Besides blaspheming, I work as a carpenter. I had an epiphany about Jesus during my carpentry apprenticeship, and have finally decided to share it. My insight is that Jesus became a great spiritual teacher once he put down his tool belt. Allow me to explain.

I came to carpentry late in life, thanks to the pandemic. I left NYC in 2019 to lick my wounds after being “let go” from the job I had moved there for, and then let go again by my fiance. I landed in Colorado, heart full of sadness, just in time for Covid.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. ~Matthew 5:4

Prior to the plague I made a living teaching yoga and photographing people. Those in-person occupations were disrupted by lockdown. As a man of many pivots, I went to work in the UPS warehouse and soon was driving the brown truck, exploring the winding roads and gated communities around me.

I found the slowing down of normal life to be comforting. In my free time I sat by an irrigation creek behind my apartment playing my guitar and singing to the animals that gathered to listen. None of us wore masks, and it was good.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. ~Matthew 5:8

A friend of mine in Massachusetts (let’s call him Matthew) called me up one day looking for the phone number of another friend. His carpentry business was blowing up because everyone was stuck home looking at their walls, yearning to tear them down. Fortunately, or not, the other friend wasn’t available.

After some consideration I said to Matthew, “Lo if you shall put your faith in me, I will help you build.”

A couple months later I landed in the land of the Puritans. Matthew gave me a tool belt and a screw gun and began patiently teaching me the ways of the carpenter. As the weeks passed and his patience began to wane, each board that I cut too short was added to the cross I bore.

To repent, I gave myself daily mental floggings while repeating the mantra, “Measure twice, cut once. Measure twice, cut once. Measure twice, cut once.”

One day, after repeating the measurement mantra 108 times, I received a vision. I was in ancient Rome and there were three Pharisees hanging out on a newly assembled wooden bench. Suddenly, there was a creaking sound, and the whole thing collapsed. They fell to the ground, startled. One of them cried out, “Jesus Christ!”

A bearded young man with long hair and a toolbelt appeared, a look of embarrassment on his face.

“What in Abraham’s name happened?” the eldest Pharisee grumbled, indignantly.

“I skimped on the nails,” Jesus muttered.

Son of a Carpenter

For want of a nail, the bench was lost. For want of a bench, the dignity of the Pharisees was lost. For want of dignity, the respect for Jesus was lost. For want of respect, Jesus quit being a carpenter. For lack of a carpentry skills, Jesus began his search for meaning. For want of meaning, Jesus found deeper truths and started a religion. And all for the want of a nail.

As I pondered the meaning of my vision, I began to realize that there wasn’t a record of anything Jesus built. Christians will say he built the church, but that is a metaphor that turns out not to be true.

If Jesus were truly god in human form, wouldn’t he have built something spectacular? Something that would still be standing, or at least referenced in the Christian bible?

The direct biblical references to Jesus being a carpenter are actually quite limited.

Mark 6:3 is the primary verse where Jesus is directly called a carpenter. When Jesus teaches in his hometown synagogue, people respond: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?”

This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus himself is explicitly identified as a carpenter.

Matthew 13:55 gives a parallel account of the same incident, but with slightly different wording: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?”

Here Jesus is called the carpenter’s son rather than a carpenter himself, referring to Joseph’s occupation. Whether by Yahweh or by Joseph, was not Jesus, after all, the ultimate nepo baby?

Interestingly, the original Greek word used is “tekton” (τέκτων), which is often translated as “carpenter” but could more broadly mean a craftsman or builder who worked with wood, stone, or other materials. It’s all Greek to me.

Parables

Jesus loved speaking in parables. His parables tend to draw from other aspects of daily life in first-century Palestine: agriculture, fishing, shepherding, household management, business and finance. Jesus offers only two parables from a builder’s perspective.

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Matthew 7:24-27

Perhaps Jesus was speaking from experience. Was he still feeling shame over that house he built in the sand? Jesus revealed another embarrassing moment from his time as a contractor later in the New Testament.

