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Explorations in Embodied Consciousness through Yoga and Meditation Winter 2025

Have you ever wondered what it means to say you are alive? Diverse yoga traditions have been exploring this question in depth for centuries. Yoga proposes we know existentially through experience, and we know intellectually with various forms of thought and language. This course emphasizes experiential explorations while introducing key terms from the tradition for orientation. We explore how experiential knowledge across the spectrum of our existence is indispensable to support positive transformation in our moment-by-moment lived, embodied experience. Yoga offers practical means for direct, experiential knowledge of ourselves specifically through meditation. This course begins with each participant undertaking individual, formal instruction in Neelakantha Meditation as taught in Blue Throat Yoga. In the first week of class, each participant will be scheduled for a one-hour time slot for this personal teaching to take place. This meditation is an easeful practice anyone can learn through this formal process of instruction. We then move as a class into explorations of embodied sensation in conjunction with practical, concrete anatomical information about muscles and bones, breathing and organs, mind and senses. Through practices of yoga asana, ballwork, body scan, breathing, journaling and savasana we gain access to embodied, experiential knowledge. Key select ideas from yoga tradition help us to name and register what is happening in our experience, like a map helping us know where we are in a territory. To further our understanding we read from the Recognition Sutras, a pithy tenth century yoga masterpiece from Kashmir. Each week we welcome a guest teacher sharing their expertise in practice and study. Out of class activities include online yoga anatomy course, anatomy coloring book, sutra text reading, personal embodied practice and journaling. Three two page journal entries and a final project presentation, video or paper is also required.