Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “Try to love the questions themselves. … Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” To question is life itself. I wrote this ten years ago. And understand it more clearly now, as I likely will find greater clarity ten years from now. Our insights are evolving—always—if we seek […]
Entering the Body
How might we find—and strengthen—those slender threads that link heaven and earth, that relate our two natures, the earthly and the divine? If we wish to deepen into ourselves, transcend the ordinary mind, and come into contact with whispers of the greater intelligence and larger awareness that reside within ourselves, how do we proceed? What is the key? These are the questions we explored in our recent classes in creativity […]
The Yoga of Creativity
Among the first four Yoga Sutras, attributed to Patanjali and translated by Barbara Stoler Miller are: This is the teaching of yoga. Yoga is the cessation of the turnings of thought. When thought ceases, the spirit stands in its true identity as the observer to the world. Otherwise, the observer identifies with the turnings of thought. Perhaps one of the purposes of the sutras, like creativity, is to get us […]
Authenticity: Seeing the Truth
“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 […]
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 […]
The Artist and the Yogini
“It is an audacious notion to put forth in this age of science and willful determination that one’s existence is somehow inspired, guided, and even managed by unseen forces outside our control. Whether called fate, destiny, or the hand of God, slender threads are at work bringing coherence and continuity to our lives. Over time they weave a remarkable tapestry. … These are the mysterious forces that guide us and […]