Summer Solstice Meditation: Light on Consciousness
Tonight is the mid-summer new moon when the skies go pitch black. Time for endarkenment, a silent bidding to go to the place where nothing stirs, a yogic sleep where your mind turns vast and space fills your head like a firmament of stars. Then, in three days time, the Summer …
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It’s Boundless
First off, I just love the word boundless because like the Big Bang, or like the salt in the ocean, or “all the grains of sand in the Ganges”, or the number of YouTube videos put up every minute (400 which is 576,000 a day or 207,360,000 a year– but check with …
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Summons
The Habit Body/Mind: A Slow Descent into Unconsciousness As we get older it is all too easy to go through the motions and get caught up by the humdrum ways of the habit body/ habit mind. Routine takes over, people cocoon into the familiar and slowly but surely go unconsciousness …
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Opening to the Auspicious
One of my favorite words in the Sanskrit language is mangalam. It has a nice ring to it, in fact if you repeat it ten times, mangalam, mangalam, mangalam… it could be beneficial to your health. The closest word we have in English by translation is auspicious, another nice word that goes …
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The Now of the Tao
When you practice, remember that you are in the now wherever you are and in whatever you do. The now is a constant, massive, ginormous thing. It is ever productive and always changing. I tend to forget this and catch myself striving to get ahead, longing for a place I …
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The Womb of the Buddha
On this mother’s day we are reminded that all human beings are born from the womb. I am thinking not just the ordinary, run-of the-mill womb however, but the cosmic womb, the womb of the creator, the buddha-womb. The Buddha-Womb: A Fertile Space of Enlightenment Take for instance the great …
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Wild Wild Growth
Springtime at seven thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains is wild. Just today it was 70 degrees, then plummeted to 40. In the morning the skies were a brilliant blue and by 4 o’clock a hail storm blew in, shredding the recently budded aspen leaves. Transformation Through Yoga Personal transformation …
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In the River of the Tao
Each day of our life flows by like a river and each moment escapes us. Ultimately nothing can be captured, and like the Zen phrase goes, “as expected you can’t grasp it”. The Tao of Flow: Embracing the Fleetingness of Life In order to demonstrate and embody this, the Chinese …
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The Art of Doing Nothing
For centuries yogis have known the benefit of doing nothing. In fact there are entire schools of practice devoted to not doing and reams of treatises, sutras, and verses that elaborate in great detail the “practice” of doing nothing. Take for example this well known verse from the Heart Sutra, …
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The Spirit of Play
All life begins in a spirit of play. For instance in the mythology of India, the gods, bored to death with their own enlightenment, conjure endless varieties of human dramas for their entertainment. Every action, every scene, every human thought are manifestations of the divine sport of the gods. Life …
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