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8 Yoga Texts Every Student Should Read
These excerpts are taken from the handout to our 20-hour YA-approved “Yoga Humanities” course: Intro to the History of Yoga: Philosophy, Practice, Transformation. Each excerpt is followed by a reflection question for use in class or individual study based on reflection questions in the course. Each of these excerpts is from a text that is…
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Authentic Movement as Spiritual Discipline
When I moved to San Francisco in 1996, a few years out of music school and having decided not to become a Zen monk just yet, one of the first things I did was to find the Contact Improvisation jam. CI had appeared in my life the year before, while I was a student at…
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Hanuman, Maharajji, lineage, complexity
At the peak of my bhakti days, Sara Oakes, Surya Prakasha and I held a monthly kirtan where we led Hindu and Buddhist devotional chants and shared stories and teachings from both traditions. For a long time I had felt a kind of tension in my heart being immersed in the postcolonial yoga world, and…
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Buddhism & Yoga: Integrating the Traditions
Buddhism and Yoga are two major branches on the family tree of South Asian spiritual practice, whose roots we can glimpse in ancient texts called upaniṣads. Both branches focus on transformative practice aimed at the end of suffering and stress. From a deeply interwoven beginning, each tradition branched into many different schools and practice systems,…
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Typing Sanskrit diacritics using OSX press-and-hold
(This is an Apple-only post, because it’s all I know, but if someone wants to write down the process for Windows and post it in the comments, please do). There are a few decent methods for entering Sanskrit (and other languages’) diacritical marks (accents, vowel marks, alternate characters, etc), but if you use them daily,…
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Intervention vs Observation in Mindfulness Meditation
A short talk and discussion given at Spirit Rock during a Thursday morning yoga and meditation class. I talked about the difference between Bare Awareness styles of instruction and Cultivating Wholesome States styles, and how they relate to each other. Talked a bit about how understanding them as different ways of engaging in practice shines…
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Ditch your meditation timer (use it differently)
If meditation is part of your daily home practice, you probably keep time in some way. Peeking at the clock every 30 seconds is clearly not the point, so you have to have some structure for sitting with your eyes closed, right? Either you set an alarm (crickets seems to be a favorite lately, if…
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A new meditation and yoga retreat format
If you’ve sat a meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, IMS, Insight Retreat Center, or any of the other Insight Meditation spots around, you know the standard retreat schedule well: basically a day of alternating 45 minute sitting and walking meditation periods, dharma talk in the evenings. All in silence except for a 15 minute check-in…
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Buddhist & Hindu Yogas are less separate than you think
A month of talks exploring the relationship between Buddhism and Yoga, or between the many “Buddhist and Hindu Yogas” plural. I wove in some history, but tried to stay close to actual practice issues. 1. Embodiment. (9.5.17) Meditation: Orientation through the senses 2. Focus & tranquillity: the practices of jhāna/samādhi, and the pleasure of Rapture…