The launch issue of Australian Yoga Journal hit the streets on 9 December. The Australian version of the American original features all things closer to home including yoga profiles, home practice tips, healthy recipes, book reviews and travel. Read more …

Spring is the time of the year when your body naturally wants to cleanse itself. So it is a good time to allow your body to let go of all the stuff that it doesn’t want including toxins, bad habits and old aches and pains. It is a good time to allow the body to cleanse by eliminating toxins including dairy, sugar, bread, fats and oils, alcohol, coffee, tea and other stimulants including spices. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Liver and Gall Bladder meridians are most prominent at this time of the year. The best foods to support the Liver and Gall Bladder are leafy greens and lightly cooked foods (steaming, light frying and par-boiling). Here’s some Spring side dishes from Linden Brooks.

Creating a personal ‘sacred’ space is an integral part of establishing an effective meditation practice. Most children inherently claim some space in their world and make it their own. Whether it is their bedroom, a cubby-house or under a bush, it belongs to them. It’s where they go when they want to think and make sense of life. As adults, most of have lost the ability to find a physical or emotional space to regroup. But if you are looking to support your meditation practice, reclaiming your space is essential.

British philosopher, historian, mathematician and Nobel Prize winner, Bertrand Russell, once said that an essential part of being happy is not having all the things you want. So what is happiness? What do we really want? And how do we get it? The relentless quest for happiness has plagued us mere mortals since the dawn of time and is at the core of philosophical, psychological, spiritual and even scientific questioning. In recent years there has been an explosion of books, studies, academic research, conferences, workshops and even stickpins about the art of happiness.