Yoga with Doug Keller
Optimal Yoga for Our Times
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Throughout its history, yoga has adapted to the needs of the times — retaining its essential wisdom, while recontextualizing it to meet the practical needs and understanding of people facing the most pressing challenges of their own time.
This workshop gives you a fresh perspective on just what is happening in yoga practice, and how it provides you with support that gives you what you really need — especially in terms of health: physical, emotional, and spiritual. That, indeed, is optimal yoga!
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Friday Evening: ‘Freedom:’ Joint Freedom is the Key to Asana - and its Benefits
6-8pm
Yoga is most often thought of in terms of flexibility — but that’s really the side benefit of something more profound: our joints. We experience limitation and even aches and pains both in and because of our joints. Yoga restores and optimizes their movement, and with that comes not only more freedom from those aches, but freedom to move, with greater flexibility and strength.
In this active practice, we’ll explore freedom and movement in key joints — from feet, knees, and hips, to the low back, neck, and shoulders. All this will take place through a satisfying sequence of familiar poses, with pauses to find better movement in these joints, both within the poses (where we often feel stuck), and between them.
And we’ll finish with the most freeing form of movement of all — the breath, and the peace and relaxation it brings.
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Saturday Morning: ‘Energy’ — and Our Maps for Movement in Ä€sana
9am-12pm
One of our greatest needs is the energy to keep going. Yoga called it ‘Prana Vayu,’ which sounds esoteric, but actually refers to a very real process of energy production taking place in every cell of the body (in modern terms, the ‘mitochondria’). It’s a ‘use it or lose it’ kind of thing.
In this practice, we explore the elements of yoga in both asana and breath that promote greater energy or ‘prana,’ and the connections between muscles by which we not only progress in our enjoyment of asana, but also get the whole body involved.
These are ‘myofascial’ connections by which we not only maintain the health of our joints and improve our circulation, but also improve our ability to receive and absorb the energy of our breath, improving our vitality.
The practice includes some vinyasa and standing poses, and gets into some basic forms of backbending, balanced out with hip openers and twists. We’ll finish with pranayama practices also geared toward creating more energy, or Prana Vayu.
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Saturday Afternoon: Grounded,’ Steady — and Light — Our Center of Calmness in Ä€sana and the Breath
1:30-4:00pm
Times also demand being steady and grounded within ourselves — a quality yoga describes as ‘Apana Vayu,’ which is our capacity to self-regulate and stay calm and clear — and, paradoxically, to become light.
This practice will spend some time with floor poses — hip opening and some forward bending — but not as a challenge to stubborn hamstrings and tight hips (though we’ll cover some strategies for improving that situation), but rather to focus on the power centered in the lower abdomen. This is the ‘Dan Tien’ or center of gravity in Tai Chi, and the locus of emotional steadiness and inner strength — Apana Vayu — in yoga, which we access through the firmness of ‘bandha.’
This is where asana leads us into breath. We can’t get a good, nourishing inhalation without a firm and complete exhalation. After the hip opening and forward bending that introduce us to bandha and breath in asana, we’ll explore the relationship between inhalation and exhalation in pranayama, and the keys to becoming steady and grounded through the breath, and yet energized, clear, and light.
With this exploration of the breath, we’ll introduce the supportive role of ‘mudra,’ the hand positions that play a surprisingly direct and supportive role to breath practices as well as bringing inner steadiness and clarity!
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Sunday Morning: Equilibrium,’ Expressiveness, and Clarity: Essentials for Shoulder Freedom
9am-12pm
The asana practice will be straightforward and practical for achieving greater freedom in the shoulders, arms, and hands, with a practice that sets forth the ideas through standing poses and some vinyasa, and then uses floor poses such as back bends and hip openers, and perhaps some inversions and variations on arm balances to dig deeper.
We’ll experience greater freedom and mobility in the arms and shoulders, and greater energy and freedom from aches — leading to better breathing.
And then we’ll go deeper still, after a satisfying practice. Hand and arm gestures have been shown to light up the same parts of the brain as language. That’s the secret of ‘mudra’ — hand positions and arm rotations that provide our own inner ‘language’ for connecting with our own breath and clarity of intention.
In yoga language, this brings both ‘Sama’ or equilibrium, and ‘Udana’ or clarity and power of will, and expression of it, as empowering our meditation as well as our actions in life.
Simple breathing practices (with a news-you-can-use understanding of them), combined with the support of a few mudras, will make for a more clear and powerful experience of clear meditation and deep relaxation to end the weekend!
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Schedule
Friday, Jun 19, 2026
6:00pm - 8:00pm ET
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Saturday, Jun 20, 2026
9:00am - 12:00pm ET
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Saturday, Jun 20, 2026
1:30pm - 4:00pm ET
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Sunday, Jun 21, 2026
9:00am-12:00pm ET
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