Many years ago in Ottawa, I went swimming one Friday afternoon in the lake. For some reason, the lake water, along with the wax in my ears, swelled up and plugged my ears completely. I couldn’t hear a thing. My doctor could not see me until Monday afternoon, so I spent 3 whole days in a state of total deafness. 
On Monday, the doctor cleared my ears with a jet of water. What happened next only lasted about 2 minutes, but I’ll never forget it. Because I had been so deaf, when my hearing suddenly returned I found myself listening to the whole field of sound, all at once. In that field were thousands of tiny tinkling sounds that I had never heard before.  I felt as if I had fallen into a vast web of sound, an enormous symphony of little chirping microscopic noises. I sat there for 2 or 3 minutes, dumbfounded, until my normal sense of hearing returned and the beautiful soft sounds disappeared from my conscious awareness. 

Something happened to me recently that was very much like that experience in Ottawa . It all began with gratitude. Over the last while some miracles have happened in my life. I don’t really know how or why these powerful blessings have emerged. I call them miracles because they appeared all of a sudden, for no reason that I know of.  Events like these do not explain themselves! They remain forever connected to a profound sense of mystery.

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I wanted to share something with you about and self-acceptance, and how much I have learned about this from Radiant Mind and Peter Fenner. Someone was speaking to him recently about how when they sit in meditation, they access an open, unconditioned place. But when they come back to ordinary life, they lose it. And feel bad, unworthy, frustrated, disappointed-pick the word that is appropriate for you.

Peter said, “Of course that happens. It happens to all of us. No matter how skillful we become at accessing that place of unconditioned awareness, we can lose it in a second. It’s nothing to feel bad about. It’s just the way things are, until you evolve to a whole different level of consciousness.” I realized in that moment that I had been feeling bad about that one thing for 30 years! That I had actually used my spiritual practice to torture myself about the fact that I couldn’t stay in the state I wanted to be in. Isn’t that amazing? And somewhat ridiculous?

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I’ve been thinking lately about all the years I’ve spent working with people, and how much of that work has been centered around unraveling our fixed sense of identity. One of my ‘Gift of Presence’ students called it “a joyous unraveling.” There are an infinite number of ways that we can relate to our identity, our ego, our sense of separate self.  Some people want to understand their ego, some want to improve it, some want to destroy it.  And of course some people just want to dress it up and take it out.

There is a lot of controversy in spiritual circles about all this. What to do? How to proceed? Do I embrace my identity? Do I expand it, do I dissolve it?  Is it real? Is it an illusion? Do I need therapy, or coaching, or meditation? Or three years in an ashram? I don’t think so.

The whole conundrum seems so much simpler to me now than it used to. I think that’s because I’ve learned to trust my own experience, and the experience of my students and friends. For me, the simple truth of the matter is this: we all get tired of ourselves!  Being a separate person all the time is exhausting. That’s why it’s so hard on people when they can’t sleep. Sleep is a total release from our whole waking-state identity.

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There was a phrase from one of the scriptures that we heard a lot in India. It would get inside my head and make my mind itch. “What is poison for you in the beginning,” it said, “will be nectar for you at the end. And what is nectar at the beginning, will become poison for you at the end.” I’ve been connecting with the
meaning of this lately, in a whole new way. Somehow this experience has lifted me up, encouraged me, and awakened me to new possibilities for our future.

How we know ourselves, how we imagine ourselves, can feel so solid and static. And how quickly it can change. Our whole identity can open and expand in a moment, no matter how much resistance we are feeling.

About a year and a half ago I came to a turning point in relationship to Mother Earth and my willingness to live a sustainable life. I realized that prayers, recycling and emails to our government were not going to do it for me. I felt this longing, deep in my heart, to take a big step forward. And I kept wondering why we humans so often wait until things are totally desperate before we are willing to do things differently.

Gradually it became clear to me that I wanted to learn to live without my car. I was quite surprised by this, as I was very attached to my car. It was a Honda Accord I inherited from my mother, after 25 years of living in India without one. It represented freedom, mobility, and the spirit of adventure. I would think about letting go of it and feel a lot of resistance.