“For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who are watching it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This person began to build, and was not able to finish!’ Luke 14:28-30

Jesus’ miscalculations lost him a few contracts. Life happens. His peers besmirched his name, for carpentry was a cut throat industry even then. Fortunately, the fortitude Jesus gained from these experiences would help him out later.

After Jesus laid the foundation for a tower and ran out of funds, he went for a long walk. As he shuffled his way along the Jordan River he encountered John the Baptist, and decided he could use a bath. Carpentry is a dirty job.

John dunked him in the water and washed away the masonry dust. It was then that Jesus realized he wasn’t meant to be a tradesman. He decided to spend forty days in the wilderness to figure shit out. The rest is His story.

Turning the other cheek

Growing up in the United States in this era, I can make jokes about Jesus, and probably won’t be crucified for them. There have been plenty of other times and places where my words would be considered heresy and I would be tortured and killed.

(As you may have noticed, fascism is making a comeback here in the USA. I may be crucified soon enough.)

There is an irony in Christianity. It is a religion built around the life and words of a compassionate and forgiving teacher, and yet the religion itself has been the cause of untold oppression, bigotry, hatred and war.

Jesus laid the foundation for the tower that would become Christianity, and then he ran out of time. The Romans came to collect, built him a cross, and without irony, nailed him to it.

If Jesus had built his own cross, it would have fallen over and the story would be different. Alas, the Romans were skilled carpenters.

Better (not) call Saul

Misogynists and slave owners find their saviour

The tower of Christianity was listed on Desert Zillow for many years before a Roman citizen named Paul came along to buy it. Paul was a devout Jew in the Pharisee tradition, known as Saul, and he got off on persecuting the Christian sects that had formed after the crucifixion.

One day, on his way to Damascus, he allegedly had his own vision. He saw Jesus, who asked, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?"

And lo, after his self-reported seizure in the desert, Paul decided to completely reinvent Jesus. The other apostles said ‘wait, that’s not what Jesus meant,’ but Paul had a vision. Was it divinely inspired? Based on his actions, it is highly unlikely.

Saul/Paul “converted” to Christianity and became its biggest proponent, but he lacked the compassion and wisdom that Jesus embodied.

Unfortunately for us, he was better at spreading his distorted version of Christianity than other early Christians. Here are some reasons why:

• His Roman citizenship allowed him to travel freely and eventually appeal to Caesar

• His Pharisaic training gave him deep knowledge of scripture and theological argumentation

• His persecution of Christians gave him credibility in regards to the reality of his conversion

• His status as an outsider to Jesus’ original disciples created some tensions but also gave him freedom to interpret the gospel for Gentile audiences

Interpretation is where the trouble starts, and continues into this present moment. Jesus was a masterful teacher, and if modern Christians were just to live their lives by his teachings then the world could be a more peaceful and compassionate place. Instead, they live in the tower of Christianity whose foundation was laid by Jesus, but from the ground up completed by the bigoted and sadistic Saul/Paul.

Blessed are the Misogynists, for they shall inherit the oval office.

According to Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians:

The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. ~1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Got Patriarchy? Jesus spent three years breaking down gender barriers. Paul spent three epistles rebuilding them.

Jesus was a Jewish prophet focused on social justice, caring for the poor, and critiquing religious hypocrisy. He never claimed to be founding a new religion or dying for humanity's sins. That’s all Paul’s improvised story.

Paul never met Jesus. His conversion was likely either psychosis or a megalomaniacal plan to gain stature. He claimed divine revelation, creating doctrines that served his own vision. He had conflicts with Jesus' actual disciples (like the Jerusalem church led by Jesus’ half-brother James) who saw him as distorting the message.

Saul was a role model for president Trump.

Blessed are the slave holders, for they shall inherit the Republican party.

He also loved slavery.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free. ~Ephesians 6:5-8

To be fair, slavery was common in those times. It’s hasn’t really gone away in ours; it just shifted form. Nonetheless, a holy man would know it is evil. A god in human form would certainly speak out against it. A false prophet like Paul would find ways to justify it.

Paul was a Biggus Dickus.

