Patanjali 2.0: Purity? It’s All A Remix Anyway!
Matthew Remski “Good composers borrow, great composers steal.” Igor Stravinski I love that Matthew Remski chose to call his new book “a remix of patanjali’s yoga sutras.” At least, that’s the subtitle. The title (and the lower case is in the original) is threads of yoga. Like Remski, I am captivated by the felt sense of yoga as being a living tradition, a vital, engaged path of inquiry.It evolves, dependent on culture and timeframe, perpetually... Read More
A Challenge to the Yoga Community—Can We Endorse Obama?—Raises More Questions than Answers
I’ve felt for years that yoga community will never evolve into a functional culture until it becomes first active, and then effective, in progressive politics. I’ve argued that the true promise of yoga will be fulfilled when practitioners are able to harmonize the internal gifts of practice with the demands of civic reality, and employ their quiet insights to the task of social empathy. I collated these thoughts into my 21st Century Yoga article—the long-winded title is... Read More
Getting Lost in Your Own Head: The Search for Your True Self
I’m going to take you on a strange psychological survey that has to do with fabricated selves, religion and mental illness. It begins with nuances in Vedantic ontology and archaic terminologies in a dead language, and it ends with my own addition to an epitaph for god written by a syphilitic German philosopher. As a Monk I Learned to Obey As a boy I was trained in classical Vedic epistemology (pramanas), which undergirded the metaphysical truths of the Vedas. According to this... Read More
Yoga and The Invisible Brain
I love teaching and practicing yoga. The combination of breath, embodied awareness, and mental focus provide rich opportunities for psychological insight, emotional healing, self-development and connection with community. I love spirituality. But I may have a different definition of this word than most people. My sense is that the word usually conveys some kind of supernatural belief. Yet when I use it I mean a combination of things that basically add up to an interest in what... Read More