But the longing was even stronger than my resistance- I knew that to be true. I was preparing to go to a Radiant Mind teacher training course in France this fall, and in July it became obvious that the only way I would be able to afford the trip was by selling my car. Isn’t it strange how the universe conspires to help you evolve and grow, even when you think you are not ready?

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When I speak, it is not my intention to tell you how to live, what you should believe, or how to improve yourself.

My intention is to offer some pointers, some radical new perspectives that will shake you up, and loosen the fixed ways you have of looking at yourself and your world.

Instead of filling you up with more information, these pointers can awaken you to a field of intelligence which I am calling ‘The Heart.’ This field of intelligence functions in an entirely different way than your conditioned mind.

Discovering the nature of this wisdom for ourselves allows us to ask ourselves some powerful questions about what is actually working in our lives, what we really want, and what matters most. 

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“Only the unexpected is real.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later, maybe in a slightly different form?  For me, over the last while, it’s been about creativity, spontaneity, the flow of life which is unstructured and unrehearsed.

We had a great discussion about it one evening in my ‘Alchemy of Writing’ group. I’ve been offering to my students a vision of creativity as something that is innate and universal, because it is our true nature. It’s not something that belongs to anyone, and especially not to a privileged or special group of people. Creativity is how the whole universe emerges into form- over and over it demonstrates this spontaneous power of expression at the very heart of life.

When I really allow my heart to open to the sense of this vast field of creative energy, I realize that each one of us was born to discover ourselves through this process of free expression- to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is always new and dynamic.

As we explored this way of looking at things in my class, we realized that a lot of confusion happens when we equate creativity with skill. They are not the same. Skill is a learned thing, something acquired through practice and intention. We can practice creativity too, but only in the sense of learning how to open, to surrender to something that we can never control.  Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

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Soma Yoga Retreat in Yelapa Mexico, Soma Yoga & Transformation

Dear friends and yogis:

One of my longtime yoga students, Tracey Scanlan and I are offering a Soma Yoga retreat in Yelapa, Mexico, Dec. 1-8. The full flyer is at the end of this newsletter. Please speak to us if you have questions. It’s going to be a marvelous retreat, an opportunity for deep renewal and awakening.

I have been encouraging all of my students to relate to their yoga practice as a living, evolving thing. If we do this, then our experience keeps growing deeper and more alive-we stay on the ‘living edge’ of what is unfolding for us.

Since the spring, we have been going deeper, opening up to ‘the inner body,’ the whole field of energy and presence that underlies our physical body. When we are able to directly contact the aliveness that the body is actually made of, our capacity to heal, regenerate and renew ourselves really opens up.

We have also been focusing on building more core strength, grounding down into the earth, and experiencing how that core strength supports us in showing up for our life, and meeting each challenge as it arises.

The original purpose of yoga was to connect you with your authentic being, which is not a separate, static thing, but a living, flowing field of presence.
When we look at the body from the outside, it certainly appears as a solid object. But when we drop inside and open to our inner experience, all that we find is a stream of experience, sensation, and feeling. And when we let go a little more, we realize there is a lot of spaciousness and tenderness in this experience, an openness that lies at the heart of who we really are.

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The Fall Soma Yoga Schedule, Soma Yoga Retreat in Yelapa Mexico, Soma Yoga & Transformation

Dear friends and yogis:

One of my longtime yoga students, Tracey Scanlan and I are offering a Soma Yoga retreat in Yelapa, Mexico, Dec. 1-8. The full flyer is at the end of this newsletter. Please speak to us if you have questions. It’s going to be a marvelous retreat, an opportunity for deep renewal and awakening.

Our fall schedule at Shanti Yoga studio is just starting. I am now teaching my Saturday morning class as usual, from 10am-11:30am, and a Wednesday evening class, from 5:30-7pm. Please come and bring a friend with you. Your yoga buddy receives their first class with me for free. And our new punch pass, 5 classes for $48, has no expiry date on it any longer.

I have been encouraging all of my students to relate to their yoga practice as a living, evolving thing. If we do this, then our experience keeps growing deeper and more alive-we stay on the ‘living edge’ of what is unfolding for us.

Since the spring, we have been going deeper, opening up to ‘the inner body,’ the whole field of energy and presence that underlies our physical body. When we are able to directly contact the aliveness that the body is actually made of, our capacity to heal, regenerate and renew ourselves really opens up.

Click here for more...