The Meditation Center

The Meditation Center of The Himalayan Yoga Tradition invites you to transform your life. Through meditation and yoga, you will reduce your stress, enhance your focus and sense of purpose, and experience transformational growth. The Meditation Center is located in the northeast Minneapolis artists’ district and offers meditation and yoga classes for all age groups and stages of meditative practice. Students are taught in small groups by experienced instructors and are given personal, one-on-one attention. The Meditation Center of The Himalayan Yoga Tradition welcomes people of every race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, creed, religious background, ability, and disability. Meditation In the Himalayan Yoga Tradition, meditation is seen as a systematic method which leads one from the lower, material levels of awareness to the highest and most subtle state of consciousness. (“Yoga is samadhi.” – Vyasa’s commentary on YS I.1). The methods of applying meditative states of consciousness and meditative insights are studied so as to purify one’s thoughts and emotions and to refine one’s activities in everyday life. In actual practice, systematic “Steps of Meditation” are learned, including basic relaxations and breath awareness at the physical level. When these are established, sushumna application and subtle-body awareness is introduced along with mantra. Hatha Yoga Hatha Yoga in the Himalayan Tradition is taught as an integrated practice, which includes: centering, basic relaxations, correct breathing, breath-awareness, stretching sequences using the Joints & Glands movements, asana refinement, subtle-body relaxations, pranayamas, and meditation. Hatha Yoga is defined as the “forcing” of the subtle energies and also as “the balancing of solar and lunar energies.” In the Prana-Vidya Hatha Yoga style of doing asanas, one’s concentration is not only on positioning the body correctly, but also on experiencing what is happening within and how the prana body expresses itself. There is reverence and gentleness in one’s hatha practice and one’s hatha teaching. There is subtle observation in the mind, moving from inside out, and the ability to totally relax non-active parts of the body and move prana into tense areas by means of concentration and the breath. Also, Hatha Yoga, as taught by Swami Veda, is understood as “a continuum” involving all the angas (rungs) of Raja Yoga, especially Ahimsa (non-violence).