If you’re ready to apply yoga philosophy to your own life—or teach it with clarity and feeling—my classes and workshops create space to sharpen your thinking, steady your inner life, and connect your practice to what matters now.
The power of a positive vision
|
Greetings Reader - I trust my readers in other parts of the world will forgive me for directing our collective attention to the purposeful chaos being generated by our nation’s chief executive here in my adopted hometown of Washington, D.C. And, given its global consequences, I trust all of my readers will share my interest in looking at the chaos through the lens of yoga wisdom in order to understand and constructively respond to it. The inward-turning practices of yoga can provide shelter from the storm. They can also empower us to lean into the storm. The balance of taking shelter and taking action is what engaged spirituality is all about. And it’s important to recognize why engaged spirituality is called for: spiritual movements take place within political contexts, which means caretakers and proponents of spiritual movements have a duty to respond to surrounding political conditions in a meaningful way. An essential component of a meaningful response is a positive vision for the future. A positive vision for the future may be hard to imagine when we’re still scrambling to figure out how to constructively resist the tectonic negativity of the present. But history tells us that the conviction of resistance leaders has always been sustained by the pursuit of a positive vision. And logic tells us that if we don’t have a positive vision to pursue, we’ll lock ourselves into survival mode as we fixate on what we’re running away from instead of what we want to run toward. Does yoga offer us a positive vision to run toward? The yoga wisdom tradition certainly tempers our expectations for a positive future by characterizing the material world as a place of misery due to the inevitability of death. It would appear that achieving liberation from the cycle of birth and death means leaving the material world behind as we head for the exit. Sounds a lot like running away, right? Not really: for most of yogis, the path to the exit runs through the world, not away from it. And an engaged yogi makes the world a better place for everyone as they run through it. So let’s get started: here are three visions of a better world based on principles of bhakti-yoga:
Bhakti-yoga promotes inclusivity and sees governance as ideally informed by universal ethical principles rather than sectarian interpretations of a singular scripture. Bhakti traditions emphasize spontaneous love and service rather than coercion or enforced conformity. And bhakti philosophy proposes that spirituality is an organic awakening of the heart that can’t be imposed through state power. The principles of bhakti-yoga can provide the basis for a powerful alternative vision—one that supports spiritual principles in public life while safeguarding pluralism and rejecting authoritarianism. This is just a start. Let’s write Project 2029 together! How does the yoga wisdom tradition inform your positive vision of the future? Write back and let me know. Wishing you all good fortune, - Hari-k P.S.: There's just one week left to enroll in my small group mentorship program for yoga teachers! If you’re a yoga teacher who want to:
then my small group mentorship program is for you. CLICK HERE to learn more about the program. P.P.S: My thanks to Jamyle Cannon for inspiring this email. Check him out on IG:@jamylecannon |
Hari-kirtana das
If you’re ready to apply yoga philosophy to your own life—or teach it with clarity and feeling—my classes and workshops create space to sharpen your thinking, steady your inner life, and connect your practice to what matters now.
Greetings Reader, My younger self never aspired to master the art of cooking. Nor did I ever think it would turn into an enjoyable outlet for creative expression. And yet, here I am, in the kitchen, riffing off a recipe to cook up another culinary masterpiece All right, so, perhaps I'm indulging in a bit of overstatement. Cooking has become a form of meditation for me. Once I'm in the kitchen, my mind locks into the process and stays there until the repast is ready. My meditative orientation...
Greetings Reader, I get a lot of questions from yoga teachers about how to explain karma-yoga — the yoga of liberation through action. And I frequently get asked for advice on how to speak about bhakti-yoga, the yoga of devotion, in yoga classes. Speaking about karma-yoga is challenging because it seems impossible to act in the world without generating some kind of reaction. Speaking about bhakti-yoga can be tricky because yoga is not a religion but bhakti is theistic by definition. But what...
Greetings Reader, Last summer, I posted an Instagram reel about how the principle spiritual equality provides a rational basis for social justice. How so? Materially, none of us are equal. We all have a little more of this or a little less of that and when we add it all up, no one is materially equal to anyone else. Spiritually, however, the yoga wisdom tradition tells us that we are all equal; that we’re all made of the same spiritual stuff and that we are all equally infinitesimal parts of...