The Samsara of War
In times of war, sorrow courses through our veins and our hearts bleed droplets of grief. In the face of such immense suffering, we are perplexed and deeply saddened. How could people wreak such ruin upon each other? War evokes such existential sorrow as violence, divisiveness, terror and hate perpetuate samsara. …
Read More
Getting Out Of Your Own Way
In the long winding journey on the path of practice, you inevitably come to a place where the best thing to do is get out of your own way. At some point you have to stop engineering your life and allow a force greater than yourself to enter. But how …
Read More
Reading the Text of the Body
It is astonishing how little people read today. These days we read only bits and snippets on the digital screen, mostly on the move, not enough to support deep digestion. When reading is limited to texted fragments, we don’t drop in. When was the last time you curled up on …
Read More
Consecrate The Space Within
Each day the most profound and nutritive thing to do is rest in the open space of stillness. When you enter the first gate and come into the temple of your body-mind make your breath tactile, sense the weight of your bones and soften your skin. Mostly what you need …
Read More
Realizing Your Buddha Nature
It’s funny how we all look outside of ourselves for fulfillment. These days we need not look far. In fact it begins right off the bat, when you pick up your phone first thing in the morning. With each tap of the screen we kindle hope that a new message …
Read More
Breathing Water
As yoga practitioners, we spend a lifetime following our breath– relaxing it, expanding it, and deepening its flow. Patanjali’s Yoga teaches that in pranayama, the breath should be “prolonged” (dirgha) and “refined” (sukshma). However, breathing in general is a tricky thing because for many the initial “air born” breath is …
Read More
Firm Back, Soft Front
When you wake up in the morning to meditate, sit with a firm back and soft front. Then in the course of your day, the spirit of firm back/soft front will stay with you. With firm back you are resilient, solid, unswerving. When the world goes topsy turvy, you “have at your …
Read More
You Don’t Have to Prove Yourself
It is funny how we spend a lifetime trying to prove ourselves. We go for the grade, strive to be successful, do all we can to be liked. We all want to appear good in the eyes of others. When you look back, it is astonishing how much time you have …
Read More
Being with the Bitter Sweet
You must know the bittersweet sentiment when a time of great change comes over you, leaving a feeling of aching joy. The tangy taste of the bittersweet is coming up for us this month, as we send off our only child to college. The masala of emotions is thick with feeling: joy and sorrow, gain and loss, relinquishing …
Read More
The Face of God
In the era of Facebook, Zoom and Twitter, we are inundated by faces, faces of all kinds from immediately recognizable, celebrity faces to the faces of complete strangers. Two dimensional faces appear on the surface of our screens, faces made and manipulated, CGI constructed faces designed to look seductive or scary. On social media we encounter …
Read More