Practice

I’m not convinced my yoga is better than your yoga because I am not in your body or your life or your circumstances or family constellation. I do not know where you come from or what makes you tick. I do not know what your body “needs”.

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. 

In this episode, author and Embodied Philosophy faculty, Andrew Holecek, is in conversation with Stephanie Corigliano and Jacob Kyle, as they discuss Andrew’s article, “Is the West Ready for Tantra?” an article released in the latest issue of Tarka. 

Sally Kempton is a master of meditation, yoga philosophy, and practical tantric philosophy. In this episode, Sally talks about Goddess practice as a spiritual technology and provides guided practices experiencing the divine feminine through the breath, being seen by the divine, and a formal meditation on the goddess Lalita.