Cape Men's Yoga

Mindfulness in meditation While travelling, I have taken time to read through a book Bhikku Analayo, a Buddhist monk, writing on the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha's most famous teaching on meditation and mindfulness. Mindfulness has become quite a trendy topic in the Western world. It came directly from exposure to Buddhist meditation practices and the rise of Goenka's Vipassana meditation methodology to enter into Western ideas of stress reduction, health treatment related to stress, and generally improvement of life quality. Mindfulness, or 'sati' in Pali means to pay attention to what is going on: to watch and observe. It is link to sampajana - which means to understand something in context. Through observing carefully what we are doing, to watch our reality in slow-motion, we often find that we have built up stress and anxiety unnecessarily and that by concentrating the mind we can untangle that process. In this morning's meditation I started off ob...

Dear fellow yogis, I got to teach a class of yoga at Naked Yoga Sydney in Australia. A great bunch of guys - diverse and welcoming. I am back with you in Cape Town on Sunday 23 November 2014 in Cape Town at our central venue in the city. Class is from 10h00 until noon. There is secure parking or lots of street parking. Bring your mat and your open heart. We'll have a nude men's vinyasa class this week. Also as a reminder deposits are due to secure yourself a place at the Summer Encounters yoga and meditationn retreat, 29 January until 01 February 2015. For more info contact capemensyoga AT gmail.com or text / whatsapp 082 579 6868. Namaste

Reconciliation Day Yoga  Dear Yoga brothers, So much has happened in the last week. Many of you will have been feeling the national outpouring of grief for uTata Madiba, Nelson Mandela who was laid to rest on 15 December. We have been caught up in tears, in memories, in tributes, in debates and most of all re-inspired by his legacy to remember one of yoga's most profound lessons - our own happiness is born out of our relationship with others and our ability to use self-discipline and empathy to build a truly worthwhile life, one of compassion, one without harm, one that loves peace and reconciliation. Though he chose a path of armed insurrection against the minority government, and paid a heavy price for this, within his 27 years of incarceration, he was able to use this isolation to reflect on what really matters in life. Instead of sinking into madness or anger, he came to learn that anger is the killer, the deceiver, the toxin in the human heart. Instead he found forgiven...

Meditation Meditation and yoga are closely connected practices. In classic yoga, meditation is one of the eight limbs of the yogic practice. My own experience progressed from formal meditation into yoga asana, only to discover that yoga asana actually helps still the mind and facilitates effective meditation. It would be great to say that meditation is one thing and this is how you do it. The truth is that meditation is many different things, has different options, and we approach it through unique pathways that are relevant to who we are and our earlier life experience. Still, meditation is a practice with many thousands of years of human experience. There is not much which has not been studied, experienced, practised and taught. What is really difficult about meditation? Getting started and trusting ourselves enough to sustain the practice. Any meditation is likely to be useful, but it is through sustained practice on a regular basis and over years, which allows the deep ...