Healthy Head Start to your 2021

Recap of two years of writing on Yoga, Ayurveda, and more yoga

Megna Paula
4 min readDec 5, 2020

As 2020 wraps and we reflect on what we have experienced together, and in solitude, we can gather our lessons from the past and inspire a renewed vision for the holiday celebrations and new year to come.

I first began writing for Medium in 2018, having just moved from DC to Manhattan. Yoga looked different here in the city, and inspired me to write in between teaching group classes at Equinox and private lessons at home in the Village. With the changes in our world, some things stayed constant (daily practice), some things grew in importance (sharing home practice and cooking inspiration) and other aspects seem very far in the past (world travels last winter).

Here are my collected writings, to support your healthy head start to 2021.

Writings on Ayurveda:

Fundamentals: A guide to all the basics

Just for fun, because I’m a tea fiend and find myself with tea cups on every countertop: What to do with your Leftover tea

How I live the yoga life, waking at dawn and following Ayurvedic guides on Circadian Rhythm:

Eating:

Living Ayurvedic eating while traveling from NYC to Puerto Rico and India

Over a decade of studying/practicing Ayurveda, this is the real take home message: be intentional in eating/nourishing yourself.

How I live Ayurveda in NYC

And my latest writing on Ayurveda: How to eat to keep your inner fire burning through winter.

Keeping your sacred fire lit from within (my apartment ; Washington DC, 2015)

Yoga Practice

Principles to guide you each and every time you step on the mat: these ideas have been inispirinig my daily home yoga practice for many yeaers and they were one of the first things I wanted to share with our online community.

How to prepare for class: I wrote this pre-pandemic, but most of it still holds for your virtual classes.

Applying the scientific method to your home practice: the mindset is everything.

How to find the best yoga teacher for you.

How to design your space for home practice

How to balance grace and power on the mat

Me practicing at home; NYC 2019

Yoga Philosophy

Classic foundations: the kind of basics covered in teacher trainings.

Changing habits: the most powerful result of paying attention to our yoga practice is seeing ourselves and learning how to change our current habits for better ones.

Flight: https://megnapaula.medium.com/asana-and-pranayama-how-yogis-fly-aecf86a8cb4e

History of Yoga: probably not as old, or as new, as you think.

Pratyahara: an ancient principle that will help you dive deeper into the present moment

Me at home; East Village NYC

Science of Yoga

Before I taught yoga full time, I was working in Neuroscience research. Bringing my two worlds together here:

Yoga for a Less Pain Brain

Science of Meditation

Mindfulness and connectivity

Psychology Of Sleep

Yoga Lifestyle:

Tips for Digital detox: pulling nuggets of insight from living for two years without wifi

How to prepare for a peaceful flight: probably more important now than ever, but written pre-pandemic so says nothing about masks. Speaking of…

How a Yogi responds to Covid

Transforming fear to love: changes I wanted to see in the early days of the NYC lock down

Yoga, Tech, and the Pandemic:

We we need Yoga now more than ever

My Yoga Life

Padmasana: a story about the first pose I learned (I was a toddler)

Digital detox: my life experiment of enjoying two years off the grid

What I learned about contentment in Puerto Rico, just before Covid came to the US

About me: just a short thing. 32 years in one page.

me and my ever-evolving home library.

Find my occasional tweets, daily yoga practice photos, chats from my mat, and writings on yoga philosophy from my new blog Conscious and Curious. Stay in touch, and stay well!

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