Similar to the way that our president is making America great again by destroying all the pillars of democracy set forth in our Constitution, Paul's letters (thirteen epistles that became books in the New Testament) are notable in their failure to mention the ministry, teachings, and miracles of Jesus. He never quotes the Sermon on the Mount, never mentions Jesus' parables, healing miracles, or interactions with people.

There is a meme in Christianity you have probably heard, “What would Jesus do?” If you asked Paul, he would make something up. Jesus led by example and told us to feed the poor and visit the sick. Paul changed it up, saying all we really need is faith.

It all revolves around Paul’s alleged visions of Jesus long after Jesus was dead. There is no fact checking, just a leap of faith based on the ravings of a lunatic.

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” ~Romans 13

Paul wrote in Romans 13 that all authority comes from God and people should submit to governing authorities. Jesus was literally executed by the government for challenging authority. Ironically, Paul ended up getting murdered by the Roman government as well.

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Jesus rejected worldly power. Paul fetishized it. Constantine militarized it.

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether a ship is the same object after having all of its original components replaced with others over time.

Christianity is like that, there is not much let untouched. Every age and empire has had its way with it.

It’s probable that some of the letters attributed to Paul were written by someone else. The words of Jesus have been remembered in a telephone game, then written, then translated, and then used by each new sect and government to say what they need him to say. Religion is the opiate of the masses, and the crowbar of the elites.

When in Rome…

Centuries after murdering Jesus and Paul, the Roman empire went on to embrace Christianity. At least their own version of it. Constantine legalized Christianity it in 313, and Theodosius made it the state religion in 380.

Pagan holidays were mingled with Christian beliefs; Easter and Christmas, both originally set apart for worship of pagan deities, were assimilated and rebranded to reflect Christian themes.

Wars of the Empire became holy wars; church leaders looked for civil sanctions to back up ecclesiastical judgments; rulers began to convene synods and intimidate their proceedings; the church learned to invoke state coercion against heretics.

After legalizing Christianity, Constantine remained Pontifex Maximus, keeping his title as high priest of the pagan Roman religion throughout his reign, never fully abandoning pagan practices. He waited until his deathbed to be baptized, a practice that became common - people would delay baptism so they could commit “necessary” sins as rulers, then wipe the slate clean before death.

This pattern of Christian “seeking the loophole” behavior wouldn’t change much throughout the ages.

Medieval Manifestations

Over time, empires came and went. The church grew stronger. By the medieval times the Catholic church was selling indulgences, preaching purgatory, punishing people for translating the bible into languages that common people could understand, and creating massive wealth for clergy.

In the 1500’s the Reformation set out to fix some of the most obvious problems. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, and then others follow, translating it into common languages. This led to the many sects of Christianity we know today, each believing that they have the right interpretation of Jesus. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Anabaptists, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, etc;

Forgive them father, they know not what they do.

Christianity today is not what Jesus set out to create. He was not a skilled builder.

Today it is astonishing how easily people are falling in line with the MAGA movement and Trumpism. Even saying our president is divine, and that the wars he fights are holy ones.

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth” ~Military.com

If the actual Jesus was here to see it, he would no doubt be horrified.

The teachings of Jesus were clear and simple. Love your neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, turn the other cheek. The kingdom of god is here and now, within us. Practice peace, humility, and service. Love god.

Paul created “wishful thinking” Christianity, where we could be forgiven for our sins by accepting Jesus into our hearts. We could hate and persecute others, especially women, slaves, Jews, and anyone not like us. Paul’s Christianity is a war between God and Satan for control of the world.

Over the centuries, sculpted by empires and corrupt clergy, the teachings were weaponized. Racism, bigotry, and misogyny find shelter within the fundamentalist churches. Politicians hide behind scriptural nonsense that has nothing to do with what Jesus taught. They reference the Bible and the Constitution constantly, without understanding the spirit of either one.

And so it is now, as throughout human history, that those in power use religion as an opiate for the masses, to control and divide us.

