yoga – Page 3 – In It To End It

Yama and Mara: Hindu and Buddhist personifications of Death, a hypothesis

February 17, 2015

Both Buddhism and Hinduism personify Death in the form of a deity. The two traditions’ imagination around this figure naturally has many overlaps, but I’m suddenly thinking about some that I can’t find any reference to in the scholarly literature. The correspondence is about the role of Death as Teacher, as appearing in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, and the role of Māra […]

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I have seen the yogi and he is us: Patañjali and the consolations of ambiguity

June 5, 2014

One of the marks of a great text seems to be that it can be deeply important to wildly different people from cultures separated from each other by vast distances of time and space. A theater company in Kolkata establishes a reputation for cutting social realism by putting on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, while a British director in France hubristically (and with some success) attempts to stage the entire Mahabharata. A Japanese director who traces his lineage

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Devotion and doubt: race, religion, and postmodern kirtan

May 23, 2014

After a long day of sessions, feeling with clients/students through the morass of feelings and confusions that seem to be the near-universal experience of being human around here, I light a dry leaf of white sage, shake off the fire, and walk slowly around the practice room both clearing the air and honoring the images and statues that live there.

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I let a song go out of my heart: an ear worm gets me thinking about karma

October 21, 2013

This morning, walking up the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley, through the crisp fall air, I heard a fragment of melody, whistled, in the distance. I only heard a handful of notes, but recognized it as the distinctive dorian mode hook in “Eleanor Rigby” — the part where the words are “…picks up the rice in the church…”. It

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Kosha and khandha, a hypothesis.

June 19, 2013

Recently, while studying a couple early Tantric texts (the Shiva Sutras and the Heart of Recognition), I found myself thinking about energy and consciousness, which the texts say are the two most fundamental aspects of reality. Feeling into these, and reflecting on various places they appear in the yoga tradition, I thought about the early list of the Five Sheaths

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Notes toward vinyasa as a meditation practice

May 26, 2013

Vinyasa yoga, where we flow between poses (asana) synchronizing movement with breath, is sometimes described as a “moving meditation”, and many people are drawn to the physical practice of yoga partly because they find that flowing through a vinyasa class is an easier way to relax and quiet the mind than traditional sitting meditation. I think this is one of

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Intention and the beauty of letting go

December 26, 2012

It’s resolution-making season, for some of us known more yogically as intention-setting. My generation seems to love setting intentions, coaching ourselves toward success, and positive thinking in general. I think the meme of positive thinking (that started in the 70s as “affirmations” and flowered in the 00s as Cafe Gratitude and the Law of Attraction) saturates my Facebook feed more than

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Renunciation of the fruits of… voting

October 24, 2012

This Sunday we’ll begin our fall Sweat+Study series, returning to one of the most profound and visionary texts in the yoga tradition: The Bhagavad Gita. And in less than two weeks we’ll end a seemingly endless campaign season, returning to what I wish was one of the most profound and visionary activities in our democratic tradition: the Voting Booth. So

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