New York columnist Ruby Warrington samples a grueling new form of yoga

By Ruby Warrington

PUBLISHED: 17:03 EST, 22 March 2014 | UPDATED: 17:03 EST, 22 March 2014

In the heated yoga studio, the sweat is beginning to form on my upper lip. Just a few minutes ago, we were warming up with gentle sun salutations the traditional flowing move that opens most yoga classes.

Now Im holding 6lb hand weights and huffing and puffing my way through squats, performed on a step platform for maximum intensity.

And, led by Zander, a ponytailed hunk who looks as if he should be modelling in Mens Health magazine, it is becoming clear that this isnt going to be yoga as my red-faced classmates and I know it.

Stretch and bend: Yoga devotees Naomi Watts and Reese Witherspoon are pictured here leaving a class in Brentwood, Los Angeles

Im at the new PXT conditioning class at the slick Pure Yoga studio on Manhattans Upper East Side: one of several yoga bootcamp-style classes to have sprung up across Manhattan, where gentle stretching and meditative breathing techniques meet high-intensity cardio drills.

Inventor Loren Bassett says: As much as I love yoga, Ive always believed in cross training to stay in peak condition. You cant just do one kind of workout you need to shock your body to see any real change.

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Fit in the City: Yoga bootcamp where Naomi feels the heat

Elizabeth Morrow poses on her specially designed Yoga by Numbers mat in Bow, N.H. The mat gives true yoga beginners a step-by-step roadmap to learn poses at their own pace. AP Photos

Sun staff photos can be ordered by visiting our Smugmug site.

BOW, N.H. -- Combine Twister, paint-by-numbers and the ancient Hindu practice of breath control, meditation and poses, and you get Yoga by Numbers.

The approach -- complete with a numbered mat -- was designed by a Boston woman whose own health scare inspired her to put yoga in reach for people with physical limitations, tight schedules or other roadblocks to traditional practice.

The oversized yoga mat is dotted with big, numbered circles that look like the target in a rifle scope. The accompanying DVD gives true yoga beginners -- those who wouldn't know an up-dog from a Chihuahua -- a step-by-step roadmap to learn the poses at their own pace.

Sun staff photos can be ordered by visiting our Smugmug site.

Elizabeth Morrow was an athlete, a skier and soccer player who, two years ago, found herself hospitalized with a right lung full of blood clots, the lower lobe completely collapsed. When she was strong enough to start exercising again, she found even the easiest of yoga classes too taxing. She didn't have the stamina for an hour, couldn't hold the poses the way the instructor wanted.

So, the 32-year-old started thinking of ways to make it easier, more convenient and even more fundamental than the myriad DVDs already on the market.

"I was thinking about a paint-by-number kit where you don't need to be Picasso or van Gogh, you just follow what they tell you and you'll come out with something," she said. "I just wanted something that felt really accessible and doable for people. The image of the mat just popped into my head: 'Wow, I can do yoga by numbers as well."'

The DVD tells users exactly which circle to put their hands and feet in and allows for advancement to more challenging poses.

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Yoga with a twist If you can't take a class, just follow the numbers on the mat

BOW, N.H. -- Combine Twister, paint-by-numbers and the ancient Hindu practice of breath control, meditation and poses, and you get Yoga by Numbers.

The approach -- complete with a numbered mat -- was designed by a Boston woman whose own health scare inspired her to put yoga in reach for people with physical limitations, tight schedules or other roadblocks to traditional practice.

The oversized yoga mat is dotted with big, numbered circles that look like the target in a rifle scope. The accompanying DVD gives true yoga beginners -- those who wouldn't know an up-dog from a Chihuahua -- a step-by-step roadmap to learn the poses at their own pace.

Elizabeth Morrow was an athlete, a skier and soccer player who, two years ago, found herself hospitalized with a right lung full of blood clots, the lower lobe completely collapsed. When she was strong enough to start exercising again, she found even the easiest of yoga classes too taxing. She didn't have the stamina for an hour, couldn't hold the poses the way the instructor wanted.