In the United States, religion and partisan politics have become increasingly intertwined. The rising level of religious disaffiliation is a backlash to the religious right: many Americans are abandoning religion because they see it as an extension of politics with which they disagree. Politics is also shaping many Americans’ religious views. There has been a stunning change in the percentage of religious believers who, prior to Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, overwhelmingly objected to immoral private behavior by politicians but now dismiss it as irrelevant to their ability to act ethically in their public role. The politicization of religion not only contributes to greater political polarization, it diminishes the ability of religious leaders to speak prophetically on important public issues. ~The Perils of Politicized Religion by David Campbell

Catch 22

I have come to believe there is a proclivity among “the faithful” to accept the interpretations of Jesus put forth by the churches. The narratives are compelling, the black and white simplicity of good versus evil gamifies our time here on Earth. Surrounded by other believers, it is easy to believe. We are social and tribal creatures.

There is also the clever catch-22 in Christianity, that to question your faith is to surrender to Satan. It keeps believers from pulling too many strings. For centuries, the barrier of understanding the Latin language kept the masses in check. But is it any different now? The state and mega churches interpret the bible, pick out the lines that keep us at odds with one another, and preach it to the masses.

What if the Christian’s are right?

"It's better to believe in God and be wrong than not believe and be wrong" ~Pascal’s Wager

Perhaps Pascal was not a skilled gambler, he only had the generic Christianity card in his hand. The deck of religions is 4,200 deep. There are as many ways to believe, love, and honor god as there are people. Even plants bow towards the sun. What monster of a god would fill the world with such confusion that we have to be born in a specific time and place to even have a chance at escaping eternal damnation?

One that loves to hear his own name, have it placed on buildings and billboards, tacky knick knacks, and in the mouths of bigots as they commit atrocities in his name? Sounds like our president. There is a connection there, for sure. Believe in one lie, and it is a short step to worshiping another.

Forgiving Jesus

As a humble carpenter, I forgive Jesus. He wasn’t the son of god, just a child of god like the rest of us. He did his best to bring a little kindness into the world.

If some of what he said in the first four Gospels of the New Testament truly came from his mouth, he truly was a great teacher.

In carpentry, there is a set of skills passed down through generations. The materials change, the structures evolve, and skilled carpenters bring pride and attention to detail to the job. There are maths and geometries that stay consistent.

What if loving god and living a spiritual life was like that? We have so many wisdom traditions to draw upon. We have the scientific method to add to them. So much of the trouble in the world comes from believing we are right, and that truth is black and white.

We need more space for uncertainty. We need more space for diversity. Trees and flowers rely on the sun for life, but they have many different ways of showing up in the world. If they all appeared and behaved the same way, our lives would lose multitudes of beauty.

People are like that, too. Most of us agree that god and love are closely related. Instead of asking, “What would Jesus do?”, perhaps we should ask the question, ‘What would Love do?”

Love would not lead us into wars, or deny brown people freedom and justice. Love would not hoard money or land. It would not dump toxins into our sacred waters. Love would not talk endlessly about itself, or post angry comments on social media.

Love would forgive Jesus for not creating a perfect religion. Love would still love Jesus. I certainly don’t want anyone to give up their love of Jesus. I only pray for us to all widen our circles of compassion.

Love would forgive Saul, too. I’m not sure I can go that far, but I am working on it.

Happy Easter.

Last night we went to see the new Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver me from Nowhere. It is a dark and brooding movie about a man struggling to make sense of his past. He returns to his hometown to write some new songs, and finds his soul is haunted by ghosts and demons. It is a Halloween movie for those of us who don’t like blood and gore. Lisa and I were up late.

The morning comes too soon. I teach a 7 a.m. class at Weaverville Yoga called “Bhakti Flow”. I recently extended the class time from 60 to 75 minutes so that I could offer some chanting at the beginning of class.

Today no one came. Our classes live stream so I stay and teach even when no one is there. At 7 a.m. I hit record and sat with my legs crossed, playing my harmonium and chanting mantras. The room echoed with the sounds, each moment of vibration lingering, gently pushing me forward into the river of time.

