The Weeks Well

Thank you for bearing with me while I’ve taken a short break. I’ve missed doing this podcast, and I’m so glad that Ty Powers, mindfulness guide extraordinaire, is the person to bring me back and round out this year. "You live your values every day." I loved reflecting on this one sentence from Ty, even though so much else he shared is such a beautiful year-end gift. Ty has been working i...

It feels at once difficult and incredibly easy to describe Sarah Powers and her work. She’s yet another beautiful embodiment of the intention of this podcast. A multidisciplinary practitioner, teacher, innovator, woman, mother, and global citizen, she offers 35 years of some of the deepest and most committed messages of interpersonal insight on how best for our species to thrive. This, all while w...

This conversation is one that I hope delights and inspires you. Always clear, succinct and, though he argues with this last point, original, Paul Grilley brought so much to the project that is The Weeks Well. I would call him—and Sarah Powers, who will be on the show in two weeks—the OG of Yin Yoga. In combining an East Asian word or concept with a South Asian word or concept, they have not only o...

I learned about Tracee Stanley from Gail Parker. These are both names I hope you now know as you follow the conversations on this podcast and as we dive into what yoga lineage is and why or whether it matters. Tracee is the first teacher I’ve talked to who has come from the Himalayan Yoga tradition. I’m glad she’s the first and I am looking forward to more greats from that school. Tracee is an aut...

💡For the month of August, we're re-releasing a few of our favorite podcasts from the 2023 season so far. Enjoy listening (or re-listening!) to these talks and, as always, tell us your thoughts and send over guest ideas. ____ Dr. Shyam Ranganathan holds an MA in South Asian Studies and an MA and PhD in Philosophy. He’s a strong voice on social media, and this is one of the few yoga handles tha...

💡For the month of August, we're re-releasing a few of our favorite podcasts from the 2023 season so far. Enjoy listening (or re-listening!) to these talks and, as always, tell us your thoughts and send over guest ideas. ____ Have you ever thought about relaxation being a prerequisite to rest? Jillian Pransky does, and she says that relaxation is a prerequisite to listening. As we discuss here...

💡For the month of August, we're re-releasing a few of our favorite podcasts from the 2023 season so far. Enjoy listening (or re-listening!) to these talks and, as always, tell us your thoughts and send over guest ideas. ____ Doug Keller's talks with me continue to be some of our most popular episodes. Here in his second episode, we explored what became a set of expanded precepts whose inc...

💡For the month of August, we're re-releasing a few of our favorite podcasts from the 2023 season so far. Enjoy listening (or re-listening!) to these talks and, as always, tell us your thoughts and send over guest ideas. ____ Seane Corn is one of the most influential people in modern yoga. Her journey in yoga teaching and service work started after her teacher training and at the moment she &q...

Dr. Jennifer Webb has been immersed in the study of psychology since her undergraduate days at Harvard in the 1990s. She got her Doctorate in Philosophy and Clinical Psychology from USC, and then she went on to Duke Integrative Medicine Center for her post-doc work. This is where she started intersecting professionally with yoga practice. At Duke, she learned how mindfulness is what she described...

James Fox started out in mindful meditation and yoga 30 years ago and soon after began teaching yoga to men facing life sentences at the San Quentin Prison. Soon after that, he founded the Prison Yoga Project, which is now all over the globe and is fueled by Fox’s dedication to teaching a trauma-informed approach in correctional facilities. The Prison Yoga Project’s reach is wide, in part because...

Dr. Shyam Ranganathan holds an MA in South Asian Studies and an MA and PhD in Philosophy. He’s a strong voice on social media, and his is one of the few yoga handles that actually stops my scroll. That's for the same reason he kept me pretty rapt in our conversation. Here we talked about his research on understanding how Non-Western traditions such as yoga are marginalized in a Western world a...

One thing that I took away from my conversation with Patty Townsend is a dead ringer for something I took away from my talk with Jillian Pransky. I almost named these two episodes part 1 and part 2 because of the intersection of a few things: that of giving and receiving both friendship in and wisdom—love, really—in the practice. It was a delight hearing about Patty's early days with Ashtanga,...

