01/19/2026
✨Doug will be here this weekend ✨
Happening this weekend Jan 23-24 live AND ONLINE from YogaEast Louisville Kentucky - with recordings:
https://yogaeast.union.site/events?event_category_id=yoga-east-workshops
Optimal Yoga
Our bodies and minds are in a constant process of change throughout our lives, and each stage has its own challenges and opportunities. This much becomes clear as we mature. And our yoga practice evolves with us, becoming all the more insightful. A truly ‘optimal’ yoga meets us where we are in life, supporting us and addressing obstacles as they arise.
Aging is a natural process, and the downside of this process involves increasing inflammatory conditions in different forms that not only cause pain problems, but also reduce resilience and vitality. This can begin as early as one’s 30’s.
The body has natural built-in mechanisms to counter these inflammatory conditions, and they are all linked to the kinds of movement, breath, and practices of mental focus that are the essence of yoga practice.
This weekend is not only a good chance to practice, but also to explore the built-in benefits with regard to aging through refining asana and pranayama practices!
Friday Afternoon Special Session:
Mudra and Drishthi: Ignored but Essential Keys to Pranayama and Meditation
We usually associate ‘mudra’ with hand gestures used in meditation. But in the original formulations of hatha yoga, mudra encompassed asana, bandha, drishthi or gaze, and even inner states of meditative awareness. When rightly understood, all of our yoga practices are forms of ‘mudra,’ and mudra especially empowers pranayama as well as meditation.
This session will provide an accessible and memorable introduction to mudra and drishthi — their meaning, significance, and history, and the context for their role in your practice.
There is a tangible and very real connection between mudra and your experience of the breath, such that mudras provide support, focus, and refinement to your pranayama practices. And yet the sheer number of mudras taught in books can be overwhelming and seem arbitrary.
We’ll start with an exploration of mudra in connection with the breath, feeling the fascial connection between acts of the hands and experiences of the breath. From there we’ll follow the logic of mudra into some manageable and memorable sets of mudras, and the role that they can play in specific pranayamas as well as meditations. Ultimately, mudra at this fundamental level is your personal inner ‘language’ of practice which best supports your experience.
From there we will expand into the related practice of drishthi, which has to do with the gaze and focus of your eyes. This also impacts your experience of pranayama and meditation, and has a special relationship with the nostrils and nadis, as well as the lungs and breathing muscles of the torso. We will explore these experiences, as well as alternative approaches to practices such as nadi shodhana.
Ultimately mudra and drishthi merge into an experience of mudra as a state of consciousness rather than a physical action — ‘Khechari Mudra,’ the doorway into Yoga Nidra.
It will be an afternoon of experiencing these practices, step by step, as a progressive refinement of practices of pranayama and deeper meditation. We’ll experience how mudra and drishthi facilitate our energetic alignment in a way that puts us in touch with the deepest experiences of yoga.
Friday Evening: Joint Freedom — the Feet are the Keys the Knees and Hips:
A much-neglected first principle for making progress with muscle flexibility and strength in asana is ‘Joint Play.’
If there is not proper freedom of movement in the joints, the natural reflexes of the body attempt to stabilize the joints by reducing both flexibility and strength in the muscles that move the joints. And if a muscle is tight or weakened because of a lack of joint play in one area of the body, that is in turn communicated to the muscles surrounding other related joints.
And so weak arches become a knee problem. Or hip pain. Or even a shoulder or neck problem.
Understanding this reflex is the key to gaining strength and mobility in asana practice, as well as avoiding inflammation of tendons, and injury from forcing the poses.
This session will explore this experience by focusing on the feet as the keys to the hips (and knees) via these very tangible connections, and provide the beginnings of a ‘map’ of these connections for understanding asana. This will be taken into asana practice, with special focus on the feet and hips.
The session will also include pranayama, with the introduction of some simple yet powerful principles of mudra that will deepen your experience of the key pranayamas introduced in this session, prior to relaxation.
Saturday Morning: The Anti-Aging Effects of Our Muscles in Asana Practice
Our skeletal muscles, which are active in asana practice, play a vital role in our endocrine system, producing anti-inflammatory hormones that slow the aging process and reduce pain syndromes — if the muscles are worked properly.
There are principles for working well with muscles to optimize their benefits in asana practice — and they include giving attention to the elasticity of tendons, which are too often neglected in yoga ‘stretches.’ Tendons are a locus of power in the dynamic actions of our muscles, but too often they are the locus of injury.
Our practice will focus on principles of fascial fitness, starting with focus on the lower body, where our longest tendons - so vital to the ‘springiness’ of our muscles - are located. Special focus will be on our body’s ‘powerhouse’ for generating resilience and energy — the muscles of the back body, upon which so much of yoga asanas are focused (and for good reason).
This will connect into the upper body and shoulders, particularly as we work more deeply with twists, backbends, and forward bends.
The work with the upper body will be good preparation for the afternoon, when we will work with the shoulders, neck, and muscles of the torso for the sake of a good and nourishing pranayama, meditation, and relaxation practice.
Saturday Afternoon: Simple Upper Body Work For Deepening the Breath: Pranayama and Mudra:
In the afternoon session, we’ll work with a variety of stretches and ‘openers’ for the upper body, which will include principles for healthy work with the shoulders and neck. All of this will be oriented toward bringing greater space, awareness, freedom, and alignment to the upper body for pranayama, meditation, and relaxation — all with the support of practices of mudra and drishthi.
Within the early texts of hatha yoga, the different practices of asana, bandha in pranayama, as well as drishthi were actually treated as different forms of mudra. ‘Mudra’ suggests a practice that draws forth what is already present but unseen: the prefix ‘mud’ translates as bliss, joy, delight, or enchantment, and ‘Ra’ derives from ‘rati,’ to ‘bring forth,’
Our exploration of pranayama will include insights into modern research concerning the measurable benefits of basic breathing practices having to do with the ‘nadis’ for cardiovascular health — how the body produces its own ‘nadi-cleansers’ that are natural anti-inflammatories that reduce a host of chronic inflammatory conditions that come with age.
The afternoon will include practices of pranayama, dharana and meditation, and deep relaxation within this larger context of mudra — transforming not only your understanding of mudra, but of meditation itself!
https://yogaeast.union.site/events?event_category_id=yoga-east-workshops
