Greetings from Tarragona, Reader, I’m sitting a stone’s throw or two from the Mediterranean Sea after spending most of my first week in Spain doing a museum-a-thon in Madrid. If you like art, you’ll love Madrid. I’m not usually a big Picasso fan, but his Harlequin with a Mirror has a wonderfully trippy quality that gets lost in reproduction and Guernica up close is as epic as they say it is. Spending time in front of Bosch’s famous triptych, TheGarden of Earthly Delights, was another...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, I don’t think of yoga as a commerce-driven wellness industry. I think of yoga as a movement driven by spiritual imagination. A movement that proclaims the possibility of a different reality. The thing fascinated me about yoga when I first heard about it was the idea that it was a way to expand your consciousness and experience reality on a higher level. And yeah, I did a lot of tripping as a teenager. But that came later. The idea that I could expand my consciousness was...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, Huntsville, Alabama is famous for being the place where the rockets that shot the first American astronauts into space were built. Unfortunately, the rocket scientist who built them, Wernher von Braun, was a Nazi war criminal. But, thanks to him, the United States won the space race and Huntsville went from being a backwater garrison town to "Rocket City." In recognition of von Braun’s central role in making Huntsville a literal boom town, the city’s municipal leadership...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Greetings Reader, Back in 1990-something, I was working for a digital video systems manufacturer. My job was to demonstrate their products at trade shows and to train end-users how to operate them. There was a lot of travel involved: to the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, to trade shows in Las Vegas and Amsterdam, and to cities large and small whenever a local broadcaster purchased a motion graphics system or title effects generator. On one occasion, the head of marketing told me I...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, I'm writing to let you know about my next live online workshop: Beyond Belief: Yoga Wisdom for Discerning Truth from FalsehoodSaturday, October 10 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT TUITION: $27 The workshop will be recorded — a replay link will be emailed to all registrants. Yoga teachers can receive 1.5 hours of continuing education credit with Yoga Alliance. → CLICK HERE TO ENROLL We have access to more information than ever before—and more exposure to sophisticated attempts to manipulate...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader, I recently heard former late night television star Stephen Colbert describe his erstwhile gig as the equivalent of “being lowered like carbon rods into a radioactive pool every day, and then being pulled out and put in front of a camera to radiate it back out at the audience at a non-lethal rad level.” Sometimes I feel like I could say the same thing about my current gig. On the one hand, I feel the need to know what’s going on in the world, both for myself and for the sake...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, After three weeks of practice, I feel confident in saying that I have mastered the art of being on vacation. Ate it up. Crushed it. Knocked it out of the park. Stuck the landing. It was great. I totally cleared my calendar of everything except all of my meetings and appointments to make sure I would have a few zeptoseconds every day to relax. And when I wasn’t busy relaxing, I renovated my entire website, planned out my workshop and course schedule for the next 12 months,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Sharing a bit of yoga philosophy before students start moving is a great way for a yoga teacher to open a class. It can also be challenging. But what’s even more challenging is weaving that bit of philosophy into your class while your students are moving. But that's how you turn the philosophy you talk about into the philosophy that everyone feels. We can tell students that Warrior Pose teaches us how to be strong, Tree Pose teaches us how to stay grounded, and Child’s Pose teaches...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Greetings Reader, A few weeks ago I spent the better part of an idyllic afternoon hanging out with a friend on a quiet veranda overlooking a stretch of woods behind my apartment complex. Our meeting was both pleasant and purposeful: our plan was to explore some ideas about how we could expand our support for the Free DC movement here in our besieged capital. But before we got down to the business of resistance, we took some time to catch up. I mentioned that my wife and I are planning a trip...
2 months ago • 3 min read