Passport to Prana
Enjoy trying out a large number of yoga classes at a fraction of the price of regular drop-in rates. Great way to source out a new studio or to practice with new yoga teachers. Available in San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa (and they are expanding).

Desert Essence Organics
A really line of organic body care products. We just tried the organic lavender hand soap - great fragrance and did not dry out the hands. All of the products are 100% vegan, biodegradable, manufactured using windpower, cruelty and
wheat/gluten free. And contains no parabens, sodium laurly/laureth sulfates, phthalates, artificial fragrances or colors, silicones, EDTA, glycol or petroleum based ingredients.

The Great Indian Yoga Masters by Birad Rajaram Yajnik
This book traces some of the prominent yoga masters through history with a beautiful selection of photographs. The book has been photographed and documented across nine countries and consists of over 200 visuals that outline the spread and practice across the world of this ancient art form.

Leeks, a member of the onion and garlic family, have long been grown and cooked in Europe and the Mediterranean. Historians claim Nero ate leeks in soup regularly, thinking they were good for his singing voice. He may have gotten the notion from Aristotle who claimed the clear cry of the partridge was due to its diet of leeks. Only recently have they become popular in the United States.

An average size leek contains approximately 40 calories and 305 mg of salt which is 13% of the daily requirement. They also contain significant levels of manganese (15%) and iron (8%). Leeks are believed to fight cancer, especially colon and prostate cancer. They contain quercetin and other compounds which inhibit carcinogenic development and also restrict the spread of cancer. Leeks also contain kaempferol, a substance which has been shown to reduce ovarian cancer in women. The green parts of leeks are especially nutritious, containing B vitamins and loaded with protective antioxidants such as carotenoids and lutein.

Read more about the health benefits and a recipe with leeks:The Nutritious World of Leeks

Kale, a descendent of the wild cabbage, is thought to have originated in Asia Minor and to have been brought to Europe around 600 B.C. by groups of Celtic wanderers. Curly kale played an important role in early Europe, having been a significant crop during ancient Roman times and a popular vegetable eaten by peasants in the Middle Ages. English settlers brought kale to the United States in the 17th century. Both ornamental and dinosaur kale are much more recent varieties. Dinosaur kale was discovered in Italy in the late 19th century. Ornamental kale, originally a decorative garden plant, was first cultivated commercially in the 1980s in California. Ornamental kale is now better known by the name Savoy.

Read more about the health benefits of Kale and a great Kale Chip recipe:Kale - Veggie Superstar

Click to enjoy our latest video: Belly Dance Power

About Gillian Cofsky:
Gillian began her bellydance journey on Vancouver Island in 2002 at the age of 15. Since then she has become well known in the dance community through teaching, performing, and eternally learning. Gillian is a BCRPA Group Fitness Leader, and certified ‘Bellyfit’ instructor, and currently teaches several Bellyfit classes around Vancouver.

It seems that there have always been wars between nations, lover’s spats and family feuds as long as humanity has been on Earth. Where humans go, drama is soon to follow. Yet underneath the soap opera emotional rollercoaster is the enduring dream of final and lasting peace. Sometimes it is those who are the most deeply entrenched within the drama of their own lives that most desperately search for salvation. For centuries humanity has turned to organized religion to answer the deeper questions, yearnings and aspirations of life. Now the search for spirituality takes prominence in the public domain and your participation in activities like yoga and meditation heralds a major spiritual revitalization of society.

Living life on the spiritual path allows you to tap into the magical underlayer of existence and it is in this space that the dream of unity and peace exists. The real fabric that hope is made of comes not in careless absent-mindedness but in patient, heartfelt dedication day after day, week after week and year after year. Practicing yoga is not some panacea for all your personal problems and certainly not the ills of the world, however, if you practice yoga you may just find a way to live a more peaceful and meaningful life before your time here is over. What unique and valuable contribution you make to the world is not always measured in terms of grandness, but sometimes in terms of how many smiles you share each day.

