Reading Time: 6 minutes When I begin any deep philosophical discussion with my students, I like to start with the idea that all philosophy and, indeed, most religious and spiritual traditions, are rooted in a fundamental unease about the human condition. Human beings are rarely satisfied with the way things are. We continually look for greater meanings and greater […]
Why Is There Suffering in the World? Read More »
Reading Time: 7 minutes Somewhere along the path of spiritual awakening, an amazing transformation begins to occur. When we wake up to the true nature of reality, we no longer see a world of good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative, or heaven and hell. We do not see good people and bad people or good events
Is That So? The Bliss of Awakening Read More »
Reading Time: 7 minutes If I were to sum up my work in the world in one word, it would be connection. This realization came after many years of teaching and writing about love and yoga, when it dawned on me that love and yoga are just two sides of the same coin of connection. The term ‘yoga’ is
The Three Stages of Connection Read More »
Reading Time: 6 minutes Humans have always had an interesting relationship with being right, despite how wrong we are about most things all the time. On a societal level, we disagree about just how right our leaders need to be. Politicians who change their ideas are derided as weak “flip-floppers” rather than as individuals who saw a change in
Do You Want to Be Right or Do You Want to Be Happy? Read More »
Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the most vague and misunderstood terms in the modern self-help lexicon is the term conscious. One source of this confusion lies behind the multiple meanings behind the word. To the uninitiated, the term conscious simply means the opposite of unconscious, whether it be a person who is asleep, in a coma, or just got
What It Means to Be In a Conscious Relationship Read More »
Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the worst things to ever happen to the Western view of love was when a group of psychologists came together and decided to refer to close relationships as attachment bonds. It all started in the 1930s, when a researcher by the name of John Bowlby observed that our family experience has a
How to Love Without Attachment Read More »
Reading Time: 6 minutes Many years ago, at the beginning of my spiritual path, when I was exploring big concepts of God, love, and consciousness, I remember coming across the following passage: Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form. The passage comes from the The Heart Sūtra,
You Can Be a Masterpiece and a Work in Progress at the Same Time Read More »
Reading Time: 5 minutes I recently had an amazing conversation on the Learn to Love Podcast with Jennie Lee, a fellow yoga teacher and author. We talked about what it means to not just feel love, but to become love; to breathe it into our entire being. She explained love is the harmonizing energy of the universe, and if
The Guru Is Not Within, Something Else Is Read More »
Reading Time: 5 minutes The first noble truth of Buddhism is simply dukkha–the reality of suffering. Though it is often translated as life is suffering, I prefer to think of it as the plain observation that there is suffering in the world. There is small s suffering–spilling your morning coffee on your lap while driving in traffic–and big S
How to Turn Your Pain into Medicine Read More »
Reading Time: 7 minutes If you practice in a meditation community for any period of time, it will not be long before you hear a reference to the monkey mind. The monkey mind is a concept used to describe how the mind behaves, which is typically pretty erratic. It jumps from one thought branch to another thought branch, endlessly
Moving Beyond the Monkey Mind Read More »
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