Greetings Reader,

The Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley is a place where you can interact with amazing large-scale modern art that plays with your sense of distance, depth, balance, and perspective as you move around it.

I've been there a few times over the years. One of the artists whose work I discovered during my first visit, Charles Ginnever, described his sculptures as “monuments of the motions of the mind” that invited the viewer to meditate on the nature of perception.

I don’t know if meditating on a monument of the mind’s movements will bring about the stilling of those movements, but the conceptual connection to yoga is pretty clear: yoga philosophy is also meant to transform our sense of perception:

I'm hardly a perfect yogī, but I’ve definitely been feeling the distress of all beings lately, and it makes me plenty mad and pretty sad.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been feeling the same way.

I’m also trying to maintain my equanimity and cultivate a deeper sense of contentment, for the sake of being able to respond to the world as constructively as possible while accepting the fact that the world is not subject to my control.

Looking at the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita — the foremost book of yoga philosophy — from different angles of vision can help us connect the dots between rage, sorrow, equanimity, and contentment.

From one angle of vision, the Gita's teachings look like an argument in favor of fighting the good fight without attachment to victory or defeat. And rightly so, because that's what it is.

From another angle of vision, the Gita’s teachings look like advice on how to face adversity from a position of emotional integration. Also rightly so.

As the Gita begins, Arjuna, the hero of the Gita, falls into a state of despair when he realizes that, win or lose, the battle he’s being called to fight will result in the world as he knows being lost forever. At the moment of truth, his knees tremble, his hands weaken, his step falters, and he collapses onto the seat of his chariot.

Arjuna appears to have two options: stay emotionally engaged with the world — and have a nervous breakdown — or become emotionally distant from the world — and live in a state of denial and repression.

We may feel like we have the same two bad options of either getting caught up in a doom loop of perpetual outrage, anxiety, and emotional burnout or risk hardening our hearts while we look for inner peace along the road to indifference.

Yoga wisdom offers a third possibility: Feel everything without being paralyzed by anything.

Rather than denying our feelings, yoga encourages us to understand them, accept them, and work with them rather than let them work against us.

Working with these feelings begins with knowing what each feeling is telling us:

• Rage: "This is wrong and cannot be allowed to continue!"
• Sorrow: "It hurts me to see others being hurt."
• Equanimity: "Stay steady."
• Contentment: "Don’t lose hope."

Rage is the alarm bell going off. It tells us that something is wrong. Yoga doesn’t expect us not to feel anger or instruct us to suppress it; yoga encourages us to turn rage into courage rather than let it curdle into hatred.

Sorrow is the sadness of irretrievable loss. It tells us that something is gone. Yoga doesn’t expect us to never feel sorrowful or instruct us to pretend we don’t; yoga encourages us to turn sorrow in compassion rather than let it throw us into a pit of despair.

Equanimity is emotional stability in service to wise action. It tells us that there is always a best possible way to respond to any situation. Yoga doesn't produce emotional vacuity; yoga empowers us to sail through the tempest with an even keel rather than let ourselves be pulled down into a whirlpool of incapacitation.

Contentment — the most mysterious and nuanced of yoga’s principles of self-care — is freedom from resentment, not from responsibility. It’s a genuine sense of acceptance that we can't force the universe to align with our desires, not a bland acceptance of the status quo or an excuse to sit on the sidelines.

Spoiler Alert: When Arjuna choses to fight at the end of the Bhagavad gita, he does so from a mindset of emotional integration.

He doesn’t give in to anger, sink into sadness, pretend he has no feelings, or become comfortably numb. Instead, he nests his rage inside a framework of equanimity and places his sorrow inside an envelope of acceptance.

This is how yoga helps us stay emotionally healthy in an unhealthy world.

Yoga doesn't promise us a life without anger or heartache. It promises that, through practice, we can become the kind of people whose rage is firmly rooted in composure and whose hope burns brighter than our sorrow.

In a world that presents us with an illusory choice between feeling deeply and thinking clearly, yoga empowers us to do both.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S: I'm thinking about what workshops I'm going to offer this fall. What would you like me to offer? I want to teach what you most want to learn, live, and share so please reply to this email and let me know what kind of classes or courses you would be excited to take this fall.