Kate Taylor's Yoga Site

I've been back for a month now and things are starting to get into a nice groove. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that sticking with my home practice has been easier than I thought it would be. I have found a small group of ashtangis here in Savannah with whom I practice a few days a week, which is definitely making it easier to stay on top of it. They are more advanced students than I am so it is great to have people from whom I can learn new poses. My approach right now it to stick to my own practice, stopping at Supta Kurmasana when I am on my own, but to go ahead and try to do all of the poses when I go to Lisa's led classes on Tuesdays and Fridays. Its been fun working on the poses after Kurmasana, but I like to really focus on improving the poses I have been given when I am on my own. Lord knows there is plenty of room to grow even in those poses.

A friend recently sent me a link to a new tool that he has developed to help students log their practice - he calls it a spiritual diary. Swami Atma comes from the Sivananda tradition, and is the founder of he Advaita Yoga Ashrama (AYA). Believe it or not I met him at a software conference in Berlin! He has a great website, which he hosts with my husband's web hosting company, Rails Machine.

I gave it a test drive a couple of days ago and it is pretty handy. It allows you to create an on-line list of your practices and log the time you spend on them each day. It also has a journaling capability which allows you to include some notes. I have created a list of practices which include my home practice, attendance at classes or workshops, meditation, and reading of sacred texts. Every day I can enter the amount of time I spend on each and get a running average over time. When I was doing my teacher training a few years ago this would have been very handy, since I had to log this info every day and turn it in for review at the end of the training. If you are interested in this free tool, you can find it here.