TSC 2010 Pre-Conference Workshop

Session 2, Monday Afternoon (2:00pm - 6:00pm)   Hotel Arizona HA-Starlight Ballroom

Half Day, $75

Siegfried Bleher

Yoga Asanas as Tools for Transforming States, Contents, Structures, and Levels of Consciousness

This workshop uses PowerPoint slides to explain the four aspects of consciousness that Patanjali describes in the ancient text The Yoga Sutras: states, contents, structures and levels.  Workshop participants will directly experience each of these aspects through the practice of yoga asanas (postures), and Pranayama (regulation of the breath).  Participants will be taught sequences of poses that, together, have the capacity to change the state and contents of the mind.  The method of teaching the poses (Iyengar yoga) has the capacity, over an extended period of time, to change the structures and levels of consciousness. The aim of this workshop is for participants to experience the degree to which consciousness is embodied, how it exists in layers, and what its natural structural tendencies are.  The workshop will be progressive and assumes no prior experience with yoga, nor pre-existing flexibility or physical skills.  Those with physical limitations from stiffness, or chronic pain, etc. who otherwise wish to attend will be provided modifications to permit full participation.

                                                                                                      ****

Siegfried Bleher, PhD, Physics, University of Maryland in 1989 in nonlinear dynamics, and completed postdoctoral work in quantum chaos at University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia and postdoctoral work on transition state theory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, before accepting a visiting faculty position at West Virginia University in 1994.  Since 1992 Siegfried has had an interest and practice in yoga, and began teaching yoga full time in 1996.  He and his wife run Inner Life Yoga Studio in Morgantown, WV.  He is a certified teacher in the method taught by modern yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar, at the Intermediate Junior II level of certification, and has trained with the Iyengar family in Pune India, as well as with many of the senior teachers in the US.  His research interest and work is currently to explore the boundary between what is objectively verifiable, and what is subjective about consciousness.  Specifically, he is interested in (1) the implications that yoga philosophy has for a modern science of consciousness, (2) whether a coherent science of consciousness can be built up from a phenomenological view of consciousness, and (3) what, if anything, does quantum theory and its various interpretations have to do with the nature of consciousness.