Body Centred Living

22/10/2026

Three stages of life help us to shift gears when the times come and grow into new awareness.

The three stages of life in Krishnamacharya’s yoga
1. Sṛṣṭi Krama — Growth
Youth · traditionally up to around 24–25
The focus is on developing strength, flexibility, coordination, discipline and the capacity to learn.
Primary emphasis: Āsana and dynamic movement.
2. Sthiti Krama — Maintenance
Adulthood · traditionally around 25–60
The focus shifts towards maintaining health and vitality while managing family, work and other responsibilities.
Primary emphasis: Prāṇāyāma, supported by Āsana and self-study.
3. Anta Krama — Inward journey
Later life · traditionally around 60 onward
The focus increasingly turns towards inner stillness, spiritual inquiry, devotion and preparation for liberation.
Primary emphasis: Dhyāna (meditation), supported by appropriate breathwork and gentle Āsana.
These are traditional guidelines, not rigid age limits. The emphasis is on adapting yoga to the practitioner’s stage of life, needs and capacity.

18/10/2026

What is interesting about this article is that we have communities of professionals all looking to the microscope to know something we can innately feel directly for ourselves.
Is something really only true and valid because a scientist observed it under controlled conditions.
‘Given a scalpel, they’ll dissect a kiss.’
Give me a river, a tree, the earth and I will love it as myself.

For more than 20 years, Japanese immunologist Dr. Qing Li has studied how spending time in forests affects the human body. His research found that time spent among trees can increase the activity of natural killer (NK) cells, immune cells that help the body fight virus-infected and cancerous cells. Some studies reported increases of around 50% following forest bathing.

One possible explanation is phytoncides, natural compounds released by trees to protect themselves from insects and microorganisms. Research suggests that breathing in these compounds may influence immune activity.

Li also found that forest walks were associated with lower cortisol levels, blood pressure and heart rates compared with walks in urban environments, suggesting that spending time in nature can help reduce stress.

The benefits appear to come from a combination of factors, including the forest's natural chemistry and the calming effects of nature on the nervous system.

Nature is a valuable complement to a healthy lifestyle. Spending time among trees may support several biological processes involved in stress regulation and immune function.

Today, people spend much of their lives indoors, often limiting their exposure to natural environments. Making time to walk among trees may be a simple way to reconnect with nature and support overall well-being.

16/10/2026

Shiva Reveals the Hidden Trap of Family Duty: When Love Becomes an Obligation, It Becomes Bo***ge!

Are you truly loving your family, or are you imprisoned by the belief that you must fulfill every expectation placed upon you?

When Parvati asks Shiva whether she is bound by duty to her family, Shiva reveals a profound spiritual paradox: the moment love becomes an obligation, the mind begins to carry the weight of bo***ge.

True love does not arise from guilt, fear, social expectations, or the desire to be seen as a good person. It flows naturally from awareness, without the psychological burden of being the doer.

This teaching does not ask us to abandon our families or responsibilities. It invites us to discover whether our actions arise from conscious love or unconscious conditioning.

The deepest freedom is not freedom from responsibility, but freedom from the ego that claims ownership of every action.

Source: Original philosophical dialogue inspired by the nondual teachings of the Vijnana Bhairava Ta**ra and the Ashtavakra Gita. Not a direct quotation from either scripture.

11/10/2026

The lovely thing is the option to use a pose to rest and allow regulation when needed or use it to activate muscles to improve the functionality of a joint. All is good when awareness and conscious choice are present!

10/10/2026

Yes, this is a way to move: no sense of purpose, no external cues or preconceived plan. Natural, spontaneous and with nature.

We tend to assume action begins with deliberation: weighing options, reasoning, then choosing.

But Chinese philosophy suggests something different: Daoist texts like the Zhuangzi describe agency without a reflective self at all, no detached rationalising, just spontaneous, effortless action in tune with nature.

Philosopher of cognitive science Brian Bruya argues that as well as this being a more accurate account of how action actually feels., it also sits far more comfortably with recent cognitive science than the Western ideal of reasoned choice, which he traces back to mistakes originating with Aristotle.

Read the full article here. https://iai.tv/articles/chinas-radical-philosophy-of-action-free-will-and-the-self-auid-3340

08/10/2026

With more philosophers questioning realist and postmodernist stances, metamodernism is on the rise: a new outlook promising a combination of irony and sincerity, truth and commitment.

In this debate with Hilary Lawson and Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Linda Martin Alcoff defends a realist approach to knowledge, and is sceptical of both postmodernism and metamodernism.

Professor of Philosophy at City University, New York, in 2021 she was ranked the third-most influential philosopher in the world.

Tap here to watch the full debate now. https://iai.tv/video/the-metamodernist-turn

06/10/2026

The really interesting part is that it isn’t simply “pressure on the shin somehow helps the brain.” It appears to be a bone–brain signalling system:

Mechanical force → bone cells → bloodstream → brain

* The researchers repeatedly compressed the tibia (shinbone) in mice with traumatic brain injury.
* The bone contains osteocytes, living cells embedded throughout the bone.
* Those cells have a mechanical-sensing channel called PIEZO1. When the bone experiences force, PIEZO1 detects it.
* The osteocytes then changed what they released into the circulation, including HSP70, IL-1R2 and APOL11a, while systemic levels of BDNF, PF4 and dopamine also increased.
* The treated animals showed less neuronal loss, less chronic inflammation and better motor and cognitive performance.
* Crucially, when the researchers removed PIEZO1 specifically from the osteocytes, the beneficial effect of bone compression largely disappeared. That is quite strong evidence that the mechanical sensing in bone is actually part of the mechanism.

And they didn’t stop at mice. They replicated important findings in pigs, which is one reason this is more interesting than a typical mouse-only result.

But there is a very important distinction

The experiment doesn’t mean that we should start firmly pressing our own shinbones for a few minutes every day.

But there’s a beautiful connection to what we already know about movement

This makes the idea of movement as biochemical communication even more interesting.

We’ve traditionally thought:

brain → nerves → muscles → movement

But this is suggesting another direction:

movement/mechanical force → bone → biochemical signals → brain

In other words, your skeleton isn’t just the scaffolding that carries you around. It is a mechanically responsive endocrine organ.

And that has potentially enormous implications for rehabilitation, particularly after periods of immobility. The authors describe the finding as establishing a bone–brain axis in which bone’s endocrine function can be altered by mechanical forces.

somatic approaches are interested in how physical experience can influence nervous-system state. I think the broader implication is particularly interesting: the body’s mechanical environment may be sending much more information to the brain than we’ve appreciated.

Firmly pressing down on shin bones for just a few minutes every day drastically improved movement and cognition in mice and pigs one week after they had a traumatic brain injury. The intervention stimulates bone cells that are sensitive to physical force, causing them to release substances that promote good brain health.

“This is big news to me, as it reveals a previously underappreciated bone-brain communication system, and could potentially lead to new therapeutic approaches in the future,” says Kristian Franze at the Max Planck Center for Physics and Medicine in Germany, who wasn’t involved in the work.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2591964-compressing-bones-releases-molecules-that-ease-traumatic-brain-injuries/

Image: JOSE CALVO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

06/10/2026

Science light and the brain.