om beginnings om beginnings
Stories from around the weird and
wonderful world of yogaPlanet yoga
Hatha for Hilary
There’s been plenty of speculation about what sort of
yoga presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton enjoys. It’s no
secret in Washington DC that Mrs Clinton (wife of former
president Bill Clinton) enjoys yoga, but now she’s on
the cusp of becoming the world’s most powerful leader,
the press want to know all about it. “Yoga experts agree
that it’s most likely that Clinton, 67, is practicing some
form of Hatha yoga,” the Washington Post (one of the
newspapers that broke the Watergate scandal back in the
sixties) commented. It even canvassed local instructors
but said that no one would admit to teaching the former
first lady. Important stuff all this yoga and politics.Yoga is the new coffee
Move aside caffeine: yoga is the new pick-me-up of
choice for execs looking to stay fresh in-between
meetings, especially in ‘trendy’ industries such as
advertising and the media. According to recent US
reports there’s a definite uptake of work-based yoga
classes to keep employees on their toes when they start
to flag. Instead of sending out for a Starbucks many
companies are now ordering in yoga instructors. And
yoga may even be displacing ‘happy hour’ after work
too as stressed workers seek out natural highs instead
of alcoholic ones. Let’s face it, yoga happy hours are
definitely more sustainable than the classic tequila ones.Columbia
USA
USA
Soldiers of Savasana
For years, Colombia was plagued by drug crime, shootings
and warlords. Now, ex-militants and former death squad
members are being turned into yoga teachers. Hundreds of
former combatants and guerilla fighters have been offered
simple yoga courses in big cities like Bogota and Medellin
through a local organisation, Dunna: Creative Alternatives
for Peace. And some of them are now going on to teach
it to others. The group has been introducing locals to the
basic poses of yoga since 2010, not just former guerilla
fighters, but also the rural poor, the very people they once
terrorised during Colombia’s brutal, half-century conflict.
Yoga always wins through in the end.