Greetings Reader, My latest rationalization for not pulling my phone away from my nose? Watching reels of musicians explaining the brilliance of the Beatles. It’s fun to learn what makes their songs so great. And it’s nice to see that these reels are coming from relatively young musicians, not my antediluvian contemporaries with memories of Beatlemania. One of the many ways that the Beatles upended the rules of pop songwriting was by opening songs with the chorus instead of a verse. The most...

Greetings Reader, Did I ever tell you that I used to be a soda pop salesman? It’s true. Back in 1981, I got a job as a sales rep for a very small company with a tiny office in lower Manhattan. Their flagship product was the first all-natural soda pop to hit the health food market. My job was to sell soda pop to independent grocery stores around the city and health food stores around the country. There were only five people working out of that office. Of those five, I was the only man. I was...

Hi Reader, One of the central ideas in the Yoga Sutras is that the root cause of suffering is ignorance of the true nature of the self. According to the Sutras, our true nature is one of eternally joyful existence. What's keeping us from seeing ourselves that way? The Sutras tell us that there are five obstacles, the first and foremost of which is ignorance. When we’re trapped in a state of ignorance, we can’t see our own true nature. What we can see is our material minds and bodies, which...