AshtangaNews

There’s been a surge in Ashtanga-related products lately, R. Sharath Rangaswamy’s Ashtanga Primary Series practice DVD, Mysore Style, a book of beautiful Ashtangi photographs, and the Guru, the documentary about Sri K. Pattabhis Jois by Robert Wilkins (available on DVD).

And now we have THREE new books:

A detail from
Ashtanga Yoga: Practice & Philosophy

• Ashtanga Yoga: Practice & Philosophy by Gregor Maehle, a teacher based in Perth, Australia. Yoga: Practice & Philosophy “integrates Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali as an organic whole, presenting them as two sides of the one coin”. The book also includes information on “the mythological background and yogic context” of specific postures in the Ashtanga practice, which sounds especially intriguing.
• Ashtanga Yoga by Petri Raisanen, an Ashtanga teacher based in Helsinki, Finland. From the online content page, there’s several sections of the book I would love to read: History of Ashtanga Yoga and Impacts of Poses (the book is currently only available in Swedish and Finnish, though an English version is in process). The website also includes lots of photos from the book, including 85 stunning, clean photos of Petri practicing various Ashtanga postures by photographer, Alexander Berg.
• Ashtanga Yoga As It Is by Matthew Sweeney,
  “the only resource that fully details the primary, intermediate and advanced A and B series of Ashtanga Yoga”. A classic, re-released. Photos along with lots of text about the practice.

Matthew Sweeney’s Classic Book

I’ve gotten hold of Matthew Sweeney’s book so we’ll be reviewing it soon.

I remember the days in the nineties when there were only two or three books on Ashtanga – in a decade! It’s great to see so many high quality publications come forth to spread the knowledge.

And now for some beautiful photos from Petri Raisanan’s book…

Navasana

Setu Bandhasana

Petri Raisanen jumps through

Every now and then, Google will come out with a service which inspires wonder. Last time they did that for me was with Google Earth.

Now they’ve done it again with Trends: a way to compare the world’s interest in different search terms. You can enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

So what does that have to do with Ashtanga Yoga?

How about looking at which yoga style is most searched for? Here’s a chart comparing Ashtanga, Bikram, Iyengar, Vinyasa and the relative newcomer, Anusara:

yoga syles the online world is interested in

Google Trends show that Bikram is most popular, and Ashtanga and Iyengar are neck to neck. Anusara only starts to register in 2005. From the regional information, the top 3 countries who search for Ashtanga are Ireland, Singapore and Sweden. At least now you know where to set up your new studio. I wonder where India is though.

How about yoga compared to other types of activities? Here’s the chart of yoga compared to pilates, meditation and stretching:

yoga more popular than pilates

Yoga clearly comes out on top. But you can also see the seasonality in the interest, as both yoga and pilates peak at the beginning of the year. The January Effect with its New Year resolutions, as it is known in yoga studios around the world, is reflected here.

And India appears as the first country for yoga searches (at last!).

Here’s one more. Draw your own conclusions.

Brad is seasonal too

[For an interesting development about this post, see Asteya Redux: A Grumpy Post -Ed.]