Web Version of Hot Summer E-Newsletter
Dear Friends, Recent newsletters I have received from well-known yoga teachers, in addition to sharing their wonderful offerings and teachings about yoga, have included references to the Gulf Oil Spill, the on-going economic crisis, and the humanitarian tragedies in Chili… (READ MORE)
Playing with Fire (What Does It Mean to Be Free?)
Happy “Independence” Day
I received a half dozen emails over the past week from various sources inviting me to think about what Independence Day, and correlatively, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, mean to me? What does the Bill of Rights mean… (READ MORE)
Darshan or Puja?
The other day I was telling one of my regulars that I’d described the group house practice as starting with receiving darshan — receiving sacred knowledge, sitting in the presence of the divine embodied in a great being — from… (READ MORE)
IRS (and Opening to Grace)
It is a gloriously cool and breezy morning of the type that is common for New England and very rare for DC, especially heading into Independence Day weekend. I had a longer and earlier walk than I usually do. I… (READ MORE)
A Flood of Memories (and Luminous Spaciouness)
I returned home yesterday from teaching my Willow Street classes and having a late lunch with a friend to a message on my answering machine from my mother advising me that a cousin had died. Although I was not close… (READ MORE)
“How did I get to be so lucky?”
most of us might ask, who have the health, education, material well-being, and computer access and skills to be able to read this. “Not luck, but grace,” Paul Muller-Ortega advises that Swami Chidvilasananda would say. For this grace, practice gratitude…. (READ MORE)
Green advertising (and viveka)
One of the important principles of yoga practice is viveka — discrimination. The longer and more steadily one practices, the greater ease with which one will find path that leads towards recognition and remembrance of our own light and the… (READ MORE)
An Environmental Perspective on Yoga
Every once and a while, I poll my students and ask them whether they find that they need less medication and medical intervention (testing and other procedures) than before they were regularly practicing yoga. Students uniformly advise that they take… (READ MORE)