Greetings Reader - Cultural appropriation is a significant concern in our yoga community. However, despite our best intentions, we can unintentionally engage in it. And the reason may surprise you. Cultural appropriation in yoga is often seen as reducing practices to trendy aesthetics, taking traditional teachings out of context, and ignoring colonial histories that led to a commodified version of yoga that caters to Western consumer culture. While these points are all valid, they stem from...
5 days ago • 4 min read
Greetings Reader - Our free monthly series, Community Conversations, continues next week with my good friend, Sara Sheikh. Sara is a yoga teacher and a licensed clinical social worker with a trauma-informed holistic approach to therapy. She provides mental health counseling to people of all ages who are hoping to shed behaviors, feelings, and ways of thinking that no longer work for them. Her work is about empowering people to mindfully engage in a process of self-discovery and...
15 days ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader - At the beginning of the Bhagavad-gita, Arjuna, the hero of the Gita, is paralyzed by grief and confusion as he foresees the death and destruction that an imminent confrontation will surely bring about. At the end of the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna, the teacher of the Gita, reassures Arjuna that the cause for which he’s been called to fight is just, his victory certain, and he has no reason to be fearful. Of course, a lot happens in between the beginning and the end to bring...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader - If you do a search on “spiritual leadership,” you’ll find descriptions that assume “spiritual leadership” means leading people along a spiritual path or inspiring people to engage more fully in their spiritual lives. That’s one way to think about spiritual leadership, and it’s a great way, but I prefer to think of spiritual leadership as the exemplary application of spiritual ideas and values to solving the problems of the material world. Among all yoga wisdom texts, the...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader - Yoga and politics might seem like strange bedfellows. In yoga, we embrace vairagya, or non-attachment, often interpreted as detachment from material things, people, and even ideas. We also emphasize the importance of tyāga, renunciation, and of seeing everyone and everything with equal vision. From this perspective, yoga can appear apolitical, and politics can seem un-yogic. We might conclude that yogis should remain detached, even to the point of not participating in...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Greetings Reader - Our free monthly series, Community Conversations, resumes this week with my good friend and long-time bhakti-yoga practitioner, Yasoda Mensah. Yasoda will guide us into a discussion about what yoga philosophy has to say about making mistakes, and how bhakti, devotional yoga, helps us embrace the perfection of imperfection. Yasoda is the owner of Trifolia Natural Products and Botanicals and the Director of Three Leaf Farmden, a project that's dedicated to pushing the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, You still have time to enroll in my upcoming course, Journey into the Bhagavad Gita. But not much: enrollment will close next Thursday night, so you’ve got just This course will be a great opportunity for you to gain a better understanding of yoga philosophy and experience the practical benefits of connecting universal principles of spiritual knowledge to your lived experience: a deeper understanding of how the world influences our thoughts, feelings, and behavior higher levels of...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader - We might think of a Supreme Being as a distant Creator or an impersonal energy as opposed to a Divine Person who has a birthday. After all, how can a Supreme Being have a birthday when such a Being would be beginningless by definition? The wisdom texts of devotional yoga answer this question by presenting us with the idea of a Supreme Being who resolves all contradictions, including the contradiction of being eternal and having a birthday! In the case of Krishna, the speaker of...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader - In yoga philosophy, bad karma is bad and good karma . . . is also bad. That’s because karma is, by definition, an action taken in pursuit of a material desire. Pursuing material desires reinforces our absorption in material consciousness and keeps us trapped on the karmic hamster wheel of material existence, which are the very things that yoga is meant to free us from. That’s why the Bhagavad-gita recommends the path of karma-yoga. Karma-yoga is the path of transcendental...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader - You’d think it would be easy to tell the difference between good karma and bad karma but, in a time of relative truths, it’s not. As the Roman philosopher Lucretius put it “One man's good karma is another man's bad karma.” Or something to that effect. Karma, the law of action and reaction, is probably the most misunderstood concept to make its way from Eastern spiritual philosophy to Western conversational vernacular. And the reason is simple: karma is complicated. Then there’s...
2 months ago • 1 min read