Have you ever thought about relaxation being a prerequisite to rest? Jillian Pransky does, and she says that relaxation is a prerequisite to listening. As we discuss here, it’s a process, and one that, thanks to science, we can now name and describe in detail. I would suggest that Jillian is part of a new cadre of experienced teachers exploring the art and practice of restorative yoga, which, yes,...

Shannon Crow started her podcast, The Connected Yoga Teacher, in 2017. She did so after taking multiple teacher trainings and finding herself disconnected from her fellow trainees right after the training ended. This disconnection was something she also found as she started getting to know yoga teachers out in the world: From competition to cults, she found that teachers were not able to discover...

How many black men in their late 40s do you know teaching yoga and wellness? I met Reggie about 10 years ago as he began his mindfulness and wellness journey at the age of 40. Our conversation here, about what it means to practice being well, had all the threads of love, health, grace, peace, and joy (words he used in an email exchange after our talk). It’s a different kind of talk than the ones I...

I decided to keep going with Doug Keller, whose first talk continues to be one of our most popular episodes. We did a minor review of his first talk, which was as dense and captivating as this one. Then, Doug explored what became a set of expanded precepts whose inclusion into modern practice could, in my opinion, change the game. These are 20 yamas (restraints) and niyamas (observances) , rather...

Seane Corn is one of the most influential people in modern yoga. Her journey in yoga teaching and service work started after her teacher training and at the moment she "niched" into a student group she believed she could help. When she met her students at Children of the Night, a non-profit serving girls between 12-17 who had been sex trafficked, she says they served her, rather than the...

Eddie Stern has been a spiritual seeker and curious contemplative his whole life. He has spent most of his time in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition and was a student of Pattabhi Jois, but along with many in the school, he has worked hard to heal traumas and elected to expand his view of practice participation in the world for the greater good. He recently decided to get his Masters degree (but he skipp...

Kino MacGregor manages to walk a fine line between the scroll-stopping stuff of Instagram and the deep practice of belonging, discernment, and freedom in yoga. If you do just take her in on Instagram, I wonder if you look past her flawless yoga asanas and pictures of the far-flung places she teaches, and read what she writes about her practices and experiences. She says repeatedly that yoga is not...

Rob Schware and Chelsea Roff are doing so many interesting things in yoga that I don't know where to start in these show notes. First, they are disruptors in an industry that since its modern inception has served a small group of suburban and urban women and the cultural elite. Give Back Yoga Foundation, the organization they run together as Co-Executive Directors, is in the business of servin...

This episode is such a great reminder of how great a practice Integral Yoga is—how deep, earnest, and sincere its roots. Swami Asokananda embodies this practice in all of his being, in every syllable. My conversation with him here, which we recorded about a year ago and I'm releasing for the first time, is amazing for teachers and for anyone seeking to deepen or better understand their yoga pr...

Richard Rosen wrote The Yoga of Breath in 2002, after he had been teaching for 15 years, and just before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He has a lot to say about the nature of the breath, and our conversation was the first of what I hope will be many on this podcast. He doesn't like the word "control" in the translation of pranayama; rather, he likes to call it cooperation. I lov...

Beryl Bender is an iconoclast. She coined the term "power yoga" in the 1980s and went on to write her first book Power Yoga . She took the Ashtanga Yoga teaching tradition and translated and made it accessible for westerners. She wanted the phrase to describe strength (versus just flexibility), appeal to men, and show that yoga could be a workout. In addition to later writing Beyond Powe...

Andrea Ferretti is a risk-taker and explorer. After my conversation with her, I would also throw in the word futurist. She's one of the first people I've talked to who legitimately seems to be pondering where yoga might go in the next few decades and beyond. Throughout her career, she has sought to work for fast-changing communications outlets describing health-span practices. She first wr...

I wanted to bring Barbara Benagh and John Schumacher back onto Practicing Well to take the conversation on yoga lineage further. They have been teaching yoga for decades—100 years between the two of them—so I brought them back to talk about what it means to be an elder in this craft. We discussed how teaching and learning have changed over the years, and how in their cases, their practice and teac...