The movie sat there with me. Deliver Me features lots of black and white scenes flashing back to Bruce’s childhood. His father a mix of sweet and abusive, fearful and beloved. The father and son relationship is often fraught. My own memories of childhood are similarly a monotone ridgeline of mountains and forests I can’t see into or beyond. As far as I remember, my father was a good man. My traumas are hidden by the trees and vines left to grow wild in my psyche.

There was a cameo in the movie by Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast kept me company for many years of long drives and lonesome subway rides. Another man with a difficult relationship to his dad. He comforted me with his rational liberalism while my own mother was carried off by lunatics into the MAGA world. I listened to his heartfelt insights while my co-worker listened to episodes of angry Libertarian podcasts. At times I would take my headphones off to hear those disembodied voices saying things that I know aren’t true, making caricatures of people whose lives are endlessly complex, bemoaning wokeness while not mentioning the authoritarian elephant in the room.

Marc Maron recently decided to stop podcasting. His last guest was Barack Obama. Quite an achievement. Quite a sad moment. It’s like losing a friend. It was somehow soothing to see him on the screen.

There is another podcast-sized hole in my heart. I long to make another one of my own. This month is the 20th anniversary of the first episode of my Vegan Radio podcast on October 26, 2005. I recently harbored some quiet dreams of launching something new this month to coincide. I just don’t have the time. My debts keep me working, trying to keep up.

This morning I was happy to have no students. There is an indescribable feeling when the tone of my voice harmonizes with the reeds trembling in the harmonium. I lead my voice up and down, orbiting around the melody. It is a dance. God is there; all of my past, present and future loves. I was not alone. I began by chanting the beloved last lines of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, “Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi swaha!” (gate is pronounced gah-tey)

The mantra translates to “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the other shore, Nirvana, rejoice!” I love the metaphor of another shore. That’s where Bruce was trying to go. That’s shorely where we all want to go.

Bodhisattvas who practice the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore see no more obstacles in their mind, and because there are no more obstacles in their mind, they can overcome all fear, destroy all wrong perceptions and realize Perfect Nirvana. ~ New Heart Sutra translation by Thich Nhat Hanh

Mantras remove obstacles as we let them enrapture us. From the Heart Sutra I free flowed into other mantras, from Krishna to Radha, from the Beatles and Lynyrd Skynyrd, eventually circling back to Om. Freebird feels as good as the Maha Mantra to a western yogi that calls himself Pashupa. All is one.

Where is the other shore? Throughout the biopic, Springsteen exorcises his demons onto a four track tape machine. The outside world wants him to create an album with hit songs. His heart wants something else. Something needs to get out. The result is the lo-fi album Nebraska.

I am still searching for my Nebraska. My Nirvana. The wise realize that enlightenment manifests in moments, it’s not a final destination (at least not for most of us). It is always right here.

Today I found this little space in my day to write. I know it’s been a while. I apologize to my paid subscribers. Finding the time is a struggle.

There is a fallen angel of guilt watching me now as I write, accompanied by a chorus of obligations. It has been too long and I can’t hold back any more. It feels cathartic, these words need to get out.

There are more words burrowed beneath these words, and still more buried beneath those. My fingers are starting to stiffen with age and hammers, I don’t know how much longer I will be able to hold down guitar strings or press the flesh of my fingertips into the keyboard.

My heart aches to uncover those buried words, the sacred chords, the art that will move you. Or at least to create piles of dirt and empty holes to show you that I tried.

This is not a whoa as me, I do know that am blessed. Lisa and Bodhi look at me with so much love in their eyes. I am somebody to someone. I have food and shelter and carry my singing voice wherever I go. I live each day in gratitude, realizing that much of the world is burning.

The autumn leaves tumble outside our window, now visible in the soft light of this cloudy day. This year’s peak foliage passed like a dream, as it always does. Our sweet little Bodhi is out there running around with her friend Pocket. My ceramic coffee mug is almost empty, and there are people waiting for me to build them things.

So I will say farewell for now, and try to come back soon. Until then remind somebody that you love them, be kind to a stranger, be brave enough to sing, and don’t forget to breathe.