So, the 32-year-old started thinking of ways to make it easier, more convenient and even more fundamental than the myriad DVDs already on the market.

"I was thinking about a paint-by-number kit where you don't need to be Picasso or van Gogh, you just follow what they tell you and you'll come out with something," she said. "I just wanted something that felt really accessible and doable for people. The image of the mat just popped into my head: 'Wow, I can do yoga by numbers as well."'

The DVD tells users exactly which circle to put their hands and feet in and allows for advancement to more challenging poses.

Yoga by Numbers has been compared to Twister, the popular game with giant colored circles, spinning wheel and crazy, cross-limbed poses. But Morrow's cool with that, even when it comes from critics.

Sentinel and Enterprise staff photos can be ordered by visiting our Smugmug site.

"I think it's awesome when they have that reaction because to me, that means they get it and they know how to use it," said Morrow, a certified yoga instructor.

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Yoga with a twist: If you can't take a class, just follow the numbers

Feature Article of Sunday, 23 March 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

In principle, Marxian materialism essentially elevated the material world above spiritualism, thereby rendering the collectivized products of human mind, in other words, human thought, a mirror image of the material world. The roots of these ideas arose from the embers of Greek material culture. Importantly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels uprooted this concept from its European historical silt then extended its materialistic interpretation, based on European society, to the European condition, proposing it as an alternative model to the internal structural contradictions occasioned by two powerful forces, the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. However, unlike Nkrumah and Nyerere, two hardworking individuals, Karl Marx came across as extraordinarily lazy, failing to apply his revolutionary ideas to neutralize the entrenched forces of dialectical materialism, internal contradictions, so-called, in his own personal life.

Ironically, Marx hated work and relied on the extensive wealth of Friedrich Engels capitalist family for sustenance, while, he and Engel, literally, and, even theoretically, plotted to destroy the same capitalism which fed them both. Then again, it was the synthesized ideas in Capital: Critique of Political Economy, by Marx, and The Communist Manifesto, by both Engels and Marx, which crucially came to underline the ideological basis of African socialism. In other words, Nkrumah, Nyerere, and all the other major proponents of African socialism imposed this utopian world of a foreign culture, excavated via the intellectual archeology of Marx and Engels, on Africa, without probably taking cognizance of the enormous historical, cultural, epistemological, developmental, material, and spiritual discrepancies inhering between the two worlds, Africa and Europe, granted, that its partially, if not mostly, the internal dynamics of a societys natural evolution which drives as well as resolves, admittedly, into its anamorphic temperament. Of course, dialectical materialism induces change but, more importantly, the factors, natural and social, undergirding societal evolution and outcomes of the evolutionary process itself may not necessarily inhabit the same space of epistemological mutuality.

Emphatically, change itself is a variable and societal physis may enjoy a mutual legroom of inverse or direct relationship. Against this background, the uncritical transplantation of Marxian utopia into Africa may have necessarily, if partially, stifled her internalized natural evolution. Meanwhile, the problem is further exacerbated by the knowledge that neither Marx nor Engels harbored any deep or intimate intellectual familiarity with African societies, much less close familiarity with her vastly rich historical and intellectual traditions as well as with her cultural psychology and time-tested cultural institutions. Regrettably, the little they knew about and of Africa, if we may put it at that, mostly derived from the ideational ejaculations of dislocated, misinformed, splintered psychologies, of which European intellectuals like Friedrich Hegel led the way. Yet, though we are quick to fault Nkrumah and other African socialists for transplanting classical Marxian thought to Africa, we are also equally quick to add that Nkrumahs consciencism philosophy, African Personality, intellectual cosmopolitanism, and Afrocentric thinking more than theoretically compensated for the intellectual deficiencies of Hegelian epistemology vis--vis historical Africa.

