I had this beautiful experience the other night. We were practicing together, and it had been a really long day for me. My brain was not working that well, although I was happy to be there, feeling full and present.

At one point, I did an asana backwards, and we had to start again. They all laughed, and the laughter was very warm. I realized that most of the class has been practicing together for a while now, and there is a lot of ease and openness in the group energy field.

Then I forgot the name of one part of the body and they laughed even more, not ‘at’ me but really ‘with’ me. It felt so good, as if we were really playing together in that field that Rumi describes:

“Out beyond wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field,
I’ll meet you there.”

I realized that practicing in that field is so much more important than anything we think we are doing. I’ve always known that, but that night we were all right there, resting and playing in that space of innocence and no-striving.

I just wanted to keep playing and laughing with them. I started thinking, “Maybe I could become a yoga clown. That could be the next evolution of Soma Yoga.”

My intention in writing these letters is to speak to you, my friends and readers, from a transparent and authentic place about what I am learning as we live here together on this planet--all of us, participating in this infinite web of life. And life on this planet is not easy. It’s not neat and tidy, and the lessons we are given are often overwhelming, heartbreaking and chaotic. That’s just the way it is. 

I’ll be 60 next year, and I’ve passed through some of the toughest  learning  in my whole life this year. I’m realizing that it actually takes a long time to really grow up, a long time to become capable of sharing genuine wisdom and compassion with others.  In the process life shakes us up, burns us, tenderizes us, until we are open enough, free enough, strong enough, to stand on our own two feet and see what  really moves us.

So if I speak to you honestly about what is unfolding for me, and for the people I work with, and the people I know and love, I have to say that I think we are all being pushed by some kind of evolutionary force right now. I really don’t know what this force is, but I feel it pushing us, calling us to move beyond all our safe and familiar places. It seems to be taking us, like a wild river, into a way of being that feels radically new, strange, disorienting, and very awkward at times. That’s all right, and it’s much easier to bear if we don’t take it too personally, if we realize it’s happening to a whole lot of us.  Whether we like it or not, whether we think we asked for it or not, it’s still happening.

A few months ago my daughter went to Kelowna, a city 5 hours by bus from our town. She went for a short visit, and was returning on the night bus, arriving the next morning. I went to pick her up at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning, and there was no sign of the bus. I waited for a while, not really concerned at all, because I knew that nothing much can happen to anyone on a Greyhound bus. While I was waiting, I called my partner Jonathan, to see if she had phoned him.

He told me about a story he had just seen on the news. It happened  the night before, the same night that my daughter was coming home, on a Greyhound bus travelling in Alberta,  the province right beside us.  A man who was on the bus walked to the back, pulled out a machete, and beheaded a young fellow who was asleep on the back seat.

I was shocked and horrified by this piece of news, and very glad to see the bus from Kelowna roll in a few minutes later, with my daughter on it safe and sound. But I couldn’t seem to shake whatever that story had stirred up in me. I realized that my thoughts about what could happen or not happen  anywhere in this world are just that-ideas that have nothing to do with reality.

Click here for more...

My intention in writing these letters is to speak to you, my friends and readers, from a transparent and authentic place about what I am learning as we live here together on this planet--all of us, participating in this infinite web of life. And life on this planet is not easy. It’s not neat and tidy, and the lessons we are given are often overwhelming, heartbreaking and chaotic. That’s just the way it is. 

I’ll be 60 next year, and I’ve passed through some of the toughest  learning  in my whole life this year. I’m realizing that it actually takes a long time to really grow up, a long time to become capable of sharing genuine wisdom and compassion with others.  In the process life shakes us up, burns us, tenderizes us, until we are open enough, free enough, strong enough, to stand on our own two feet and see what  really moves us.

So if I speak to you honestly about what is unfolding for me, and for the people I work with, and the people I know and love, I have to say that I think we are all being pushed by some kind of evolutionary force right now. I really don’t know what this force is, but I feel it pushing us, calling us to move beyond all our safe and familiar places. It seems to be taking us, like a wild river, into a way of being that feels radically new, strange, disorienting, and very awkward at times. That’s all right, and it’s much easier to bear if we don’t take it too personally, if we realize it’s happening to a whole lot of us.  Whether we like it or not, whether we think we asked for it or not, it’s still happening.

A few months ago my daughter went to Kelowna, a city 5 hours by bus from our town. She went for a short visit, and was returning on the night bus, arriving the next morning. I went to pick her up at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning, and there was no sign of the bus. I waited for a while, not really concerned at all, because I knew that nothing much can happen to anyone on a Greyhound bus. While I was waiting, I called my partner Jonathan, to see if she had phoned him.

He told me about a story he had just seen on the news. It happened  the night before, the same night that my daughter was coming home, on a Greyhound bus travelling in Alberta,  the province right beside us.  A man who was on the bus walked to the back, pulled out a machete, and beheaded a young fellow who was asleep on the back seat.

I was shocked and horrified by this piece of news, and very glad to see the bus from Kelowna roll in a few minutes later, with my daughter on it safe and sound. But I couldn’t seem to shake whatever that story had stirred up in me. I realized that my thoughts about what could happen or not happen  anywhere in this world are just that-ideas that have nothing to do with reality.

Click here for more...

In the Buddhist tradition, they speak about something called our true nature, our unconditioned being. Other traditions call this ‘soul’, ‘essence,’ ‘pure consciousness,’ or ‘spirit.’ If we take away all the names, and relate to this as a direct and simple experience, actually accessible for us all, what is it? How does our true nature express itself? How does it move in the world?

