Articles

Creative healing methods, including ritual therapy, offer us ways to address all kinds of grief: subtle to catastrophic, known and unknown, recent and historical.

Grief refers to the emotions we experience around a loss.

The Oxford Dictionary defines passion as a strong and barely controllable emotion. Many so-called positive emotions fit that bill. So what happens if we experiment with touching sorrow in times when we feel the most euphoric of highs? Cultivating the opposite in all situations, even in times of elation, prepares us for the inevitability that we will at some point feel the lowest of lows. 

Is it possible that the commonality of shared pain and grief can be seen as a gateway to connection? Can it help us name and strengthen our values? Is collective grief work imperative for any movement towards eradicating injustice and restoring shared humanity?

Turning fifty, with its sea waves of hormonal change, brings much new information to the mind. You can feel some brittleness emerge and the pliancy of the joints realign. You are (or, I am) less interested in the farthest and deepest reaches of a pose, for example, but rather in the intricacies of the steps of the subtler body on the way there—on the way anywhere. 

If the yoga industry wants to thrive again, it needs to start teaching more than fitness. Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel- all the techniques already exist within yoga’s traditions to offer a class that touches every part of our being. By offering more integrated classes that include pranayama, mantra, meditation and kriya, we can now provide a yoga experience, instead of just yoga poses.

Just as each feature of cosmic order has an essential nature, cosmic order itself has an essential nature. Bringing ourselves into harmony with the essential nature of cosmic order is the way by which we can live peacefully in the world. Conversely, dissonant action relative the essential nature of cosmic order brings about chaos and destruction.

I started attending classes because I had reached a place in my studies where I needed personal feedback about the experiences I was having. I took group classes for about one year before being approached to teach. I was completely ignorant of the culture of yoga building in the West and its historical context in the East. I was only interested in the practice as a psychology… as a way of spotting and shifting patterns of thought and behavior.