Q: What does yoga mean to you? A: The entire Life! The infinite and unforgettable path. The conscious and joyful journey. It`s an incredible gift and inexplicable insight. The sacred dance of body, mind, and spirit. It is awakening, self-research, self-mastery, self-understanding, self-reflection, self- transformation, expression and contribution to the glorious infinite spirit of divine Love, Light, Freedom, clarity, miracle, resonance, co-creation, and renewal. It's my daily message and an act of gratitude, purity, asceticism, mastership, trust, virtues, transformation... I AM on 8 sta ..read more

Even though my life isn't perfect, I woke up with gratitude this morning. You ask me why? Simply because my yoga practice has got me to that place, no matter the circumstances, my heart is full. I discovered yoga in 2008 in Los Angeles, a friend took me to his favorite studio in West Hollywood, he probably doesn't know how this experience impacted my life. Flash forward 12 years later, I am on the journey of what I call "Be In the Moment": experience every single opportunity that comes at you. Precisely a year ago, I found myself very stressed out with work and discovered Kundalini Yoga. I wor ..read more

As fate would have it, I lived summer of 2013 in an ashram in Kauai. Every morning, we welcomed the day hours before sunrise with mantra, pranayama, meditation, and asana; and every afternoon, we worked the ashram’s farm in silence. Day by day the routine peeled back my layers, and day by day I came to meet my true self. Going vegan arose organically in this process. I arrived at the Ashram a vegetarian. Without having thought much about it, at a gut level it simply felt wrong to eat the bodies of others. My time on the ashram gave me space to reflect on this decision. And the more I thought a ..read more

I went vegetarian aged 10 much to my family’s confusion at the time. Growing up in Ireland it wasn’t a common choice in my hometown in the late 90s!   Fast forward to when I started Yoga Teacher Training and we learned about ahimsa (non-harming) and were asked to go veggie for 2 weeks. I decided to try going vegan and noticed a massive shift in terms of my view of what I put in my body and the origins of food. I kept up eating vegan for the remainder of the training over the spring, and then by December went fully vegan after educating myself further with documentaries and reading ..read more

My compassion journey started 21 years ago. I was 15 and got my first pet, Henry the rabbit. And the day I got him I wondered, how can people eat such a cute animal? And then it dawned on me: isn’t it just wrong to decide about someone's right to life just based on how cute they look? From that very day I became a vegetarian. One day a couple of years later, I came across a video on dairy farming. And that was the final shift to understand that veganism is the way to go. So about 6 years ago I went vegan, yes and honestly I wished I had someone close by who would have helped open my eyes earli ..read more

I've always loved animals. My family had chickens when I was growing up, we had a rescue dog that I loved with all my heart. I would walk him and look after him to make him happy. The chickens I would take the vege scraps to and it always made me smile to see them pecking and scratching around the backyard. When I was little, I never made the connection that those same chickens I loved and cared for, would be the same thing that would be put on the dinner table some nights.    Forward about 20 years, I found yoga. I'd recently moved from Sydney to Melbourne and had found my ..read more

I learned about veganism and various forms of interfaith/new age spirituality and self-awareness or improvement mentalities prior to yoga’s entrance into my life. This was in my teens. I also already had a belief in the power of movement prior to yoga featuring in my life, primarily through the form of dance and voicework. So, when I learned about yoga and how it essentially seems to interweave all these aspects together into one whole system, this enticed me and made perfect sense to me. I dived into my yoga teacher training quite quickly (arguably too quickly in hindsight). By the end of the ..read more

Before I went vegan, I was eating plant-based for about four years. I knew about the health of a plant-based diet and I always loved animals but at that point, I thought a plant-based diet and veganism were the same. Through my yoga practice, I learned about ahimsa. Ahimsa for myself in my practice and by that ahimsa as a way of life. It’s the non-hoarding, the non-stealing, and especially the non-violence to any living being, including myself! And for me that was huge! So actually in my understanding of yoga, every Yogi should be vegan.   —Featured Yogi Micki Lippki Instagram: @yoga ..read more

I had been a  vegaterian  for many years. like many people, I like animals and couldn’t  really stomach ‘pardon the pun’ eating  something that was once alive. I am also very lucky to be from an Indian Hindu family many of the dishes I eat ABC have grown up on, are mainly vegan so the transition from a vegetarian to a vegan diet in 2017 was very easy.  Most of the food I eat, I make so I know what goes into it. I avoid vegan ‘junk/fast foods at all costs, it has little or no nutritional value and in my opinion, gives a lot of non-vegan/ vegetarian’s a lot of reaso ..read more

In NYC I became a yogi and a vegan. First step into the yoga and vegetarian world 5 years ago, I took a yoga class for the first time at “Yoga to the people” in NYC. I was living one block away from their East Village location. At about the same time, I became a vegetarian, to truly embrace the yoga values. Shortly after settling down in the Big Apple, I developed a weird skin reaction. Seeing many different specialists, it was apparently linked to my poor diet that included meat. I was already considering myself as a low meat-eater but was still eating a burger from time to time! To underst ..read more