Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

You may think that writing about alignment would arise spontaneously for the founder of Alignment Yoga, though I’ve struggled to coalesce my thoughts into a manageable blog posting. After some serious procrastination, I’ve decided that tonight is the night to put fingers to keyboard, and tease apart some ideas about alignment. In the prior blog posting, I discussed how simply feeling your body is the essence of practice. Independent of technique, cues or alignment, embodiment is perhaps the greatest gift that can arise from investing the time and energy into mind/body practice. Riding on the coattails of this de-emphasis on form is a de-emphasis on postural alignment. This was and is intentional - alignment is overrated. Many people inhabit bodies that may be considered misaligned, yet experience little if any pain. Other people may suffer terribly with the supposed symptoms of misalignment, yet their bodies are fundamentally well aligned. In working with bodies, causality is...

As many of you may have seen, my wife and I recently decided to close our Madison-based Mound Street Yoga Center. This decision has been a long time in coming, as the fortunes of our iconic, single-room studio have been declining for quite some time. I am nostalgic for its former glory, though honesty, I am also relieved to openly discuss the years-long decline that consumed more and more of our time and energy. A lovely chapter is closing, and in its wake, another chapter most assuredly has begun. Embodiment: enjoying one of my favorite sweets following a run on Pre's Trail in Eugene, OR Part of this closing-of-chapters involves my approach to teaching Yoga. As my previous blog posting initiated, I’m reflecting on 30+ years of teaching Yoga. What does it mean to do something for thirty years, and how does this longevity inform future actions? I’ve traversed many paths within the corpus of Yoga – from purity-of- essence -alignment, to the most vigorous of Vinyasa-flo...

Sometime last month marked my 30th year of teaching Yoga. While I cannot remember the first day that I taught Yoga in the Spring of 1989, I clearly remember the life milestones that concurred with that then-new beginning. Those milestones occurred sometime in the month of April, and since then I've considered April, 1989 as the beginning of this significant chapter of my life. For most of those years, I taught Yoga as my full-time profession. During many of those years, I was delighted with my choice to follow my passion for Yoga, though some of those years were filled with feelings of doubt. The arc of my Yoga teaching and practice has evolved over the years, more or less following a U-shaped curve. In the beginning of my teaching and practice, I was young and in love with Yoga. As I descended into midlife, my faith in the hagiographic portrayals of Yoga and its lore wore thin. Now that I'm rounding the bend to the age when many of my friends are retiring, I have had a rena...

I cannot claim an affinity for sauna based on heritage, any more than I can claim a fondness for Citroen cars or BMW motorcycles based on heritage. Despite my name, I'm a mutt of European ancestry; I'm no more Scandinavian than I am anything else. Despite my lack of ancestral inclination to sauna, however, I've always been drawn to the intense heat of sauna, sweat lodge and hot springs. When I was a student-athlete at the University of Minnesota, my track coach encouraged sauna to expedite recovering from hard workouts. Even at that young age, I eagerly followed coach's advice, at least when it involved sauna. Upon graduation, I immediately embarked on a years-long, back-to-nature period that included lots of sauna (albeit wearing less clothing than during my varsity athlete days!) I've long been partial to hot springs, sweat lodges and saunas. Once I settled in the rural hill country outside of Madison 25+ years ago, my sauna-philia only increased. From Se...

When I was first introduced to the Speed Play approach to running, I was wholly underwhelmed. I had little (almost none) sense of where my limbs were at any given time, and running was a less-than-satisfactory experience. Various coaches suggested that I run cross country in order to improve my coordination, and I obliged by running cross country in 1980 and 1981. Training was painfully challenging, and the high point of each workout was hanging out with my teammates at the close of practice. At the time, I could scarcely imagine that nearly forty years later, I'd be joyfully doing Fartlek workouts. Some workouts are a pleasure - some aren't. The workout, Fartlek, derives from the Swedish word for speed play . I've just returned from 90+ minutes of Fartlek running in Blue Mound State Park ; delighted in the interplay of running slowly, darting up hills, and coasting along flats. Rather than structuring a workout into discreet bits of this and that, the Fartle...

In my previous posting, I explored some of the choices I've made with regards to strength training. Every system has its tradeoffs, and each of us is left to decide what tradeoffs (risks) are acceptable, and which are not. I've landed on working out 2-4x per week on the Pilates equipment, supplemented with some dumbbell and bodyweight exercises. After weighing the available information and feeling how things land in my body, I'm of the opinion that this combo satisfies my desire to maintain (and hopefully build) muscle mass... done within the frame of mindfulness that I came to appreciate through my years of Yoga practice. In training cardiovascular (aerobic) fitness, there are various options. Some trainers advocate a primary focus on lower-intensity work done for longer periods of time, while other trainers are partial to high-intensity intervals, done for shorter periods of time. Each camp cites evidence supporting their approach, and claim many adherents who are mo...

Last week I wrote a bit about calculated risk, and how pretty much every decision that we make contains a degree of it. This week I'd like to share my approach to muscle mass, and the risks I've chosen to reject and embrace. I think the evidence is quite strong that resistance training is beneficial for the human body. Among the benefits of resistance training are: Increased bone density Increased muscle mass (great for counteracting the effects of aging) Improved balance Reduced risk of lower-back pain Increased resting metabolism (good for weight control) Improved glucose tolerance (reduce risk of developing diabetes, and/or reducing its severity) With all the benefits of resistance training, I think we'd all be wise to consider how to work 2+ days/week of resistance training into our lives. For years I considered my daily Yoga practice as sufficient resistance training. The teachers who taught me Modern Postural Yoga repeatedly claimed that yoga postures b...