Greetings Reader, There was barely enough room in the jumbled-up mess of an office to fit the desk, the one adult behind it, and the three pre-teens who were sitting in front of it. The furnace-level setting on the electric radiator’s thermostat approximated the sensation of sitting inside a combustion chamber. The smoke from the Rabbi’s cigar displaced every molecule of oxygen in the room and conspired with the radiator to remove every last drop of moisture from my eyeballs. But enduring the...
4 days ago • 4 min read
Greetings Reader - Our free monthly series, Community Conversations, continues next week. This month, we're going to explore questions around the phenomenon of Identity Fusion. Identity fusion is a psychological construct where an individual’s personal identity merges with a social identity, such as a group, nation, or team, causing them to define themselves as being non-different from the group and think of the group as being non-different from themselves. Fused individuals maintain their...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader, When I was a little kid, my parents took me on a trip from our home on Long Island to Washington, D.C. We went on tours of the Capital Building, the Treasury Building, probably a few other buildings, and the major monuments. I suppose it was all meant to be a civics lesson. When we got to the Washington Monument, I wanted it to be an endurance test: I suggested that we walk up the 550-feet worth of stairs to the observation deck rather than take the elevator. My parents, of...
11 days ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, The New York Times ran a story last week that brought me back to the glorious days of my misspent youth. It was a story about a 1936 film that was originally released as a pompous public service announcement and went on to enjoy a second life decades later as a midnight-movie classic: Reefer Madness. I saw Reefer Madness with a group of friends at the Uniondale Mini Cinema on Long Island when I was a teenager. And yes, we were all hippie freaks toking on clipped roaches...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, If you’ve been teaching asana classes for a while and feel like your students are asking for something more, something deeper . . . The yoga and meditation market is moving away from high-intensity asana workouts and toward practices that focus more on somatic healing and nervous system regulation. Offering guided meditations is a powerful way to meet that demand. A great guided meditation is more than just relaxation cues and visualization prompts. There’s a science to using your...
21 days ago • 1 min read
Greetings Reader, A couple of weeks back I wrote about how right reasoning depends more on true premises than on a well-constructed argument. For example, “All horses can fly, all horses are tomatoes, therefore, all tomatoes can fly” is a well-constructed argument that’s based on two obviously false premises. If it were just a matter of armchair philosophy, then it wouldn’t really matter. But falling for logical fallacies can have real-world consequences. For example, if you think alignment...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, Last Sunday, I shared some examples of faulty logic that I've seen circulating through the yogaverse. I was planning on sharing some other examples today, but I'm going to put that off until next week. This week, I have something else on my mind. I was one of many protestors standing, waving, chanting, and drumming out in front of the White House this past Tuesday evening. Fortunately, it became another TACO Tuesday before the evening was over. Of course, I was relieved when...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, We visited my hometown Krishna temple in NYC a couple of weeks ago. It was wonderful to be there: fantastic kirtans in the temple room, exquisite Deities on the altar, and a very nice talk about the connections between bhakti philosophy and our search for happiness. After the lecture, we sat with a few other attendees as we all enjoyed the delicious vegetarian dinner that the temple offers as part of their regular Sunday evening program. I’m sure no one really wanted to go...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Greetings Reader, I hope you had an inspiring No Kings Day yesterday. Here in our nation's capital, as in many other cities big and small, the creativity of protestors was on full display with clever banners and costumes designed to ridicule Trump and his administration. There was also a lot of singing and joyfulness, which was very encouraging because prioritizing joy is one of the most important elements of a successful resistance movement. Tyrannical governments want to be feared; joy...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read