The Call of Solitude
There is nothing as treasured as a dear friend, someone to be with in idle moments, walking the paths, sharing warbling thoughts, drinking tea. This friend is a confidant, one in whom you can place your trust and love the most, a virtual friend in God. In Sanskrit the trusted other is suhrid (su meaning …
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Staying Fluid in Space
Bring to mind in your meditation the image of a carpenter’s leveler, suspended in fluid, empty like a bubble. The leveler is used by surveyors, stone masons, and carpenters to indicate the point of balance. Visualize this point floating in your mid brain at the bridge spanning your two brain hemispheres. This empty bubble “breathes.” …
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The Center is Everywhere
It is ironic that yoga practices today speak so often of finding your center. “Become centered” or  “center yourself inside,” say many teachers. What if there is no one center but that the center is everywhere? You could imagine this in your body as you orient from the center of the top of your head, the center of …
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Embodying the Tao
May I live as the river flows Carried by the surprise of my own unfolding. -John O’Donohue Cultivating Resilience and Nourishment Through Taoist Principles This summer we have been embodying the Tao in all of our practices. The Tao is best likened to water that is pliable, nourishing, and flows with …
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The Union of Opposites
The Split: A Universal Human Experience It is so easy for the mind to get split, hearkening back to the days of Sesame Street when an apple and a banana bounced across the screen with the ditty “one of these things is not like the other, one of these things …
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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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