Karma Class
Join our expanded community, submit a non-proft for our Karma class.
The first Tuesday of every month our 4:30pm class becomes our Karma Class. The proceeds from that class go to a non-profit that has been recommended by yogis. If you have an organization you feel strongly about let us know. We would like to support the wide range of organizations and interests of our yogis community ideally serving the Houston Community. Speak Up, we want to hear from you!
Recipes
Recipe for Homemade Chai Sweetener to add to coffee or tea.
1 14oz can of unsweetened condensed milk
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
Pour the can of milk into a clean, dry jar. Add the spices and cover tightly with a lid. Place in the refrigerator. The longer it stays refrigerated the better it gets. To use stir the mixture and scoop out 2 to 3 tablespoons into a cup of very strong, hot black tea.
Taken from Yoga Body Newsletter 2004
Yogi Tea
Boil 2 quarts water in a 3-4 quart pot. Add 15 whole cloves, boil for 1 minute. Add, 20 black peppercorns, 3 sticks of cinnamon, 20 green cardamon pods (crush or split the pods first), 8 or more slices of ginger 1/4" thick (no need to peel)
Cover and place on low boil for 30 minutes. For the best flavor cover with a tight lid on very low heat for 2-3 hours. When finished turn off heat and add ½ teaspoon of black tea. Strain tea and drink. You can serve the tea with honey or maple syrup and if you wish add soy milk or regular milk. The spices in this tea create a synergistic healing effect.
Black pepper is a blood purifier. Cardamon aids in digestion. Cloves strengthen the nervous system. Cinnamon aids calcium absorption. Ginger heals inflammations and removes physical weakness. The soy or dairy aids in assimilation. The black tea activates the ingredients.The tea strengthens the nervous system, energizes the body, clears the mind and is both a remedy and preventive measure for colds, allergies and other diseases of the mucous membranes.
Taken from YOGA YOGA in Austin TX
Community
Our Community, each month we introduce a yogi in our YA family.
Meet Yogi Sam Collins
What First brought you to yoga?
My first brush with yoga was the year I came back to Houston after graduating from UT. I don't remember now what motivated me to try yoga then but this was during the Age of Aquarius when alot of people of my generation doing yoga were looking for an alternative life style or at least something more enlightening than what was going on in mainstream America. I didn't do it that long as I became completely turned off when my yoga instructors, a married couple, approached me to sell Amway for them. I didn't come back to yoga until 27 years later at the age of 49 after reading an article in the Chronicle about yoga in Houston.
What is your favorite pose?
Triangle. My progression over time from being able to reach my hand to my shin, then to my foot, then to the floor was one of the indicators that my flexibility was progressing. In the beginning I weighed almost 200 pounds and had the flexibility of a block of granite. Triangle became one of the measures of my transformation. Once I was able to put my hand flat on the floor, one of my instructors suggested grabbing my big toe with my thumb and forefinger instead, lifting the big toe upward. This small adjustment really changed the dynamics of the pose. Triangle works both your upper body and lower body in tandem. When fully furled, it creates a tension both upwards with your arms and torso and downward with your legs - like the tension of a bow and arrow fully pulled back just before the moment of release. That sustained suspended tension all held together with balance then softened a few degrees by relaxing into to the pose really does it for me.
What is your guilty pleasure?
Ice cream.
What is your hometown?
I was born, grew up and have remained in Houston my entire life except for my four years in Austin at UT.
What do you do for work / fun outside YA walls?
I am an attorney, self-employed, and act on behalf of judges and courts as a court appointed receiver. I love to read, travel, go to concerts, get together for dinners with our friends and follow politics. My real fun is going to our place in Asheville, North Carolina where my wife and I hike in the tens of thousands of acres of parks and wilderness outdoors, go waterfall hunting, explore the nearby small towns, shop for pottery and meet the potters scattered all over the mountains in their homes and potter's sheds, go to outdoor art fairs, attend the weekly Friday night drum circle in a downtown park, listen to blue grass concerts, walk the grounds at the Biltmore Estate and drive the Blue Ridge Parkway.
What is your favorite quote?
I have two and they are related. The first is a line from the movie Risky Business, one of my favorite movies (if you have never seen it, rent it). Tom Cruise's character is a rich kid high school senior who finds himself in a complicated (and very funny) mess that has spun out of control while his parents are out of town on a weekend get away. At the same time he's trying to get into Princeton at the insistence of his parents without really having the credentials to do so, which is a secondary story line. As his world seems to be crashing down on him, his friend Miles turns to him and says: "sometimes you just got say what the f---" . Meaning, life is short and the complications many. Don't spend all of your time worrying about everything - it usually all works out for the best or at least it works out. My second favorite quote is one that my wife likes and lives by and really has a similar meaning as the first quote - "Don't sweat the small stuff".
What is your favorite meal?
Lately it's been eggplant parmigiana.
Can you share an interesting fact that most people would not know about you?
I am 58 years old and although maybe I seem like a buttoned-down lawyer, inside I am still that same 20 something hippie kid (at least in my head). I have been married for 30 years to the love of my life, I have two great kids, Jordan (28), an attorney for the Dept. of Energy / Renewable Energy who lives in Washington DC and Emily (26), a media buyer in Manhattan. My family is the most important fact to know about me.
What have you gained through your yoga practice that you would like to share?
Yoga empowered me and enabled me to take control of my body and mind in a way that I didn't think was possible. I tried running and working out at the gym but in reality, I was basically a couch potato from the end of high school until I started yoga. From the start I knew that yoga would be the "it" for me and I had the time, desire and workplace flexibility to do it often. I quickly went from 3 days a week to 5 (cutting back to 4 in the last few years). Yoga is like almost everything else - if you do it alot, you progress. At first I would struggle with getting into a pose. Once the the poses were learned, I still struggled with the transitions from pose to pose. Once I could transition, I began learning to be stable and to transition smoothly. I learned to keep my movements compact and not have alot of extraneous motion. Eventually, something fascinating happened: I stopped struggling as much and I found myself gliding smoothly through the transitions in a state of mental serenity and gracefullness that I did not think was possible for someone with as thick a body type as mine. I stopped having to think so hard about the poses and movement and began to flow through. For me this is the beauty of yoga: instructors tell you to be "present" and its true. But I like to get lost in the moment and the movement of it, and disconnect from everything else that occupies my mind and my world - where there's only the flow and the flow releases me and sets me free.
And More.........