Tread across any terrain, any darkness, and stop. Kneel down by the creek. Your hands comb over the cool moss on the ground and you do nothing else other than feel and hear and see. Take it all in. Curiosity absent any agenda.
Might our senses offer more capacity for Knowing than fickle and capricious thoughts?
It's an ongoing lifetime education for any of us bold or foolish enough to sit in the teacher's seat — learning to look at a room full of differently 'posed' bodies. With instruction cues focused less on the gross outer forms and more on the imperative to breathe into harmonious, liberating alignment from the inside out.
It's temping, common, and understandable that in the closing days of 2020, our attention and conversation revolves around overwhelming evidence of disunity. Yet we're bound together not only by common wounds, but also by the brief, indispensable mercies that can appear out of nowhere when we need them most.
Very few of us are ready to surrender the benefits of technology and the conveniences from carrying a pocket-sized supercomputer. I heart my Waze app and I appreciate how Spotify algorithms turn me on to great music I'd otherwise miss. But many of us could do with more awareness of what the digital barrier between ourselves and the real world does to our well being. So we can manage it intelligently.
If I had a dime for every friend, student, colleague, family member, barista, organ grinder, or grocery cashier that replies, "I can't even . . . " to the question, "So how's it going?" I'd have enough dimes to buy a couple bags of luxury ice cubes or make a serious dent in someone's college loan debt.
A survey of opinions on whether yoga is a religion offers a range of answers to suit any predisposition or bias. Passionate, polarized debates on ‘what yoga is’ surface time and again in books, on websites, and during awkward discussions with family members or friends trying to understand what it is that has drawn their loved one to this mysterious ancient practice. Is it religion masquerading as exercise? Eastern mysticism? A fitness regimen? Applied Hinduistic theism? A sister tradition to Buddhism? Pantheist philosophy? An atheist doctrine bent on sabotaging Christian beliefs?
