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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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The Zen of Oz
A Zen Moment of Awakening and Discovery It all started when Toto pulled back the curtain and revealed nothing but a puny man pulling on his levers. It was a very Zen moment– the bald head, the long black coat, the no God. After the trauma, getting banged on the …
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Be As You Are
It’s funny how we spend an entire lifetime trying to get somewhere. We struggle to get ahead in life, to make the grade, to get the big contract, to be liked on social media. Yoga and Spiritual Awareness A spiritual discipline is not immune to the mind that grasps. We …
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Seeing Clear to the Bottom
Flowing Like Water: Nurturing Adaptability and Clarity Water has been our theme this month. In practice, we have been moving in the Way of water, staying fluid and adaptable, always nourishing. We emulate water that is supple and soft yet can overcome the hardest thing. Water is humble for it has …
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