“Know Thyself.” Socrates words, derived from the Delphic Oracle of ancient Greece,resound with an inner force as clear and direct as their first utterance over twenty-five centuries ago. These two simple words lie at the heart of the world’s great teachings and have had a profound impact on the thought and inquiry of western civilization. Who am I? Why am I here? What is my own — my path, my […]
October, 2011
Yoga & The Search for Authenticity
I asked one of my teachers recently, “How do I know which tapasya (austerity/renunciation) is the right one for me?” He replied, “It’s the one you least want to do.” My own personal tapasya transformed over a three-week period. I went from abstaining from sugar, to abstaining from seeing people, to abstaining from certain relationships. I found that I could live without sugar, chocolate, and wine easily. What really got […]
I Quit Teaching Yoga
A while back I quit teaching yoga. I took a sabbatical for one year. The decision to stop was not made hastily or without foresight. It was a long time coming. The reason I quit was due to my ambivalence about what it means to be a real teacher. Being a teacher in the postmodern world presents us with problems we don’t yet have solutions for. I am not a […]
What Serves What?
One of my teachers, Dorothea Dooling, founding editor of Parabola Magazine, spoke often about the idea of levels, that there are larger dimensions that cannot be understood by the rational mind alone. Further, she claimed that one of the chief maladies of modernity is found in not acknowledging the existence of levels; that everything is on the same plane, that hierarchies of quality and being no longer exist. In relation […]