A couple sessions ago we learned a song called Obligation (by Laurence Cole) that sticks with me. Sometimes I sing it while I am teaching yoga, sometimes in the car with Lisa, sometimes when I am in awe of nature. The lyrics are simple:

Everything lives in obligation to everything that lives.

While the altos and baritones sing that, the sopranos, tenors, and bass harmonies sing:

Every, everything in all creation, everything, everything is alive!

Here’s a video I recorded on my GoPro of us performing the song as a flash mob at an Asheville Christmas boutique:

Speaking of holidays, today is the Fourth of July. Sitting on a barstool at my kitchen counter, typing these words into my Macbook, drinking my morning coffee with oat creamer, the song is echoing in my head.

Lots of my friends cheekily call this American holiday “Interdependence Day.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, while simultaneously cringey enough to ensure we get labeled as libtards. As we should.

Without libtards, the MAGA cult would have no enemy to define themselves by. There is interdependence even in adversarial relationships. Without the British empire there would be no American Revolution, and without subjugation no need for a Declaration of Independence.

Still we cling to the idea of independence. It’s a powerful way to manipulate ego. Ego wants to believe it can pull itself up by its own bootstraps. The idea is crazy. Without relationship, there is no up, nothing to pull towards, no boots to strap.

For most of my life my ego has wanted to stand out on its own. Like many of us, I felt so rejected by my peers as a child that I developed coping mechanisms to protect my heart.

I had a paper route and walked the neighborhood with a cloth bag delivering newspapers. It was boring and often miserable when the snow and rain came. There were no podcasts or smart phones back then, so I was left with my imagination.

I created stories in my mind of myself as a superhero or a rock star. In the superhero myths, I lived on Jupiter and was a saviour to my people. That was before I knew Jupiter was a gas giant, of course. The rock star fantasies were more Earth-based. I was a handsome guitar wizard who wrote incredible songs and was adored by my peers.

Oddly, I now get off at the Jupiter exit on Route 26 to get to my house, where I play guitar and write songs. Interdepending with my past.

The ego monster that I grew began to believe the stories I created. Not literally, the way my mom believes that Jesus actually rose from the dead. In a more subtle way, like I was the star of the show and the people around me were supporting actors.

One regret in my life is that I was so independent that I didn’t appreciate teamwork. I wasn’t able to live my rock-n-roll dreams because I never learned to play in a band. I would sit at home and play guitar solos, imagining myself on stage. Then I would go out and get drunk, hoping it would give me the courage to meet my soulmate. The ego monster would emerge and destroy any chance of true connection. Loneliness becomes a feedback loop.

The wisdom that comes with growing old is humbling. Or perhaps humility is itself a type of wisdom. Years of lost friendships have taught me that I am no better or worse than anyone else. I have fallen short of my goals again and again because I try to go it alone. Not recognizing the talents and support in the people around me.

Even now, as I write, there is a voice in my head wanting to be loved by you, the reader. But I no longer put myself above you. I am becoming aware that we are more similar than seperate. It is the sorrow and regret that I share that connects us, more than any unique brilliance in me.

The American ideal of independence serves to isolate us. The libtards and the MAGAs need to come realize our interdependence. I don’t know how and I don’t know when. There is a fascist takeover happening, the ICE agents in masks are just the modern gestapo. The othering of immigrants, the USAID cuts that will cost more lives than the holocaust, the gutting of Medicaid health care and food programs. We are becoming an ugly and repulsive nation.

United we stand, divided we fall. Let’s join hands.

My partner Lisa and I moved to Asheville in August, six weeks before Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc and chaos all around us. The bottom of our street washed away, along with a bridge and a house that were near the idyllic little creek we had been swimming in days before.

Zooming out, entire towns were flooded, trees and power lines were down everywhere, and Asheville’s beautiful River Arts District was completely destroyed. We waited a week for our power to come back on, and when it did it felt like a miracle. There were so many people all around us suffering without power and water for weeks and months.

