Articles

Leaving the Smoothies of Atonement

 (a ficto-meditation)

My Manhattan hostess was totally yoga-rific. She was putting me up in her flat while I was in town for an Ayurveda thing. At 7am I was up and typing away on the couch, and she breezed out of her bedroom in an om-tank, bamboo harems and bunny slippers, hair pleasantly tousled by inversions. She headed straight for the kitchen.

I’m a smoothie girl. I love my greens. Wanna join me?

It sounded vaguely erotic. I brushed the thought away: it wasn’t like that. But she’d disarmed me, and now I was reluctant to reject the smoothie overture. Also, for the past three years my yoga students had been describing with suspiciously sensual delight their daily greens-smoothie ablutions. So I took a risk for research purposes, and because I can be polite to a fault. Continue reading “Leaving the Smoothies of Atonement”

Articles

Shocked and Hollowed Spaces Left by Eleven Vanished Beliefs

continuing, in a way that’s not entirely clear, an exploration of second-order religiosity

 

 

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A Facebook friend recently reminisced on a thread about the arc of his relationship, from childhood to adulthood, with the divine form of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita:

“As a Hindu, I have been brought up with images of many-armed deities, their attire (which is completely culture-specific), their bloody or benevolent appearances, their vehicles, etc. As a child, I took the description of the divine form [of Krishna] literally at face value, and it evoked strong feelings within me. With time (and hopefully, some wisdom), I see it as purely allegorical, something that signifies the infinite nature of the universe and its incomprehensibility. To be honest, I’d have preferred to have maintained the childhood vision of all this, but unfortunately, ‘modern’ education will never allow me to experience such deep feelings again.”

Continue reading “Shocked and Hollowed Spaces Left by Eleven Vanished Beliefs”

Articles, Uncategorized

The Unbearable Distance of Belief: Notes on Icons, Appropriation, and the Second-Order Religiosity of Modern Yoga

I’m willing to bet that I’ve crossed the thresholds of a hundred or more yoga studios across the Americas and Europe. Most spaces play on the post-industrial vacancy of their former purposes: studios spring up in converted warehouses, old factory lofts, and now, I hear, in several abandoned malls of the Rust Belt. The first yoga studio I opened was in a vacant building on the riverfront of Baraboo, Wisconsin, in a bright open room where B-grade maple floorboards still bore the scars of the tool-and-die cutters that had roared there a generation before. Continue reading “The Unbearable Distance of Belief: Notes on Icons, Appropriation, and the Second-Order Religiosity of Modern Yoga”

Articles, Ayurveda, Blog, Featured, Uncategorized

steve jobs: an ayur-reverie about a lost mother, the pancreas, and the maternalization of technology

First published on www.elephantjournal.com, 10/12/2011

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How is it meaningful that Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer? The poetry of ayurveda might say:

Steve Jobs lost his maternal source of sweetness and nurturance at a critical age. He then worked with blazing determination to recover this intuitive support, not only for himself, but for others. Between his loss and his relentless overcompensation for this loss, he burned up in sacrifice the physiology of sweetness: plasma, fat tissue, and the pancreas. He both created and possessed as a mother does. Continue reading “steve jobs: an ayur-reverie about a lost mother, the pancreas, and the maternalization of technology”

Activism, Articles, Ayurveda, Blog, Featured

Deepak Chopra muddles words like “consciousness” and “quantum”, but that doesn’t make him a charlatan

Thanks to Julian Marc Walker for his excellent, exhaustive analysis of Chopra’s use of language, and to Rene Tschannen for hosting the Facebook dialogue that stimulated this post.

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Deepak Chopra gives me an ambivalence migraine.

On one hand, he’s largely responsible for the groundswell of interest in the art of Āyurveda, which I love and practice. I’ve had many students and clients seek Ayurvedic counsel based upon their exposure to Chopra’s conveyor belt of books. Those who have been especially comforted by him often had unfulfilling experiences with biomedicine that would make a former biomedical practitioner who had moved on to something more transcendent very attractive. In Chopra they found a post-medical expert who mirrored their own post-medical yearnings. Continue reading “Deepak Chopra muddles words like “consciousness” and “quantum”, but that doesn’t make him a charlatan”

Articles, Blog, Featured, Poetry

His body is a golden string your body’s hanging from: Leonard Cohen and the disgraced guru

an excerpt from Cohen Koan, first published on yogaforsmartpeople in May of 2013 — thank you Tracey.

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I believe that you heard your master sing while I lay sick in bed. In the late 90s I opened a magazine and saw a picture of Leonard Cohen sitting beside his teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, both of them zen blank-and-stern in brown-black robes, bone-white rings at their left breasts. In recent years I had lost track of his biography, and had no idea that I was mirroring it, thirty-five years his junior. I cut the picture out and put it on my altar next to a picture of myself with my very own crazy Buddhist teacher – Geshe Michael Roach. Cohen’s zen uniform had a kind of continuity with his grey-blue suits, and perhaps the gabardine his father had worn in the Canadian Army, or the racks of suits Cohen would have seen hanging in his father’s haberdashery. Renunciation and militarism for him have always seemed cut from the same cloth, en vogue. Continue reading “His body is a golden string your body’s hanging from: Leonard Cohen and the disgraced guru”

Articles, Blog, Featured, Yoga, Yoga philosophy

Transparency Papers: introduction, and growing up Catholic (part one)

It’s become clear in an era of lightning-fast interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange that the transparency of one’s sources can be a grounding factor in understanding why and how one does yoga philosophy. Inspired by discussions on this blog and others, I’m experimenting with creating a record of my religious and academic influences. I think the stories of how we come to yoga are an essential part of the yoga we wind up finding. This entry, which describes some of the impact and lessons of my Catholic childhood, is the first of maybe five parts. The others will follow the chronology as it happened: university influences, years in Buddhism, years in a kundalini cult, years of quieter study — alone, and with quiet mentors — and how these experiences seemed to roll together into an eclectic practice of yoga and the vedic arts, and occasionally being an adult. Continue reading “Transparency Papers: introduction, and growing up Catholic (part one)”