Yoga has been practiced for more than 5,000 years, and currently, close to 11 million Americans are enjoying its health benefits. Yoga can hardly be called a trend.

Most Westernized yoga classes focus on learning physical poses, which are called asanas. They also usually include some form of breathing technique and possibly a meditation technique as well. Some yoga classes are designed purely for relaxation. But there are styles of yoga that teach you how to move your body in new ways. Choosing one of these styles offers the greatest health benefits by enabling you to develop your flexibility, strength, and balance.

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Even though for most healthy people yoga is a safe non-aerobic form of exercise, it is not without its risks. According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the yoga injuries most commonly treated in emergency rooms involve overstretching and strain from repetition to the:

Also, certain poses can increase your risk of injury if you have conditions such as:

Here are some tips to help you reduce your risk of injury from yoga:

If you are pregnant or have a pre-existing health condition: Consult your health care provider before starting a yoga program. Your health care provider can help you know how to judge what type and level of yoga exercise is safe for you.

Don't try learning yoga on your own. Work with an experienced and credentialed instructor to learn the proper way to perform the exercises and avoid injury.

Continued here:
Yoga Health Benefits: Flexibility, Strength, Posture, and More

Evolutionary Enlightenment is a philosophy that mixes teachings about Enlightenment from Eastern traditions with a Western scientific understanding of evolution.

Evolutionary Enlightenment is inspired, on one hand, by the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and the Buddhist tradition. On the other hand, it also follows in the tradition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the German Idealist philosophers. In contemporary culture, it is associated with the work of Andrew Cohen, founder of EnlightenNext, and Ken Wilber, a leading figure in the Integral movement. The ideas of Evolutionary Enlightenment have been discussed and elucidated over the past five years by Cohen and Wilber in the pages of EnlightenNext magazine,[1] as well as in Wilber's recent book Integral Spirituality.[2] An evolutionary approach to Enlightenment or self-realization is also outlined in the work of Beatrice Bruteau,[3] a Teilhardian scholar and theologian, and mentioned in the recent bestseller A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.[4] The cultural relevance of this approach to spirituality has been recognized by those studying broader cultural change, such as Spiral Dynamics author Don Beck,[5] who has called it "a map or model for personal emergence, showing the qualities that individuals must embody to become the leaders we now need."

The philosophical idea of Evolutionary Enlightenment is discussed by Ken Wilber in his 2006 book Integral Spirituality. He points out that enlightenment is often defined as being "one with everything," and raises the question, "if evolution occurs, how can enlightenment have any meaning? if everything is evolving, and I get enlightened today, then won't my enlightenment be partial with the sun's dawn?" [6] Wilber suggests redefining an evolutionary enlightenment to mean "the realization of oneness with all states and all stages that have evolved so far and that are in existence at any given time." [7]

The idea of Evolutionary Enlightenment as a spiritual practice has been put forward by Andrew Cohen. He emphasizes the need for individuals to recognize that their own spiritual transformation is essential for cultural evolution. Building on this principle, he offers a set of tenets that can be practiced by individuals to transcend egoism and express a deeper creativity and spiritual energy that Cohen calls the Authentic Self. In this approach, the problem raised by Wilber is resolved through redefining Enlightenment as being "One with the timeless Ground of all Being and with the evolutionary impulse that is driving the entire cosmos." Through identifying the evolutionary impulse as their own Authentic Self, individuals can transcend ego and find a deeper self-sense without needing to live a life of asceticism or solitude, as was often required in traditional Enlightenment teachings. Evolutionary Enlightenment as a spiritual practice also emphasizes the need for human beings to learn how to come together in a way that brings out the highest creativity in each individual and simultaneously releases their potential for collective intelligence.

Evolutionary Enlightenment shares important principles of, and is often associated with, Integral Theory, in that both combine spiritual and scientific insights to create a comprehensive understanding of humanity and the universe. These shared insights include a recognition that contemporary human beings are at the leading edge of a 13.8 billion year[8] evolutionary process originating with the Big Bang, and that humanity's emerging awareness of this process has profound philosophical and spiritual implications.

Evolutionary Enlightenment and Integral Theory share an understanding that ultimate reality consists of a non-dual union of emptiness and formwith form being subject to development over timeand that the interior realm of consciousness and the exterior realm of matter evolve together.[9] One outcome of this insight, which Integral thinkers have codified and mapped, is that there are hierarchical stages of development along a deep-time evolutionary continuum, and that the interdependence between interior and exterior development directly manifests itself in human consciousness and culture: from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to kosmocentric. Furthermore, each successive stage of development transcends and includes its predecessors, and exhibits a greater awareness, sense of belonging, and capacity for consciousness, cognition, and care.[10]

While Evolutionary Enlightenment and Integral Theory share important epistemological roots in Evolutionary Spirituality [6], the two emerged independent of one another. Cohen pioneered Evolutionary Enlightenment in the mid-1980s and encountered Integral Theory in roughly 2000. Since then, EnlightenNext magazine has become a leading forum for discourse and inquiry into Integral Theory, including a running dialogue between Cohen and Wilber entitled "The Guru and the Pandit" series.

