Namaste Yoga 123: Ganesh's Cat and the Teachings of Interconnection

http://www.melissawest.com One day, as a child, Ganesh amused himself by tormenting his pet cat, pulling on her tail, rolling her up and down. After a few minutes of amusing himself, he left the cat and went away. He didn't give too much thought to what he had done to the cat and went to meet his mother, Parvarti. Ganesh was surprised to find to find Parvarti suffering badly in the dust with many wounds. When he asked his mother what had happened, Parvarti responded that Ganesh was responsible for her bruises and scrapes. You see, all is one and Parvarti is indeed the cat that was tormented by Ganesh. The story teaches us of the interconnection of all living beings. If we injure any living being we injure every living being. In this class we will focus on the one of the primary teachings of yoga, the interconnection between all things, or in other words, the philosophy that all is one. Starting in our own bodies we will experience the connection between the layers of our koshas from physical, breath, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. The chakras also point to the connections between our physical bodies and our day to day interactions and existence. Physically we will of course explore cat pose in its many manifestations in this class. This video will focus on spinal flexibility through flexion, extension, lateral flexion and extension and rotation. We will also experiment with moving our spine in cat like motions in postures such as nataranjasana/dancer and 1/2 bow/dhanarasana.