In fact, George Orwells Animal Farm, which one commentator, a reviewer of the book, possibly, aptly characterized as a more powerful critique than the atomic bomb, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both depict the humiliating failure of communism as an alternative creative response to capitalist totalitarianism. However, we may have to grudgingly accept the fact that Nkrumahs African socialism did not blossom into full-blown politico-economic adolescence prior to the CIA-inspired putschism that toppled his progressive government. Admittedly, his brand of economic system was more appropriately a smorgasbord of socialism, African communalism, and liberal market capitalism, particularly democratic capitalism. Nkrumah insisted there was no discrepancy between socialism and private enterprise, notes Ama Biney (p. 107). Thus, he surrounded himself with men and women whose expertise traversed capitalism, socialism, communism, and African communalism. As well, its probably in the public domain that he openly dismissed communists in the CPP to assure the British of his intentions not to countenance communism or to allow his government to be manipulated by the exploitative prehensility of Soviet communism. In fact, Nkrumah publicly denied being a communist to his audience when his alma mater Lincoln University conferred an honorary doctorate on him.

Ama Biney writes: With these economic achievements behind him, Nkrumah presented to parliament on March 4, 1959, the CPPs Second Five Year Development Plan. While the plan was ambitious, it was by no means a departure from the laissez-faire policies of Professor Arthur Lewis nor was it what scholars have described as the shopping list approach of former colonial development plans (Ama Biney, The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah, p. 100). Elsewhere Ama Biney maintains: There are Marxist scholars, such as Mohan and Fitch and Oppenheimer, who dismiss Nkrumahs economic developments in the post-1960 period as having little to do with socialism(Ibid: p. 106). Its important to recall that socialism and communism are not the same. Ironically, that is because many ideological opponents of Nkrumah have no clear understanding of these basic concepts and, therefore, miss the philosophical differences between them. On the other hand, the British needed this assurance to deactivate their suspicions of Nkrumah to sink Ghanas public assets in a political ocean of nationalization.

Understandably, nationalizing South Africas industries, corporations, and mineral wealth had represented Nelson Mandelas and the ANCs restorative projective, a moral political formula to address pressing issues of social injustice, prior to the eventual demise of Apartheid, only for him to turn around and accommodate free market economics at the expense of Black South Africa. Julius Malema has since demanded a re-excavation of nationalization to address South Africas racial disparities. That said, how exactly did Marxian thought help the world? How many people did Pol Pot, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Nicolae Ceau?escu, Josef Stalin, Kim ll Sung, and Leon Trotsky put to death because of communism? Again, lets state here for historical emphasis that Kwame Nkrumah did not kill any individual political opponent or a group of political opponents, this, according to the political scientist Prof. Irving Markovitz (See Ghana Without Nkrumah: The Winter of Discontent). Having said that, the alternative questions is, how many people have had their lives snuffed out thus far since capitalisms formalized institutionalization? Is egalitarianism the answer to class conflict? Is classism the answer to egalitarianism? What did the moral philosopher Adam Smith had to say about these questions?

Yet we may also want to pose this question: Is capitalism any better? At least, not if we look at history and contemporary events through a critical lens! Argumentatively, the institution of slavery itself had all the hallmarks of incipient capitalism, though the theoretical formalization of capitalism materialized after thinkers such as David Ricardo, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Malthus, to name a few, had appeared on the scene. Further, Aparthied, racism, colonialism, ozone depletion, wars, imperialism, environmental pollution, and neocolonialism are arguably reflective appurtenance of capitalism. As an illustration, Mazowers Dark Continent: Europes Twentieth Century has more to say about some of these moral and political questions. In fact, Africa still reels from the ideological stupefaction of the Cold War, a war of which a tangential Africa has become a well-known collateral victim as well as a casualty of philosophical foreigness. Thus, both systems, capitalism and communism, are exploitative paradigms.

