These mindful practices are like taking a soft cloth and wiping the smudges off the window of our busy brains. In this way, we polish our perspective, making room for extra wisdom, patience, and compassion.
Read moreSacred Threads: The Story of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
Join us for this six-week series of myth-busting, story-telling, meditation-inspiring, and sacred-text-decoding with Annie Moyer, Master of Divinity student and longtime fan of Patanjali’s 196 aphorisms on Yoga and all it means.
Read moreA thought, or four
All we can do is recognize the precious opportunities we have right in front of us to celebrate joys and to hold space for pain, whether that pain is in our own hearts, in the hearts of friends and family, or halfway across the world among human hearts enduring devastating violence.
Read moreI can see for piles and piles
From the Buddhist viewpoint, as goes a stack of paper, so go I.
Read moreGiving Joyful
Consider joy as an active state of loving friendliness, compassionate presence, and generous spirit – envision it as the energy that you radiate, and not an energy you consume.
Read moreThe Calm At The Center Of The Challenge
A great benefit of yoga asana practice is the demand it poses to the mind-body system to counteract the habitual ways we use our bodies. Often, habit comes without heed, and mindless movement is a certain gateway to stress, strain, or injury.
Read moreTopsy, Turvy, and Tranquil
Human beings are not that different from trees and water when it comes to being at the mercy of a fragile ecosystem. As the only element of nature with the gift of consciousness, however, we have a unique opportunity.
Read moreIn A Digital World, Take Care Of Your Analog Self
Relative to the universe, we are infinitely small; relative to our loved ones, we are greatly treasured; and relative to the earth and its cycles, we are in constant flux.
Read moreA True Start
The perennial New Year's Resolution is getting a makeover, and I'm glad for it. The old look was hard to keep up with, swathed in an attitude that we weren't good enough last year, so we better kick it up this year; we all know how that turned out. By February, we were exhausted and demoralized, and whatever habits we were seeking to change tended to creep back in, leaving many with the feeling that the new year got off to a false start.
Read moreLaser focus yields big energy
This phenomenon of sharply focused attention yielding a surplus of energy is the opposite of our social programming, which tells us to divide attention in multi-tasked directions, to push beyond our comfort zones, to go big or go home, but all this external focus can leave us frustrated, anxious, and depleted, much like the state of Earth itself.
Read moreShifting on axis
It's hard to know how history will view our current times without a couple thousand years of hindsight, but it's not hard to feel and see the numerous data points currently shaping our own sort of axial moment.
Read moreAre you busy?
What happens when we rest/breathe/contemplate is the grand and invisible work of a nervous system recalibrating our frail humanness, leaving us better in balance: strong enough to meet big moments of activity, soft enough to enjoy our own quiet company, compassionate and patient enough to tend relationships with full hearts.
Read moreShaken ground, steady breath
If something hurts, feel the pain. If something confuses, ask questions. If something angers, trace the anger’s source. If something is untenable, reach out to what you can reliably touch: a friend to give a comforting hug, a donation button to give material support, or the earth where you’ve planted – with eternal optimism – your summer tomatoes.
Read moreOriginal Yogis?
Observations collected with unflinching wisdom over several hundred millennia evokes a nascent yogic awareness: the horseshoe crab as an original yogi – calm and composed, reminding our troubled parts that time marches to a beat and at a depth we can't begin to fathom.
Read moreFour solid reasons why yoga helps
Integrated mind-body practices are uniquely suited to help us reckon with the injustices we see, the indignities we experience, and the incredulousness we feel. Here are four demonstrable ways.
Read moreWhat's the quality of your attention?
I now recognize the experience as awareness waking up to its full potential for expansive wonder, a lesson in how paying full attention is fundamental to mindfulness. It anchors us in the moment, it helps our nervous system distinguish between real and imagined threat, and it orients us to the realm where the breath is most available.
Read moreHow do we know what we know?
Yoga offers insights into consciousness that help us sort our present world perceptions. With discernment and equanimity, we can avoid sliding into habitual negativity and misunderstanding.
Read moreLife is a balancing act
As we hone our skills to stand on one foot, to stretch for strength, to exhale at least as much as we inhale, we can keep our eyes and ears open for ways to live in balance during a time that seems anything but steady.
Read moreSharing the burden and the bounty
Though illness (and its remedies) is often treated as an individual experience, the pandemic's persistent interruption to our lives in 2021 is monumentally larger than any one person, and its shared collective burdens are significant.
Read moreSavoring the last bits of summer
Living in the mid-Atlantic region, we have the gift of defined seasons and their quarterly lessons in impermanence. A mainstay of this lesson is the reminder to appreciate what is, rather than wishing for what was or what's to come.
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