Practice, contemplation, and insights
I slept last night in the room that I slept in as a child. My mother now uses the room to store some of the vestiges of her old antiquing business. The carpet, wallpaper, and curtains from the 1960’s are gone, but the bed is the same one in which I had slept. The picture…
In 2000 or 2001, shortly before I started practicing Anusara yoga, a teacher who regularly played music in class, played for us a recording of Alice Coltrane singing a tantric chant to Siva and the Goddess Bhuvaneshvari. I only heard the chant once while we were in savasana — corpse pose/final relaxation. Although I only…
I am writing this from the terrace area of the Shakespeare Theater, in between parts two and three of “The Great Game: Afghanistan.”. It is a testament to the quality of the writing, acting, and production that we still feel ready for the third set of plays. What “The Game” emphasizes, whomever authored the segment…
Please read this beautiful article by Natalie Miller on bhakti — the path and practice of devotion.
Yesterday I asked about setting an intention to be blissful in every thing we do for a day. Having the intention is a good start (I might not even have thought of such an intention without my yoga practice). What I really want is to be able to manifest that intention. For me, I know…
What if for a whole day you did every single thing with the intention of becoming blissful? If you have them, taking care of pets or kids or elders? Every thing that you did at work? How you went from one place to another? Every morsel of food and drink you selected, prepared, and ate?…
Surely that’s what life was all about? Opening doors and peering through them–perhaps even finding the rose gardens there… (Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho) The good murder mysteries — the ones that teach much about human nature and do not dwell graphically on gore and violence — can teach us much about the power…
I was browsing; I was looking for a poem to read to a friend because I was not ready to write one myself. I found several that were right for me to read, but not to share, and this one I wanted to share more widely because of the delight it is bringing me to…
One of the things most likely to keep us from having a steady home practice (whether asana or meditation or both) is being unable to live up to our own expectations or preconceived notions of what is a proper or good home practice. If we think that we need to do a certain amount for…
I adore having a library and will rarely say no to a philosophy text or a book about anatomy, therapeutics, or yoga methodology. I am less interested in “self help” types of books or gadgets. Every once and a while though, I come across something that truly supports my practice and my teaching. When I…