Any reasons? Pointedly, in Chapter Two, otherwise titled Laws Governing the Evolution of Societies: Motor of History in Societies of AMP and the Greek City-State, of Cheikh Anta Diops influential work, Barbarism or Civilization: An Authentic Anthropology, we are exposed to a panorama of scientific, historical, and sociological reasons explaining why societies are the way they are based on how and why they evolve the way they do. Simply put, the cultural temperament or philosophical complexion of a given society, African or non-African, is a creative product of a scatter-gun collision among a system of evolutionary factors, a prior acknowledged fact. However, this fact may not be so obvious at the crown of a given society or polity in question. This therefore calls for a close evaluation of the political demography of a nation-state, city-state, etc. To put it more succinctly, the cultural charaterology of a social, ethnic, racial, political, religious, and economic collectivity determines the normative sociality of a polity. In another sense, proponents of African socialism should have seen Diops critical analysis on the evolution of human societies before considering whether or not to have imposed socialism on Africa in the first place.

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Great Lessons from Dr. Yaw Nyarkos Work (ll)

On the new series "Oprah & Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth," premiering on OWN on Sunday (March 23), the media mogul will sit down with spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle to take viewers on a chapter-by-chapter 10-part journey through Tolle's book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose." The aim of the series? To teach viewers how to focus and become more aware and present.

"It's one of the most important books I've ever read," Winfrey raves in the preview above, "and it could change the way you think about everything."

"Oprah & Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth" premieres on Saturday, March 23 at 12 p.m. ET/PT on OWN. Will you be tuning in?

Photo/Video credit: OWN

Related pics

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'Oprah & Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth': OWN presents a journey through spiritual teacher's seminal work

"I need to sort my life out,"says Ellie Goulding with a sigh, fiddling with her bright blonde hair as she talks. "And if I don't do it soon, I may as well just be forever on the road, because that's what it feels like."

Curled up in the corner of a black leather couch in her modest dressing room backstage at a Washington, D.C., venue, Goulding describes her next six months as if she's been asked to run endless wind sprints. (Although, as it turns out, that might make this fitness addict happier.) This is what you dream of when you imagine being a pop star: hit singles, a world tour, award show performances, screaming fans.

But the reality is not exactly a dream. It's work, and a long string of empty dressing rooms like this one that tend to look the same whether you're in North America, where Goulding will be until May, or Australia, New Zealand and Asia, where she'll travel to immediately after. Some stars favor drink or drugs to combat the boredom. Goulding, a self-professed "shy geek," brings books. (Latest faves: Laurent Binet's historical fiction novel"HHhH"and Eckhart Tolle's self-help best-seller"A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.")

'Divergent' Soundtrack: Ellie Goulding Adds Three Songs as Young-Adult Music Shifts

She runs her fingers through her hair again, and the silver sparkles on her gold nail polish catch the light. It's a mixture of awkwardness and disco glamour that pretty much define the 27-year-old U.K. singer. "As much as I love what I do, and music is obviously everything to me, I'm being pulled home, and I've got to do that soon, I think," she says. But in the United States, Goulding's career has been building slowly to this point, and it's too late to stop now. A little less than three years after she performed a selection of understated songs at the April 29, 2011 wedding reception of Prince William and Kate Middleton, Goulding has transitioned from an acoustic-leaning pop songwriter to an electro-dance siren.

Her debut album,"Lights," was released stateside throughCherrytree/Interscope in March 2011, a year after its U.K. bow. It took more than another year to connect, when the sixth single the ethereal title track became a surprise summer hit, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in its 33rd week on the chart in August 2012. That was just two months before the release of her second album,"Halcyon," which has spawned a growing collection of radio hits, as well as tour after tour and music video after music video, each one designed to feed the other.

