“The body never lies,” Janet Stone said in a workshop on the yogic concept of satya, or truth. “We misinterpret it, ignore it, and project our ideas onto it, but the body itself never lies.”
Our mouths sure do, though. Even if we don’t tell boldfaced lies, we all withhold aspects of the truth, revert quickly to what we want to believe rather than listening openly, we hide aspects of ourselves from others, and most of all, we lie to ourselves. And that’s okay:...
How many times during the day—if ever—do the following three words pass your lips? “I don’t know.” My answer to that question is “Not enough.”
Our culture—at least as it is expressed through religion, politics, and the media—places a premium on certainty. Turn on your television and start clicking across the media universe and you’ll soon find someone telling you Jesus is the only way. Click again and you’ll find pandering pundits playing the world’s foremost...
Oh, fire, what would we do without you?
On farms, crops do better after a fire has licked at the earth and burned off the top layer of old growth in the fields. In the forest, pinecone seeds only reveal themselves for fruition after fires transform the land to burnt ash and smoke, killing the parent trees and turning the shells of the cones to cinder. Somehow, all that survives is the seed, the potential of rebirth inherent in the plant, which had slept in the...
In honor of Mother’s Day and my own mother, who passed away of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or ALS, eight years ago, I thought I would share the poem I wrote the morning she died.
A Journey In Listening
We were dependent on your loving words,
Your wise advice,
Your compassionate understanding.
We told you everything.
You told us everything.
We...
Though it seems a familiar formula for those on a spiritual path to rebuke money and keep things simple (many holy people have taken vows of poverty), I now wonder if it isn’t time for light workers, those doing the most healing work on the planet, to be unafraid to be the next billionaires.
It begs the question: Is it more “spiritual” to be poor? Should people who truly desire to serve the world take a vow of poverty? Or can being wealthy offer us its own...
What makes scripture “holy?”
Ask that question to a fundamentalist Christian, and the answer is simple. “The Bible is the literally the word of God,” some Christians will tell you. “It is historically accurate and without error.” Other Christians may have a more nuanced approach. “The Bible was written by men who were inspired by God,” a more liberal believer might say. “It’s not literally true, but often points to a higher truth.”
Secular...
The massage therapist slid her hand under my sacrum, and waited. I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to feel like and apparently nothing was happening.
“What do you feel?” she asked, keeping her hand still. I closed my eyes.
I felt as if my spine were spiraling away from her hand, curling and twitching towards the left, my shoulders rolling in, dizzy, as if I were spinning through the air. My jaw seemed to list to the left, like in the movies...
I bent over, lifted my left leg, and tried to quickly slide my foot into the thick black rubber fin with as much grace as I could muster. My right foot toed the small sheath of my flip flop, which teetered on a precarious patch of jagged black lava. I had an awkward gait, like that of a monk seal on land, ready at the slightest provocation to plop over onto my belly, grunting. Then I wiggled into the right fin with the same hurried action, the rubber pulling the hairs from my...
Anger: we all know it, many of us well. But at a yoga party, it would be gauche to bring up the raging intensity sitting in your gut. We’re all focusing on the positive here, right?
Not exactly. Yoga is in part a practice for life. It’s natural and normal to feel anger, and yoga can help us find the compassionate action that the anger is sometimes trying to point us toward.
Anger comes in different forms. Empowering anger is a galvanizing force: It has a clarity like a...
There’s an underground spiritual movement in the United States that has grown so quietly over the last few decades that you may not even know you’re part of it.
To find out if you’re part of this secret network, just answer the following question: “Are you currently involved in a small group that meets regularly and provides support and caring for those who participate in it?” If you answered “yes,” congratulations. You are part of the small group movement. More than 40 percent of...
The recent conversations about same-sex marriage have got me thinking. Someone on a talk show pointed out that the argument for “traditional marriages” was questionable, since marriage “traditions” of our not so distant past included a man’s obligation to marry his brother’s widow, arranged marriages for financial and political agreements, and a 60 percent divorce rate. It wasn’t until relatively recently that we married for love, and that doesn’t seem to be working out so well....
I live in a country where we drive on the right (not the correct, but literally the right) side of the road, and our cars have steering wheels located on the left side of our cars. And until this week I’d never driven any other way. Now I am visiting a country where they drive on the left side of the road, trying to be sure I position myself and my vehicle in the appropriate locale at all times.
When I first climbed behind the wheel, my instinct was to think...
“Now is the time to know that all you do is sacred.” ~Hafiz
Remember that moment on December 21st, 2012, when you wondered if just maybe the Mayans were right and the tides would suddenly rise to destroy the arrogant human race? And then nothing happened?
I remember how exciting it was to think about the possibility of a new world—one that marked an energetic shift, an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional awakening that was not only personal...
For some addicts, hitting bottom and having a spiritual awakening are the first steps along the path of recovery. That's why Alcoholics Anonymous, the oldest and largest of the twelve-step groups, calls itself a spiritual—rather than a religious—program.
Founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson, a New York stock market analyst, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio, physician, AA is a fellowship of alcoholics who decided to "turn our will and our lives over to the care of...
When we think about the specifics of what we would like to manifest in our lives, our visions should feel absolutely yummy: I mean an “ooh-that-feels-so-wonderful” kind of feeling. Each idea we project for our future—the perfect mate, the ideal scenario at work, perfect health and wellness—should excite us from our toes to our noses and beyond. Our visions should make us come alive. Those who “sort of” want happiness only “sort of” get it.
Yet this wonderful...
One of the best things about the Internet is our ability to reconnect with old friends and sweethearts. And one of the worst things about the Internet is that it has opened a door to our pasts that, in some cases, might best remain closed. There are wonderful stories about people who looked up an old flame from their school days to discover that he/she was still single, or recently divorced or widowed, and overjoyed to rekindle the fire. There is also, however, the distinct...
Once upon a time, Shiva, the Lord of Yoga, became infuriated to discover that his beloved, Sati, had immolated herself with rage when her father, Daksha, insulted the couple by not inviting them to a party. Shiva yanked a great dreadlock out of his hair, threw it in on the ground, and the warrior Virabhadra appeared from the earth, sliced off Daksha’s head, and planted it on a stake. We gesture towards this story in our yoga classes every time we reach our arms up in Warrior One...
“Spiritual” starts to lose its meaning when you turn on the TV and hear a middle-aged guy in a car commercial use the “S” word to describe the feeling he gets when he climbs behind the wheel of his new $60,000 ride.
So perhaps we should define our terms. What are people talking about when they say they’ve had “a spiritual experience?” And how many of us are actually having them? According to a 2009 Pew survey, two out of three Americans expressed belief...
In today’s social movements, there is typically online organizing (“Click here to do this good thing”) and there is offline organizing (“Excuse me, ma’am, would you sign this petition to do this good thing?”). But hold on to your clipboards because I’ve seen the future. And I am here to tell you that a new wave of community organizing is dawning at a bar, dog park, spa, cupcake shop, playground, and yoga studio near you. Let’s call it “Deep Offline Organizing.”
We are talking deep,...
This is how bad things have gotten: I am squatting on my floor by a low table to write this because I threw out my back again and I am in extreme pain. Pain, however, can lead to resting, also known as sitting in my apartment with nothing to do, which makes me feel like the craziest of crazy, so I must find some way of working. Hence squatting before my altar to the Lord of the Internet.
Being injured is a good time to practice the yoga of awareness: I observe that I am in pain. I...
