Articles – Page 40 – Matthew Remski

February 21, 2015

Meditation: a Conversational Model

It’s helpful to remember that the best conversations end in radiant aporia – an impasse of language and thought brought about through empathy and interconnection. When conversants exhaust their content and fall silent in an awareness of the world that conjoins them, they enact socially what meditators have always sought in private yogic experience.

January 7, 2015

The War that No Yoga Teacher Can Run From

I predict/wish that teachers will recognize that the enemy of terrestrial life is global, structural, pervasive and tenacious, and that neither asanas nor meditation can attack it directly. Only boots-on-the-ground activism can. Then they can recognize the true target of teaching: that human civilization is the macrocosm of basic human drives like rāga and dveṣa.

January 1, 2015

Seeking the Gita

Today's reader is hurtling through the subway tunnels of a digital matrix with a paperback or an e-reader in her hand. Between chapters -- verses even -- she is overwhelmed with waves of data from across the globe. She is so saturated in neoliberal propaganda it has become invisible to her, but something hasn't felt right for a long time. She knows that climate change will be catastrophic. And the book she's holding -- which her YTT director assigned her to read without much explanation -- describes how a male Iron Age warrior talks with God in a chariot, and is eventually convinced of the necessity of war.

December 15, 2014

Boycott Satyananda’s Literature and Methods Until Reparations are Made for Sexual Abuse

Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard testimony from over a dozen witnesses who resided at Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain from the mid 1970s through the late 1980s, including eleven who were children or young teens at the time. The ashram was founded to spread the practices of yoga. But without exception, the former child residents told harrowing stories of pervasive physical and sexual abuse.