If we want to be reborn—to be open to truth, to experience greater wholeness, and to awaken to the fullness of life—we must die to the known and the familiar, everything that keeps us enslaved in our present condition. As many of us find ourselves unwilling to let go and even cherish who we think we are, one of our teachers use to say that you cannot make an omelette […]
Yoga Sutras
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Reconciling the Dance of OppositesInner work is paradoxical. We are asked to delve fully into ourselves to see the shape of our inner being and the myriad manifestations of our conditioned selves. Yet we are asked to transcend ourselves and the unconscious, habituated parts of our nature. We need both discipline and surrender, assertion and receptivity. We are guided by the force of great ideas, but growth of awareness moves […]
To Question . . .
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 […]