"I suggest you write about something really important..."

An article in The Wall Street Journal on the health benefits of deep breathing was not surprising news to yogis who have advocated this for 1000 years

What shocked me were the responses.

The article begins simply enough:

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Knowing when to hold it, when to fold it, when to let go

"Push, push, PUSH!"

Your teacher's voice is pushing you into those bends and twists just outside your comfort zone.

Is she pushing you forward or pushing your buttons?

There is a Sanskrit word that describes how to push on: “krama”  which means, "step-by-step."

Step by step is a good mantra for life

But what do you do when you are so overwhelmed with stuff o do that you cannot imagine doing one thing,  one step at time? You eithermulti-task or become paralyzed in place.

How to move forward? Take the next logical step.

That's how it works.  Breathe. Focus. Make a wrong move? Correct and continue.  Struggling? That's what's holding you back.

So what's the trick to balancing yourself, in hot yoga and in life?

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Sweat so Good!

You do it for that delicious mix of warrior accomplishment and complete calm; it's what keeps you coming back to hot yoga. 

Yet you may be blissfully unware of the amazing cellular health you're getting not just from the asanas, but from the sweating you do in hot yoga.

Get ready to get blown away when you hear how deeply and completely healing your regular hot yoga practice is, for every cell in your body.

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Heat it. Heal it. Write it.

Hot yoga is alchemy.

Alchemy: the Medieval science of changing ordinary metals into gold, a power or process that transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way

Not coincidentally, it often required high heat.

Writing is that same process: one part you, preferably heated, and one part magic. Writing, like hot yoga. scratches the surface of your experiences and gets down underneath. Writing makes wisdom from words; it just takes a pen to draw you out and like hot yoga, you start from where you are, right now.

What happens when you add writing to hot yoga?

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How you do hot yoga is how you do everything

35 days ago I was a hot yoga beginner.

Today I finished a 30 Day Hot Yoga Challenge - a month of consecutive hot yoga classes, the same poses, the same script-and now it makes sense.

Hot yoga is not just something that happens in hot yoga.

Once the script gets into your brain, you can begin to see how the lessons of hot yoga relate to your actual life.

Here are my top 12 hot yoga learns:

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