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.
Yet materialism, which has dominated our intellectual culture since the Victorian age, covers fewer and fewer bases of life in the twenty-first century. The natural sciences are increasingly defined by quantum data, interdimensional formulas, and fields like neuroplasticity, which uses brain scans to demonstrate the capacity of thought to alter neural matter. Our ordinary reference points of life are in greater flux today than at any time since Darwinism upended what it meant to be human in the Victorian era.
….and experimentation with psychedelics is becoming increasingly mainstream, and considered in a positive and hopeful light.
We start to see that our worldview is constructed, agreed upon by the dominant culture, and that it is not the only way of seeing…
We live in the 21st century, a brave new world wherein communication, expression, and the exchange of ideas, feelings, and information….