You may have heard some of your teachers at SMY talking about fascia. Fascia is the technical term for connective tissue, the white stuff between the skin and the muscle of a chicken breast. Fascia wraps around every muscle, bone, and organ of the body. It coalesces to create tendons and ligaments. If you eliminated every structure in the body except for fascia, you would still have a recognizably human shape!

Here’s Gil Hedley, a great anatomist, talking about the way that fascia regenerates each night as you sleep as a kind of “fuzz”. Ever wonder why you feel so stiff when you’ve missed yoga a few times? Check this out!

Do you know the original meaning of the word yoga? Thousands of years ago, long before anybody associated yoga with exercise, yoga meant “yoke”. A thing to connect your horses to your chariot.

Since then, the meaning of yoga has exploded. Scholar David Gordon White writes that “yoga has also been employed to denote a device, a recipe, a method, a strategy, a charm, an incantation, fraud, a trick, an endeavor, a combination, union, an arrangement, zeal, care, diligence, industriousness, discipline, use, application, contact, a sum total, and the work of alchemists. …this is by no means an exhaustive list.”

I still like to think of it as a thing you use to connect your horses (your power) to your vehicle (your body). Yoke your actions to your dreams. Then every step you take is an expression of the deepest longings of your heart.