For me, one of the simplest ways to approach this is through the term ‘basic goodness.’ There is, in the deepest part of every human being, a goodness that is absolutely natural and uncontrived. This understanding is about as far away from the notion of ‘original sin’ as we could ever get. In our western world, the notion of original sin has gone so deep that it permeates many of the basic structures of our thought, belief, and perception. We see things that are wrong, broken or evil in ourselves and in the world, without any awareness of a deeper ground, a more fundamental nature that is always available.

To awaken to basic goodness engages us in a radically different kind of life. Poets like Mary Oliver glimpse this new way of living:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

How do we begin to see, to recognize, this basic goodness?

Click here for more...

Real change, lasting transformation, is something human beings long for, deep in their hearts. It’s the reason we go to workshops, look for teachers, take courses, repeat affirmations. And it’s something that doesn’t come easy.

I remember many years ago, watching a woman on T.V. who was facing the death sentence in America. She and her boyfriend had been on a drug spree when they were much younger, and had killed someone. During the ensuing years in prison, she had undergone a radical transformation. She described it as opening up to God, discovering who she really was.  When I saw her speak I recognized her as one of the most radiant beings I had ever seen. She wanted so much to live and be able to share the deep love and joy in her heart. They executed her a short time later, and I was very sad about it.

What is it about us humans that makes real transformation such a rare and precious thing? Why do our efforts at self-improvement and moving forward so often come back to where we started? Why is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

We need to understand what it is that stands between us and real change. It is our beliefs, fixed attitudes and self-images, our deepest sense of who we are and what life is. These beliefs and attitudes are so fundamental to who we are that we are usually unconscious of them. They are like the air we breathe, the ground we stand upon. They motivate our actions, give rise to our emotions, and create our lives. And the reason they are so hard to see through is that they make up our survival system. We picked them up at a very early age in order to survive the challenges of our early life. Our deep and visceral need to survive can express itself as the need for security, the need for approval and the need for control. The one who has these needs is experiencing him/herself as a conditioned being, separate and alone, trying to get by in an unfriendly universe.

Click here for more...

Tomorrow is the Equinox, a time of movement, clarity, and breakthroughs—a time to allow what you really value to manifest in the world. It’s also the time of the harvest, of gratitude.

In a coaching session this morning, a client of mine spoke about her ‘glass ceilings,’ those places of inner limitation and constriction that have been with us so long they are mostly invisible.  In order to meet the immense challenges and complexities in our personal and collective lives right now, we need a real willingness to become aware of these glass ceilings, and then to move right through them.

I said to my client:
“I see that one of my key roles as your coach is to keep reflecting back to you the gifts you hold, so that you can fully recognize them, nurture them, and offer them into the world, knowing their full value. I think this is one of the keys to busting through our glass ceilings. It’s also one of my deepest knowings that our most powerful gifts are what come so naturally to us that it takes a long time to fully appreciate them. It’s like a fish trying to taste the ocean.”

Click here for more...

I spent five days in August at a retreat in the mountains. Our theme was Everything Changes. We engaged in a number of different contemplations, meditations and inquiries. One of my favorite questions was, “Do I really know that I will not die today?” As you can imagine, to sit alone and really open to such questions can be deeply challenging.

One night I was sitting beside a young man about 30 years old. I was right in the middle of a very difficult experience, when I heard him softly say ‘Help’. Immediately a strong sense rose up in me that I was in no position to help anyone. It was one of those moments that you’d like to wriggle right out of, if you could. I sat there, wishing that I was in a more balanced and grounded state, and hoping that I had not really heard what I had heard.

It was very quiet. And then it came again, just a soft voice, out of the darkness: “Help.” I realized there was no getting out of this one. My mind was telling me that I could not do anything for this person beside me. I was not feeling well at all. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there and allowed myself not to know. It was not easy to allow that, even though it was the plain and simple truth of my experience. And then, right in the same moment that my mind was saying, “I can’t do this,” I felt another kind of energy move me toward him, quite effortlessly.

Click here for more...

The whole pleasure/pain response, that instinctual mechanism, is embedded in the body. We resist pain, and we hold onto what feels good. What could be more natural? And yet what could be more mechanical, conditioned and reactive? We cannot ask the deep survival patterns of our body/mind to disappear. They are very powerful, and quite essential on a certain level of our being. But if we allow this kind of conditioning to dominate us, then we cannot discover our deeper nature, which is presence-- completely open to everything as it is.

We can work with our conditioning in a much gentler way when we are already resting in presence, in an open space of non-judging awareness. This awareness is our foundation. It is simple, open, unstructured, innocent, natural, and right here.  With this kind of awareness we can begin to become intimate with our own experience, with the totality of our experience. Not separating parts out and saying, “This is me, and this is not,” but opening our arms and accepting it all.

Accepting my body just as it is in this moment, listening, breathing, moving, and letting go. When I allow my breath to mirror the openness of my awareness, then the nature of my experience begins to change. I can approach the feeling of discomfort without pulling away or resisting. I can allow myself to open to this feeling, listen to it, respect it, work with it. Not looking to a book or a CD or a teacher, but opening to the wisdom that comes through the body, from moment to moment, that emerges and then disappears. Heart beating by itself, lungs moving by themselves, resting in the simple feeling of being alive.