Yoga philosophy – Page 6

July 12, 2015

Kino’s Hip: Reflections on Extreme Practice and Injury in Asana

The circular argument that MacGregor transparently makes is so hard to understand, it seems to validate the adage that yoga cannot be conceptualized. Pain is described as a necessary spiritual tool in a practice that claims to heal the body and ego and free the person from all limitation. But if you have too much pain, or the wrong kind, you’re courting injury. No-one wants that. Or do they? If too much pain does injure the yogi, the bright side is that renewed focus upon bodily healing may hurt the ego as it contemplates its new limitations. This is ultimately good news, because, as MacGregor says, “the real yoga is the burning up of the ego”.

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.