In the stormy clouds of life’s inevitable series of setbacks you will find the silver lining of your soul. It isn’t when everything in your life clicks along in an upbeat winning streak that you ask the toughest questions of your life. The search for meaning walks hand in hand with the reality of struggle. When it’s cheap, free and easy, it’s can also be meaningless, light and unbearable. Sometimes people fundamentally reevaluate their life’s purpose, direction and drive after a life-threatening illness. Others do so after a momentous or inspirational meeting with a person, mentor or role model. Many have also voluntarily chosen to face the deluge of bad news that arrives at their doorstep through the power of yoga.

Eckhart Tolle says that every single person interested in spirituality today has suffered and it is the suffering that created their interest in the deeper dimension of life. So it is that yoga as a spiritual path offers a unique kind of salvation, one that promises not to remove you from your suffering but one that teaches you how to love, live with and accept the reality of life as it really is, good and bad days just the same. You see, the bad news comes knocking at your door and threatens to pull you under a permanent shadow of depression, anger or defeat completely uninvited. If you run from it, fight it or try to escape, you’re doomed to fail someday. Every person on Earth has a day that’s better off spent in bed no matter how cheerful, sunny and bright their disposition might be. The glitteratti, celebrity and royalty all have bad hair days. Yogis, priests and saints get angry. And there’s nothing with that. Inner peace is more a discipline of the mind than mere good luck. With the power of yoga you see the truth of life, that is, that there is nowhere to run, no place to hide, and no one to save you. All that’s left to do is begin walking along the slow, steady spiritual path, the path of freedom, truth and lasting peace.

It is when life tests you by offering the challenge of hardship that you know exactly what you’re made of. Strength and steadiness of character are defined not in moments of ease, but in moments of great duress. In the context of yoga, it is not what comes naturally and effortlessly to you that holds the greatest power of transformation. That which is far from your sense of normal has the ability to make you a new person for it is in these moments that you will have a mirror with which to see yourself clearly. Much of my personal journey in yoga has been about developing strength and steadiness both of the body and mind. At moments of great challenge, my first inclination is to quit, give up and grow melancholic and self-pitying. One of yoga’s greatest gifts to me is the awareness that exactly when I want to throw in the towel is exactly when I need to push through, not harshly with unnecessary crass force, but from the core of my being, gently, powerfully and with exactly the right amount of strength and grace.

About Kino MacGregor
Kino MacGregor is a small business owner (www.miamilifecenter.com), yoga teacher and freelance journalist who has produced two yoga DVDs and is currently working on her first book, Inner Peace, Irresistible Beauty to be released late April 2009. For complete details please see www.ashtanga-awareness.com.

Click to watch The Knee Yoga Anatomy Video.

About David Keil:
David Keil was introduced to yoga in 1989 by his Tai Chi Chuan teacher. Both the Tai Chi and Yoga practice at the ripe age of 17 began his research into his own mind-body connections. As an instructor of Kinesiology (the study of movement and musculoskelatal anatomy) at Miami’s Educating Hands School of Massage, David had developed a fun, informal and informative style of teaching. Because of his passion and desire to share the human body with everyone, he delivers this complex and sometimes frustrating topic in a way that is very accessible and understandable to yoga practitioners.

A Licensed Massage Therapist and Certified Neuromuscular Therapist, David has taught seminars in Body Mechanics for Massage Therapists and has also worked with other local and national audiences. David’s current personal yoga practice is Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga. Since 2002 he has had the honor of studying with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois as well as with John Scott.

Click to watch Restorative Yoga Video For Deep Calm. Also available as a download for your computer or ipod.

About Rick Coe:
Rick Coe has an MA Transpersonal Counselling Psychology from Naropa University. He lives in Vancouver and teaches yoga at Exhale Studio, practices counselling at Jericho Counselling, and is currently training with Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy.

In addition he is developing community workshops combining yoga with with movement and dance modalities, as well as with nature reconnection.

