Benefits
*Brings balance and harmony to the body, mind and spirit
*Helps with strength, flexibility range of motion and balance
*Calms the mind, reduces stress and anxiety
*Revitalizes the body and mind
*Slows heart rate
*Lowers blood pressure
*Increases circulation
*Strengthens and tones muscles
*Helps to detoxify system
*Improves function of internal organs
*Balances muscular system
*Increases metabolism and energy
*Can help reduce depression, stress and insomnia
e
Knowing
“Whoever leaves this world without knowing his own world, it, unknown, is of no use to him, just like the Veda unrecited, or some other work undone. Even if someone does a great and meritorious work without knowing it, that work of his perishes in the end.”
e
More than posing
The Eight Limbs of Ashtanga Yoga are:
- Yama – code of conduct, self-restraint
- Niyama – spiritual observances, commitments to practice, such as study and devotion
- Āsana – integration of mind and body through physical activity
- Pranayama – regulation of breath leading to integration of mind and body
- Pratyahara – abstraction of the senses, withdrawal of the senses of perception from their objects
- Dharana – concentration, one-pointedness of mind
- Dhyana – meditation (quiet activity that leads to samadhi)
- Samādhi – the quiet state of blissful awareness, superconscious state.
COMMUNITY YOGA:
GPSS-GPSCY (Graduate & Professional Student Center at Yale)
@ GPSCY, 204 York Street, New Haven (between Arch & Drama School)
Free will donation (pay what you can or pay it forward)
All levels and ages welcome
YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL
@ Marquand Chapel, 409 Prospect Street, New Haven
No monetary cost, just pay it forward
All levels and ages are welcome.
Free will donation (pay what you can or pay it forward)
All levels and ages welcome
PRIVATE STUDIO:
WOW - Workout on Wooster
Drop in Class $15 (package deals available)
All levels and ages are welcome.
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PRIVATE YOGA:
Yoga Therapy - individualized according to specific needs.
Group Yoga - all levels and ages welcome, practice is modified to group requirements.
Yoga offered at $60/hour for 1 up to 3 persons, 4 or more persons at $20 each person.
Your own Yoga mat is required. Blocks, straps, and blanket or pillow are optional items but useful in many circumstances. Other tools may be of benefit and shall be discussed according to needs. (i.e. Resistance ball, light weights...)
Initial Trial Period includes consultation and assessment: 2 sessions are scheduled and are Prepaid upon appointment set up.
Please email me your inquiries and provide your telephone number and best times to reach you. Serious inquires only. Please include any specific ailments.
alexandre.souto@yale.edu
e
7.10.2010
Hope is good. For many, it is the only reason to keep on living. The prisoner
hangs on, thinking of the day when he will be released. The cancer patient looks
at statistics, and finds solace in a greater than zero odd of remission. The
spiritual seeker draws much strength from reading accounts of happiness
awaiting. The participant in MBSR training keeps on coming to the group,
inspired by tales of others before her who have cut their pain symptoms in half.
The abused child seeks refuge in fantasies of another life, one day . . .
Hope is sometimes the only thread left, between life and death.
Hope is also a double-edged sword, and a state of mind that keeps us in the
future, and seals the deal of our present unhappiness. So many times, I find
myself not liking the current moment, and hoping for, rehearsing a different
life. If only . . . When . . . Some day . . . So many variations in the mind,
around what really amounts to a profound hatred of the present experience, and a
denial of life itself.
Hope lures us with its false sweetness.
Hope is ok, as long as it comes with an acceptance of the now. A tricky balance,
best maintained by keeping hope contained in the broad field of big intentions,
and out of moment-to-moment living. It's somewhat akin to steering our boat
towards a lovely place, and then forgetting about our destination, and making
room for all the experiences along the way. Not expecting anything else but what
is offered to us, right now. The storms, the rough waves, the sleepless nights,
the beautiful sunsets, the stillness, the dolphins . . . Not wasting a single
minute of the journey.
~ Marguerite Manteau-Rao ~
7.05.2010
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
6.13.2010
6.09.2010
1 Corinthians 13.1-8
The Gift of Love
13If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,* but do not have love, I gain nothing.4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.
6.04.2010
6.02.2010
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
6.01.2010
Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.
If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment."
The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
2.11.2010
*Interview published in Shambhala Sun, http://www.shambhalasun.co
2.04.2010
YOU
1.30.2010
Desires
1.24.2010

From the PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED by Paulo Freire:
"For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized "today." For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, in behalf of the continuing humanization of men" (73).
"The goal will no longer be to eliminate the risks of temporality by clutching to guaranteed space, but rather to temporalize space... The universe is revealed to me not as space, imposing a massive presence to which I can but adapt, but as a scope, a domain which takes shape as I act upon it" (22-27).
1.16.2010
First Spring Class + Poem
Greetings Beloved:Our first practice at YDS this summer was invigorating. We carried a heart felt sequence in bridging all levels yogic experience present in the Chapel into a harmonious communion. The next day some were a bit sore by the awakening of forgotten muscles. May we continue to support each other in the practice, awake all molecules of the physical, mental and spiritual body.
Below is a poem that came to me as I flew over the Pacific on the way to my teacher training in Hawaii. May this be an offering acceptable to your heart.
rippled Apah mat
to infinite curvature
Aditya plucking
white clouds from you
Surya burning within
desiring no desire
Trout
Coconut
Saxophone
May you be happy and at peace and may I be blessed with your presence once again,
Alex
12.28.2009
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad III 4:2
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad II 4:14
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad II 4:11
Bhagavad Gita
51-53 Unerring in his discrimination, sovereign of his senses and passions, free from the clamor of likes and dislikes, he leads a simple, self-reliant life based on meditation, cointrolling his speech, body, and mind. Free from self-will, aggressiveness, arrogance, anger, and the lust to possess people or things, he is at peace with himself and others and enters into the unitive state.
54 United with Brahman, ever joyful, beyond the reach of desire and sorrow, he has equal regard for every living creature and attains supreme devotion to Me.
55 By loving Me he comes to know Me truly; then he knows My glory and enters into My boundless being.
56 All his acts are performed in My service and through My Grace he wins eternal life.
57 Make every act an offering to Me; regard Me as your only protector, relying on interior discipline, meditate on Me always.
58 Remembering Me, you shall overcome all difficulties through My Grace. But if you will not heed Me in your self-will, nothing avail you.
59 If you egotistically say, "I will not fight this battle," your resolve will be useless; your own nature will drive you into it.
60 Your own karma, born of your own nature, will drive you to do even that which you do not wish to do, because of your delusion.
61 The Lord dwells in the hearts of all creatures whirls them around upon the wheel of Maya.
62 Run to Him for refuge with all your strength, and peace profpund will be yours through his Grace.
63 I give you these precious words of wisdom; reflect on them and then do as you choose.
64 These are the last words I shall speak to you, dear one, for your spiritual fulfillment. You are dear to Me.
65 Be aware of me always, adore Me. Make every act an offering to me, and you shall come to me.
66 Abandon all supports and look to me for protection. I shall purify you from the sins of the past, do not grieve.
12.27.2009
Sound
one cannot seize the sounds as something outside it
but by seizing the drum or the drummer
one has seized the sound
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad II 4:7
12.22.2009
Thomas Merton
“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be done though, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real.
In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything. The great thing, after all, is to live—not to pour out our life in the service of a myth. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration, and confusion… The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process.”







