrote the Bloomberg article, it’s time for an Indian to win the Nobel Peace Prize (Mahatma Gandhi’s surprising omission has been widely criticized) and he thinks it deservedly belongs to Iyengar, who turned 95 just last month and is considered one of the founders of what we know today as modern yoga. And yoga, (overly simplified) as finding inner peace as a means to finding peace outside, is the gist of a lot of Iyengar (and yoga/Patanjali’s) teachings and is the basis for Choudhury’s case for Guruji’s nomination.

“Is there an Indian today who deserves it?” Choudhury asks. “There certainly is,” Choudhury continues, “and it’s curious that his claim on it has apparently never been taken with the seriousness it merits, when one might say he hasn’t just advanced the cause of peace in the world, but considerably enlarged its meaning.”

This would be a good year to award the prize to Iyengar. Remarkably, he continues to keep up an exhausting schedule, radiating the positive effects of yoga practice for both body and mind. Two years ago, he travelled to China to start an Iyengar yoga institute there. “He can still do the sirsasana, or head stand, for half an hour at a go,” the Indian journalist Sanjukta Sharma wrote in a profile last month. “This is the longest a yoga guru has sustained his or her practice to perfect more and more.” To millions of practitioners who have passed through Iyengar yoga schools in 72 countries, or have deepened their understanding of yoga poses through one of his books (most notably the 1966 classic “Light on Yoga,”) Iyengar is the face of yoga.

Click to check out the full article on BKS Iyengar, Modern Yoga, and the Nobel Prize.

~ Asara Lovejoy

Via Athleta

Oh, chaturanga dandasana. We’ve had a long and complicated relationship. I remember my first few yoga classes way back when, and how it was unclear to me that people were not in fact lowering themselves all the way to the floor. They were – gasp – hovering! And when I first tried you, how miserably I failed. You may not come easily, chaturanga, but perseverance pays off.

There is nothing like supporting your own body weight for building strength. Which is why you must not do a drive-by with this pose, cruising as fast as you can into upward facing dog. As Baron Baptise puts it in his book Journey Into Power: “A lot of students try to sneak their way past Low Push-Up and move directly from High Push-Up to the next pose, which is Upward Facing Dog, but I strongly encourage you not to do this. Find ways to work within the pose. Modify, dilute, research, but don’t run or avoid the work. Challenge yourself sensitively and your weakness will soon turn to strength.”

Read the full guide on how to do chaturanga dandasana properly. 

Image via Athleta