Feeling the inner body deeply allows yoga practitioners a daily window into their own soul. By regularly tuning into this internal level yogis can actually feel the alignment or misalignment of their actions. The body’s wisdom lies in its pervasive truthfulness
and the yogi’s wisdom lies in the ability to listen to the body’s sometimes superior sense of self. The body is perhaps the most physical form of the mind and the spirit and in fact outwardly and inwardly tells its story with clarity and precision. Practitioners learn to delineate messages from their inner world from whims of fancy and desire through years of dedicated practice. It is a delicate tightrope to walk the line between healthy guidance and destructive old habits that die hard.

Yoga postures or asanas give practitioners a chance to access the spiritual through the physical. This long, arduous task of internal awakening makes it possible for dedicated practitioners to excavate layers of themselves. Yogis cross the bridge between the physical and the spiritual through a path interlaced with the fire of pain, the release of trust and the freeflow of love. Each physical posture presents a series of tests and challenges that heal the body and train the mind. In the small moments where practitioners make contact with the eternal part of themselves they gain access to a more deeply tuned-in way of living, being and acting. It is in this undulating state where the flow of life actually begins.

Yoga is a sanctuary where you learn to listen to your body. Like a holiday from the limiting, negative thoughts that run on auto-pilot at the back of the mind yoga helps amplify the true nature of your mind and soul within. This heightened faculty of
listening allows you to actually hear not only the body but also the mind. When your capacity to listen is at its greatest and most refined you have the ability to listen directly to your soul and seek its constant guidance. At the depths of your being lies a place where you already know all the answers to your deepest questions, a state of being so serene it remains calm even amidst the most terrifying traumas of your life and a mind so vast it encompasses the entire universe both good and bad in a field of love.

While on a daily basis it is often hard to hear the musings of the subtle language of soul, with regular yoga practice it is possible to attune your vibrational sensory perception to follow the messages surface from the deep. All the greatest ideas are in some sense channeled from this soft space within, not generated by a mechanistic world without. The miracle of yoga is that it provides regular people like you and me a way to literally gain access to the sacred inner world of spirit. Without this check-in I would sometimes quite literally be lost. While I do not get it right every time and certainly there are moments when I think I am receiving a deep message only to find that I am just feeding an old negative behavior, yoga helps me get better at listening to, trusting and having faith in the soft, but persistent voice within.

While the tradition of yoga is intensely bound to the sanctity of the teacher-student relationship, the words and guidance of the greatest teachers are meant as sign-posts that lead students to the discovery of their own true voice within. The presence of every yoga master raises the bar for the possibility of a better life for each student and is a starting point where we can begin. The ending point of this age-old tradition, the ultimate goal of eternal peace, must be an individual experience gained through the hard work and good fortune of each practitioner. Years under a teacher’s divine guidance can best give you the gift of finding your highest teacher within. No sacred teacher wants you to do what they say just because they said so or because you read in an ancient scripture. At its best yoga is a non-dogmatic, non-religious path towards self-realization. All yoga is experiential by definition because no one can live your awakening for you. No matter how many times you read it in scriptures or hear it from your teacher nothing is real for you along the path of yoga until you actually feel it in your own body, mind and soul as a call to action. There is no one who can know your own journey better than yourself and no one who can answer the hardest questions of your life but yourself. Teachers and tradition illuminate the path ahead for you, but you have to take each step with your own two feet. Once you dig deep enough and touch the eternal nature within you hold the key to lead yourself out of darkness into your own salvation.

Yoga seeks to unify the practitioner with the deepest level of themselves through a harmonization of body, mind and soul. When the mind is quiet, the body is healthy and the soul is free every living being can experience what is their birth right, that is, a state of boundless happiness, limitless joy and compassionate power. The entire process of yoga is one of remembering who you really are. In the glory of our true nature we trust the innate goodness of our being and learn to listen to the quiet voice of belief that comes from our deepest sense of self. Against a mountain of evidence to the contrary and doubt that cripples generations you have one thing to hold onto, a soft, subtle, but courageous voice that dares to say I think I can.

About Kino MacGregor
Kino MacGregor is a small business owner (www.miamilifecenter.com), yoga teacher and freelance journalist who has produced two yoga DVDs and is currently working on her first book, Inner Peace, Irresistible Beauty to be released late April 2009. For complete details please see www.ashtanga-awareness.com.

