ilg featured in MOUNTAIN LIVING MAGAZINE

It is said that you can judge a man's character by what lies on his reading stand...here's mine; copy of current MOUNTAIN LIVING MAGAZINE which did a feature on Yoga and included a hit of Ilg, photo of my new Trek EX9 Mountain Bike to be shipped here any day from Durango (yes, i will be selling my trusted steed, 'Grunt'...if interested in the hole shot, email me!), and upper right; photo of Dewa riding her first pony; a once wild Mustang from the Sierra Nevada appropriately named, Nevada. Spot provided by Amma Ilg! click to enlarge.


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FOR THE LOVE OF LOTUS
Flagstaff's Passion For All Things Yoga

By Penelope Bass
for Northern Arizona's MOUNTAIN LIVING MAGAZINE

excerpted from their AUGUST 09 issue

For Steve Ilg, who teaches locally at the Northern Arizona Yoga Center in addition to being a world-class athlete and founder of his own fitness empire, Wholistic Fitness®, yoga came to him naturally. "By age 16, I had already grown so tight from distance running that I knew, intuitively, that I would need to balance the contractive sports with expansive or elongation disciplines. It seemed common sense. I began to fundamentally intertwine my already passionate embrace of Western sport training within the yogic system."

However, Ilg took a different path to yoga than most, beyond its physical aspects and benefits, which he believes saved his life, "I say that I came into yoga different than most Westerners because when I paralyzed my spine from a winter mountaineering incident, I simply could not move my physical body. I began immediately with my spiritual body, my breath body. I had to rely upon Tibetan-based Chakra meditations and yogic pranayams (precise and regulated breathing exercises) to literally breathe life (prana) back into my broken spine and smashed pelvis."

"My practice of yoga immediately took me out of a 'victim role' and immersed the wholeness of my inherent enlightenment potential into this most humbling yet majestic maturation of self-discovery, which continues to this day - to this moment." Ilg continues to compete across the country in everything from cycling to skiing and in 2009 alone took fourth place out of 125 master cyclists at the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic and is the reigning Arizona State Nordic Champion. He also created his own form of yoga dubbed High Performance Yoga® which he teaches at the Northern Arizona Yoga Center. "My style of yoga completely honors everything that is written in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the other Hatha Yoga scriptures," Ilg said. "The chief delineation in my approach to asana is wholeness, mental concentration, spiritual tenacity, joint health, and stablization - strength before suppleness, wholeness before specialization."

I have taken many yoga classes before and like to think of myself as fit and active. However, Ilg's "HP Yoga" class left me with every muscle trembling and a sore weekend.

"Only by attacking our weaknesses, our negative tendencies, is there growth," Ilg said. "In comfort, there is only stagnation."

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To get a copy of the entire article, contact: Northern Arizona's Mountain Living Magazine 928*779*1877 www.NAMLM.com