Go Backstage With Ellie on Her 2013 Tour

Onstage, Goulding displays the same mix of goofy and glam that she does in conversation. Her dazzling live show is dominated by uptempo dance tracks. She speaks to the audience in a warm, upbeat tone, and she's visually magnetic, constantly in motion. Some moments she gyrates with sexual abandon, while in others she busts out a running man. Goulding says that she gets lost in her dancing, which is equal parts geeky and joyful. "When I'm onstage, I'm like a monster," she says with a laugh.

To stay in shape for the stage, Goulding exercises religiously. (In 2011, she teamed up with Nike for a short film about training for a half marathon "I'm a runner. I've got no choice but to keep running, and I can't stop," she says in the movie, which sounds oddly like her current tour schedule.) At home she does boxing and gymnastics, along with running. But on tour she uses the"Insanity"video, sometimes in a hotel room (if it's big enough to run drills in she describes it as "boot camp kind of stuff, with lots of squatting"), or at a venue if she's working out with other tour members. "I feel like people associate keeping fit with something negative, but with these fun gyms, you don't even realize that you're working out," says Goulding, mentioning a free-running parkour gym she likes in Los Angeles.

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Ellie Goulding Aches For Downtime: 'I Need To Sort My Life Out'

San Diegos 13th annual Kyoto Prize Symposium was held on March 18 at the Conrad Prebys Aztec Student Union to honor Robert Heath Dennard who invented Dynamic Random Access Memory and proposed scaling theory guidelines.

DRAM operates the memory in digital equipment, storing data and programs. Its found in laptops, cell phones, digital cameras, game systems and other electronic devices. The scaling theory allowed Dennard to miniaturize transistors that allows for devices to be smaller, denser, faster and less expensive.

The event is part of a three-day celebration hosted by San Diego State, along with University of California, San Diego, University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Kyoto Prize is an international award that honors significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of humanity. It was created in 1984 by the nonprofit Inamori Foundation and is the highest private award for global achievement from Japan.

Three recipients are awarded the Kyoto Prize each year in the fields of advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy. Dennard is the Kyoto Prize laureate in advanced technology.

At the symposium, SDSUs Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate and Research Affairs Stephen Welter introduced a pivotal moment in Dennards life when he was inspired to create DRAM.

What Im hoping for is theres someone else in this room who, like he was being inspired, will also be inspired, Welter said. In essence what is happening is hes paying forward the inspiration to you that he received from somebody else.

Welter then introduced Dennard, who presented a speech titled Reflections on Creativity in My Microelectronics Career in three parts.

He began with his background, growing up on a farm during the Great Depression and led into his education at Southern Methodist University and Carnegie Institute of Technology. His professional career began at International Business Machines, where he created DRAM.

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Kyoto Prize Symposium comes to SDSU

Durham, NC -

From how parents can best support their children's education to how a human brain can process several languages, Duke writers explore a wide array of topics in their latest books.

Many of the books, including new editions of previous titles, can be found on the "Duke Authors" display shelves near the circulation desk in Perkins Library. Some are available as e-books for quick download to your computer. Most can also be purchased through the Gothic Bookshop.

[Duke Today will provide similar updates in the future. If you are a member of the Duke faculty or staff who will be publishing a book of interest to a general audience, send us a message about it along with your publisher's brief description.]

Aidoo, Lamonte, co-editor: "Lima Barreto: New Critical Perspectives" (Lexington Books)

Aidoo, an assistant professor of Romance Studies and Luso-Brazilian Studies, weaves together 12 essays from Brazilian literary scholars, historians and anthropologists. The authors analyze the work of 19th- and 20th-century Afro-Brazilian writer and journalist Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto.

Andrews, Edna: "Neuroscience and Multilingualism" (Cambridge University Press)

Researchers estimate that half of all humans speak at least two languages, making multilingualism common. Andrews, recipient of the 2013 University Scholar/Teacher Award, offers a new model for analyzing multilingualism. This first book-length study of how two or more languages are represented in the human brain is the culmination of the past 10 years of her research.

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New Reads from Duke Faculty