Click to watch Shiva’s online yoga video: Creative Core Abs

About Shiva Rea:
Shiva Rea, M.A., began exploring yoga at the age of 14. Since then, the practice of yoga has transformed her life and become the essence of who she is. A leading teacher of Prana Flow Yoga and Yoga Trance Dance, Shiva travels the globe leading retreats, holding workshops and hosting conferences for her legions of fans.

Muscle consumes approximately 6-10 calories a day per pound with daily RMR. In comparison, the brain consumes 109 calories pound, the heart and kidneys each consume 200 calories per pound. Since organs can not be increased in size, our best option for increasing caloric consumption with RMR is by increasing muscle mass.

One popular myth is that muscle burns 50-100 calories a day per pound. Studies have indicated that increases in muscle mass add increased calorie burning with numbers ranging from 20-90 calories per pound per day. But questions have risen asking if the increase in calorie expenditure was because of the extra muscle alone or if other factors were involved. Experts then concluded that 10 calories per pound per day is a more reasonable estimate versus the 50-100 calories per pound.

By gaining even a small amount of extra muscle mass like 5 pounds can increase your daily calorie consumption automatically by about 50 calories. By the experts figures, this works out to 1500 calories extra a month. To lose a pound of fat requires a net loss of 3500 calories, therefore, this extra 1500 calories via muscle gain can be a very helpful method to reaching the 3500 calorie goal for fat loss.

Morale of the story: if you are working to improve your ability to manage your body composition or to loss weight, it is important to add some exercise activities that will increase your muscle mass. Dieting alone often results in an undesirable decrease in muscle mass and with little fat mass loss - when you exit a diet, your caloric burning capacity is diminished and you will likely gain even more body fat.

Will Yoga add muscle? Yoga can add muscle for those who have been sedentary and beginning a fitness program. Yoga will help maintain fat-free mass for those who are already well conditioned with fitness. Progressive and muscle loading postures will engage large muscle groups and contribute to improving muscular strength, endurance and toning. Here are some ideal Yoga poses that work large muscle groups:
*Warrior Poses (Virabhadrasana)
*Chair Pose (Utkatasana)
*Plank Pose / Push up transitions (Chaturanga Dandasana)
*Upward Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana)
*Bridge Pose and Spinal Lift Pose (Setu Bandhasana)

Another key myth especially for women is the fear of looking bulky and masculine with increased muscle mass. An addition of 5-10 pounds of lean muscle mass distributed over the entire body would be quite insignificant in terms of showing as bulk and for woman, this would be more represented as a more ‘toned’ image. Consider that 5 pounds of fat has a much greater volume than 5 pounds of muscle. By replacing 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of muscle, you would effectively decrease your body size and enjoy a more toned physique.

Putting physical attributes aside, the gain in muscle mass will also be beneficial in generating more supportive tissue around joints thus balancing the increase in flexibility you gain from Yoga. Again, challenging another myth, increasing muscle will NOT decrease your range of motion and flexibility as long as you remain consistent in your Yoga practices and train without producing injuries or deep muscle soreness. Finally, increasing muscle mass likely involves generating weight bearing stress on the bones. This loading effect on the bones contributes to improved bone health and reduced development of osteoporosis.

The quinoa seed is high in protein, calcium and iron, a good source of vitamin E and several of the B vitamins. It contains an almost perfect balance of all eight essential amino acids needed for tissue development in humans. The protein in quinoa is a ‘complete’ protein due to the presence of all 8 essential amino acids. Quinoa is 12% to 18% protein and four ounces a day, about 1/2-cup, will provide a childs protein needs for one day. The 6-7% fat of quinoa is relatively high when compared to other grains, but it boasts a low sodium content and also provides valuable starch and easily digestible fiber. The seeds are also gluten-free which makes this a nutritious and flavorful alternative grain for those with gluten sensitivity. Quinoa would be a worthy addition to anyone’s diet, supplying variety as well as good nutrition.

Click to read full article and recipe: Artichoke, Asparagus & Mushroom Quinoa Risotto