Discussing the limitations of the contemporary post-modern stage of human development in this series, Wilber describes the relationship between Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment as follows:

They (post-modern beliefs) inhibit an integral evolution. They did wonderfully up to their stage and they were very important in overcoming some of the problems with traditional values and scientific materialism. All of those were handled beautifully by the pluralistic post-modern stage. But now we're ready for the next stage, we're fighting for an integral awareness to blossom . . . and to blossom, of course, in the form of an evolutionary enlightenment. [11]

This description positions Integral Theory as an important philosophical framework (the map) for Evolutionary Enlightenment. It also suggests that contemporary culture cannot progress without evolving individual and collective consciousness (the terrain), which is the goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

More:
Evolutionary Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

News:

June 2008 - New Eckhart Tolle Book: Milton's Secret According to amazon.com, the book will be released on October 31, 2008. The full title is Milton's Secret: An Adventure of Discovery through Then, When, and The Power of Now.

To see the book covers and read a bit more about the book, click here.

March 2008 - Eckhart Tolle & Oprah Webcast Downloads I'm pretty sure that virtually everyone who is the least bit interested in the teachings of Eckhart Tolle would like to listen to the webcast made available for download at Oprah's website: Right now there are 3 formats available of the first webcast: Ipod Video, mp3 and m4a. You may also read an excerpt from the transcript of the first webcast.

October 2006 - Eckhart Tolle MP3 Downloads As of a few weeks ago Amazon.com are offering a wide variety of mp3 downloads. These happen to include several audio CDs of Eckhart Tolle. You can buy the whole album, or even single tracks. I made a slideshow of the available albums. Enjoy.

October 2005 - Eckhart Tolle's New Book Finally Published

You can order the American hardcover edition of the book from amazon.com.

22nd of November 2004 - Eckhart Tolle Discussion Community With the kind assistance and support of Heidi of Peacethings.com I have created an Eckhart Tolle Discussion Community. I would love it if you visit it, introduce yourself and join the discussions.

My Introduction:

I have created this website because Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now has been a great source of peace and wisdom in my life. It is my desire and intent to make an online resource that would be helpful at promoting Eckhart Tolle's teachings.

View post:
Eckhart Tolle: a fan site (Quotes, Excerpts, Biography, Photos)

In this subdomain of Science and Spirituality, we contemplate our basic reality as Consciousness and behold this manifest Cosmos arising out of Consciousness. We'll especially consider the many uncanny, "miraculous" anomalies of this dream-like Cosmos and the Consciousness which subsumes it.

We start with an excerpt on Consciousness as the basic, essential reality underlying all appearances and experiences. This essay comes from my upcoming book, Spirit, Science and Deep Wonder.

Here is an old handout I've given students for many years on Cosmic Miracles, the stupendously "uncanny"many scientists would openly say "miraculous"fine-tunings inherent in the appearance and unfolding evolution of our physical universe, without which there would simply be no universe. Such serendipitous miracles can give anyone evidential basis for a spiritual faith that this earthly situation of ours is not some existential nightmare of absurd meaninglessness, an entirely-by-chance "accident," but rather a wondrously beautiful and meaningful drama lit up at every turn by some kind of Divine Superintelligence.

And here is a useful short paper on learning how to discern fact from fiction, along a ranging continuum from mere conjecture or fantasy to plausible possibility to some degree of likelihood (based on stronger and stronger evidence) to what we can as a society agree upon as "fact."

On a very popular, controversial topic, here is an essay on Miracles, an excerpt from the first part of the Appendix, "Miracles and Other Unusual Phenomena" taken from my book Women of Power and Grace: Nine Astonishing, Inspiring Luminaries of Our Time [Wake Up Press, 1995]. The reader will also find in the endnotes to this essay an especially useful set of bibliographies on physics, cosmology, parapsychology, etc.

In case you think such paranormal powers are the stuff of mere fantasy and over-zealous reporting by cognitively-challenged "flakes" and "crackpots," here is an impressive report on the psi power of Remote Viewing, which was thoroughly studied and applied by the U.S. government at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) from 1972 to 1986, and then at the U.S. Army's Fort Meade from 1978 to 1995, with many satisfied customers, including the CIA, NSA, NRO, and other federal agencies. I include with my essay here on Remote Viewing an appendix reproducing a significant press release from the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which first revealed the phenomenon of remote viewing to the scientific world in a special 1996 issue devoted to the subject.

The bottom line: our universe and the powers of Consciousness (in both its "normal" and "paranormal"/nonlocal aspects) are far more interesting than we have been led to believe.

Read more:
Science and Spirituality - Enlightened Spirituality, Welcome ...