From Asana to Vinyasa to Prasara: The Evolution of a Modern Yoga Practice

photo credit: Dr. Tony George

Over the past 12 years or so, my yoga posture practice has changed dramatically. It all began when I walked into a Barnes and Noble bookstore in college and bought a beginner’s yoga book published by the Sivananda Yoga Center. The posture practice was a pretty standard, well-ordered sequence of asanas, preceded by one vinyasa (surya namaskar). This took me a long way toward exploring myself within the postures, but it wasn’t until I discovered “Power Yoga” that I found a way to become more immersed in some sort of connected flow through the entire practice.

During this time period (about eight years ago) I also discovered Godfrey Devereux’s Dynamic Yoga Method. Combining the energetic qualities of the bandhas and the spirals with the connective possibilities of vinyasas between asanas, I really felt like I had a fantastic, even fluid practice. However, it wasn’t until until the next novelty in my practice emerged that I discovered how truly connected and fluid a yoga posture practice could be.

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Making Homemade Ghee from Unsalted Butter – myCreativeEvolutionTV Episode 1

This is the first official episode of myCreativeEvolution Television. Woot!

In this experiment, I’ll show you how to make your own ghee in your own kitchen from unsalted organic butter for less than half the price you’ll pay for it mail order over the Internet. Making your own Ghee is a super simple process, but it does require patience, and it will probably take you about 2 hours. Before we get to the video, though, let’s first establish what ghee is, and then talk a bit about the benefits of using ghee instead of butter or some other fat for cooking.

If you’ve taken a stab more than twice in your life at cooking Indian food, you’ve probably seen “ghee” in an ingredient list. And, if you’re like me, you just substituted butter, olive oil, or some other fat because you didn’t have any ghee, you didn’t know where to get any ghee, and you honestly weren’t exactly sure what ghee was at the time. That was me until rather recently.

Ghee is simply the Indian or Ayurvedic version of clarified butter, which is commonly used in French cuisine. What they do is cook all the water content out of the butter, as well as the milk solids, leaving pure fat — YUM! To make ghee, we’ll just cook the butter a bit longer than we would to make clarified butter. This toasts the milk solids (which settle at the bottom of the pan), and gives the ghee a wonderful, unique flavor.

In terms of the benefits of using ghee as opposed to some other fat in cooking, there are two different categories — verifiable and mumbo-jumbo. Since ghee has been a staple in Ayurvedic medicine for millennia, when you research its benefits, you’ll find a lot of anecdotal, hocus-pocus-y claims. I don’t mean to say I think these claims are all false, just that they are not really objectively verifiable. In the interest of honest inquiry, I have separated claims that are scientifically verifiable from those that are more, shall we say, esoteric.

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