Drishti – Santa Barbara Yoga Store: Yoga Clothing, Workout Clothes, & Yoga Supplies

Guess what!  We just launched an iPhone app called Yoga Quiz Cards!  Can you believe it?  We know, we know – there are an abundance of yoga apps on the market, so a new creation isn’t necessarily that exciting, but our yoga app is actually kind of cool.  It’s designed to test and expand your knowledge of yoga pose names – and that’s it.  It’s not a yoga class/practice app like all the others are.  It’s a great tool for anyone – yoga student or teacher – who might want to deepen their connection to the practice by learning the correct English and Sanskrit names of the poses.

We honestly think our app makes a great contribution to the yoga world by filling a need that’s not being met in the yoga app realm.  We’re pretty proud of our creation, and we think you’ll enjoy it too!

From today through next Friday, April 30th, if you download our app and then email us (email(at)drishtiyoga.com) to tell us a little something about it so we know you’ve truly downloaded it, we’ll email you back with a $20 gift code to our store!  Bye now!

Hi Everybody!

Just a quick update on a topic we brought up in our last post: Drishti’s owner Jenni and her yoga teaching! Jenni now has a regular, ongoing class at Yoga Soup – yaaaaayyy! It’s Fridays from 5-6:30pm and it’s a fun, strong Level 2/3 class. She’s also still teaching her word-of-mouth $5 Drishti Underground Yoga class – email us to inquire about details if you’re interested in attending (email(at)drishtiyoga.com).  And if you’d like to take Jenni’s class but you can’t make her regular time slots, feel free to email and tell us this, and we’ll happily send you a quick email whenever Jenni subs a class around Santa Barbara.

That’s all for now!  We hope your yoga practices are alive and inspired, and we hope to see you soon!  BYE!

We’d like to acknowledge the obvious fact that it’s been about six months (six!!) since we’ve written on this here blog. We admit it – we have turned into official blog slackers. For over two years, we were extremely regular blog updaters, adding new posts several times a week (most of them quite intriguing and pertinent to the yoga lifestyle reader, we promise! Pay no attention to that very last post we published about the Riverdance Dog, okay? Heh heh…)

But then, in about September of last year, our motivation shifted. Although we like to think we did a pretty good job of reporting on what was new and exciting in the yoga world, we appreciated the fact that there were other sources out there whose offerings were wonderfully complete and very insightful (most notably our friends at Yoga Dork, which is truly just about the only site you need to visit to stay on top of all things yoga. Plus, they have some pretty cool advertisers over there (wink, wink.)) ANYwho, we began to realize that a frequently-updated Drishti Blog might not be quite the best contribution that our valuable time had to offer. (And it *did* require quite a bit of our time. Maybe we’re just slow writers or somethin’.)

So… Drishti’s owner Jenni, who was basically the sole author of the Drishti Blog for its entire existence, started to feel an inner calling to re-direct the energy she was putting into her blog. Instead of investing time and attention in researching and writing online posts, she decided to invest her time and attention in – guess what – learning to become a YOGA TEACHER!!! Can you believe it? Yes, for those of you who don’t know Jenni, she has spent the past 13 years practicing yoga 5-6 times a week, and for 8 of those years she was a dedicated Mysore-style Ashtangi. She has therefore managed to rack up quite a few hours on the mat. And finally, after 13 years, she has decided to channel her accumulated experience into a new endeavor: teaching her own yoga classes.

Jenni has definitely found yoga teaching to be as rewarding and inspiring as she suspected. She is excited to start an ongoing class at Yoga Soup (a local Santa Barbara studio) as soon as they have an opening which matches her schedule needs. She has also been teaching a weekly class through Drishti that she calls Drishti Underground Yoga (don’t you like the name?) These fun flow classes are small and word-of-mouth and Jenni is only charging $5 for them! If you might be interested in attending Drishti Underground Yoga, send us an email and we’ll respond to you with more details.

So… that’s our story for the time being. Drishti is doing great, by the way. We just had our 8-year anniversary on February 9th, and our bi-annual sale last month was overwhelmingly busy, as usual. Our store is packed full of all of the best yoga/workout/lifestyle wear on the market – have you seen our newest line, Green Apple? If not, you’ve *got* to check it out!

