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Now the things are getting serious! We've dealt with the bahiranga sadhana, the external practice... we learnt how to withdraw our senses inside ourselves, now you're facing the antaranga sadhana, the internal practice... here you'll deeply work with/on your mind, here the results won't be just better posture or more energy but real calmness in every condition, full concentration, clarity of mind and stuff like that... Dharana is the sixth step of patanjali's ashtanga system. Dharana means concentration, concentration is the ability to focus your mind on something. In general terms do you consider the ability to focus important in

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The 8 limbs - part I Until pratyahara we are in what is called the bahiranga sadhana... gross definition of sadhana is the practice that we are doing, bahiranga means external... all the steps we took until this point are related to the external reality, yamas and niyamas are about we interact with the world at a behavioural level, asanas and pranayama are affecting our movements and breathing and will modify the physical interaction with the world. All together the first 4 limbs will improve many aspects of our life at a physically external level... and this improvement will definitely

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We have seen that yamas and niyamas are the foundation of the yogic 8 limbed ladder to perfection. Yes, you've read it right... perfection, this is the final destination of your yoga practice... maybe it's a very very far point from where you are now and where i am now... but that is where we'll both arrive, everybody and everything is meant to get to that point, sooner or later... yoga is a series of techniques that will help you to reach the "last stop" in a shorter time... i'm not intending 1 month or 1 year or 1 decade...

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Let's spend some words on our connective tissue from a yogic point of view! You already know there are 4 kinds of tissues in our body, connective tissue is one of these. Anatomically talking it is a kind of biological tissue that connects, supports and separates the different types of tissues and organs of the body... it's a big category including bones, blood, fat, cartilage and more. Nervous tissue controls everything, muscular tissue moves everything, epithelial tissue is the external clothing of the body and the internal lining of some organs... all the rest is connective tissue! From our yogic

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Muscular system - part I Muscular system - part II Muscular system - part III We described in a basic way the muscular system and how it works... but what are its functions? 1- Movement: this is the most obvious function, you move in space through the contraction of your muscles! 2- Posture: bones and muscles together hold you in the position in which you are right now! 3- Protection: think of your abdominal internal organs... stomach, intestine, pancreas and so on... without the strong barrier of your abdominal muscles it would be very easy to severely injure them! 4-

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Muscular system - part I Muscular system - part II We've seen that a (skeletal) muscle has 3 possibilities: 1- To contract - this is the only "active" possibility, there is a generation of force that will lead to some result 2- To relax - this is a releasing of the contracting force, anyway being an act of release we could say it's active as well even if the action is the "un-doing" of a previous contracting action 3- To be stretched - it's normally a passive situation, it happens when the attachments of the muscle are pulled apart so

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We gave a basic description of muscles and how they contract (Muscular system - part I) We said that muscles are attached to bones through tendons, those attachment points are called origin and insertion: 1- Origin is the attachment to the bone less movable during the muscle contraction 2- Insertion is the attachment to the bone more movable during the muscle contraction Do you see? The biceps (i like to use them as example eheheh!!) have 2 origins in the bones in the shoulder area and 1 insertion on the radius bone in the forearm. The gastrocnemius (one of your

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