That’s about all that we have to report for now. We’ll be writing on this here blog again soon… Until then, Namaste! ~Drishti

This video speaks for itself. We wish we owned this dog!

We know that some of you may have seen this back in June when it debuted, but we have a feeling that many of you missed it (along with us!) and we thought you might enjoy giving it a look-see. It’s the hilarious and geeky comedian John Hodgman speaking at the Radio and TV Correspondents dinner at the White House. We found it highly meaningful and entertaining and wish it had received more attention than it actually did.

P.S. Where do you think yogis fall on the nerd vs. jock spectrum?

The #1 most emailed article on the New York Times’ website today is a new op-ed piece by everyone’s favorite food reform champion Michael Pollan!  In this piece, Mr. Pollan insightfully points out the intimate connection between the food industry and the health insurance industry.  In the aftermath of President Obama’s significant speech on health care reform last night, it’s important to realize that our current, dysfunctional health care system benefits greatly from our current, dysfunctional food system.  According to Michael Pollan, “The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care.”  (We love this quote!)

From the article:

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

So poignant!  Have you ever wondered why in the world it is that hospitals, whose sole reason for being is to keep people healthy, consistently serve highly-processed, un-fresh, terrible-tasting food to their patients?  We have…

And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Luckily, signs from the Obama administration suggest that food reform is, in fact, on the future agenda (i.e. Michele Obama’s White House garden, President Obama’s remarks about a possible soda tax.)  And we certainly hope so, because if the food industry giants of today have their way, they’ll be stamping processed, sugar-filled children’s breakfast cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops with tragically misleading labels like “Smart Choices”!  …Oh wait, they already are.

[New York Times]

…the well-known company SIGG announces that that the liners of many of its reusable metal water bottles (i.e. the part of the bottle which comes in direct contact with the water!) contain Bisphenol-A (BPA), an infamous chemical long suspected to be hazardous to humans.

Yes, it’s true, guys.  Steve Wasik, the CEO of SIGG, officially announced in a two-page letter on the SIGG website that all of their water bottles manufactured before August of 2008 contain BPA.  What’s even more noteworthy is that the company has apparently known for years about this BPA presence and did not disclose the information until now.

Not surprisingly, SIGG has come under much fire since the release of Mr. Wasik’s letter.  The blogging world has been full of criticism for the company, and established news organizations like The Boston Globe, Mother Jones, and Salon.com have all covered the story.  And in a meaningful move, Patagonia terminated their contract with SIGG over the controversy.

In response to this negative backlash, Mr. Wasik published a second letter with a decidedly more humble, apologetic tone.  Here’s an excerpt:

After reading and responding to hundreds of emails and viewing nearly as many blog & Twitter posts, I realize that my first letter may have missed the mark.  What I should have said simply and loudly to all of our loyal SIGG fans is:  I am sorry that we did not make our communications on the original SIGG liner more clear from the very beginning.

SIGG has initiated a voluntary exchange program (not a recall), in which consumers who own these pre-August 2008 bottles can send their product back to the company for a BPA-free product in exchange.  We wonder how many of you own BPA-containing SIGG water bottles.  And if you do, do you plan to utilize SIGG’s exchange program, or will you instead apply the dollars you would have spent on shipping your bottle back to the purchase of a new water bottle from a different company?

The New York Times has covered it, so why not Katie Couric of CBS News? This issue has officially transcended the realm of little old yoga blogs like ours! Here she is, weighing in with her opinion that “Both sides should take a deep breath – after all, a compromise isn’t that much of a stretch.”

Have you heard of the Museum of Animal Perspectives, which attaches cameras to the backs of animals and posts the hugely-entertaining, eye-opening videos online? We spent a good part of our morning on their Flickr site, watching a pig’s snout rummage through mud, a scorpion run across the desert floor, a wolf sniff out a squirrel, and more! Here are a few highlights!  Visit their site to view all of the engrossing offerings.