I talked to my mother regularly during those early weeks of recovery, and while Lisa and I felt the speed with which FEMA and other rescue services were being deployed was impressive, my mom was under the impression that Biden’s administration was leaving us all to die.

“I have heard there are no helicopters,” she told me, as helicopters flew over my head.

I love my mom, and I know there is no clever use of logic that will change her beliefs. Beliefs are entwined with emotion. She is a Christian from Kansas, and the seeds were planted long before I came around. So I try to seek common ground and steer the conversations away from the present president.

In Hindu mythology, like Christianity, there is an ongoing battle between good and evil. Hinduism is a bit more nuanced and playful than the western religions. Where Christians have the good versus evil dichotomy of angels and demons, Hinduism has devas and asuras.

In general, devas are beings who do good in the world, and asuras are beings who do harm. They each have supernatural powers, and are constantly battling for control of the universe. Their existence embodies the dualistic nature of creation, where opposing forces are necessary parts of the cosmic whole.

However, devas are not all good, and asuras are not all bad. They are shades of grey. Asuras are generally power-seeking, materialistic, and sometimes malevolent. The devas are generally benevolent, righteous, and followers of dharma (cosmic order).

In Hindu mythology, both Devas and Asuras are considered descendants of the great sage Kashyapa, born to different wives. The Devas are the children of Aditi, known as the mother of the gods, and they represent the forces of good, light, and virtue. In contrast, the Asuras are the offspring of Diti, who represents darkness and ignorance, often associated with negative traits. ~Mythlok

As you might have figured out, the devas and asuras are a lot like us. In fact, they can even be seen as aspects of our own psyches. Within our minds and hearts is an ongoing battle to choose a spiritual path over a materialistic one, compassion over anger, love over bitterness.

It’s my opinion that the western Bible has things backwards. God did not create us in “his” image, we create the myths of god in our own image. If there is a god, or gods, then their ultimate nature is unknowable to our human mind. Perhaps the divine is a little easier to know in our hearts. Whatever glimpses of divinity we are granted, the only way to express them is through metaphor, myth, and story making.

Myths aren’t concerned with historical accuracy or past events. Instead, they delve into hidden realities—the unseen truths that shape human experience across time. They speak to what happens within us, right now and always. ~Dr. Michael Simmons

In the MAGA-verse that my mother inhabits, this must seem like a golden age. The chosen one has inherited the throne and been given a mandate to clear the way for the coming of Christ. God is returning soon. Her beliefs are being reinforced and molded by the algorithms in the online spaces she is connected to. The myths she holds close are not allegorical to her. She believes them to be factual. There is a bridge between us that has been washed away by a flood of calculated misinformation. Evangelical Christianity, in its dogmatic clinging to the veracity of every word in the Bible, has made it easier for all kinds of false narratives to be believed. FOX News and the right wing media propaganda machine amplifies the confusion.

And so it is that I turn to a myth from my tradition, one that I hold dear.

Kali versus the blood demon

As the devas and asuras battle throughout time, there are leaders who rise and fall. By performing acts of reverence and penance to gods like Brahma (creator), Vishnu (sustainer), and Shiva (destroyer), the devas and asuras can be granted boons. Boons are special powers, and for asuras they often have to do with invincibility.

One such asura that gained a boon is called Raktabija. Rakta means blood, and bija means seed. Raktabija’s boon was that every time his blood would spill, more Raktabijas would be created (multiplying like Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy). In some tellings of the story, he gets this boon from Shiva, and in other tellings, from Brahma.

Raktabija created havoc on the Earth, hunting and killing devas, humans, and animals to feed his insatiable hunger.

The goddess Durga comes to their defence. Durga was created from the combined efforts of male deities who could not defeat an asura demon called Mahishasura, whose boon was that he could not be killed by god or man. In his arrogance, he did not believe that a woman could kill him.

After battling Mahishasura for centuries, the male gods understood what they were up against. Each of the male gods gave Durga their own special power, and she became an amalgamation of their awesomeness.

Durga emerged as a beautiful woman with ten arms, each holding a divine weapon, riding a lion. Every time Durga would come close to defeating Mahishasura, he would change form and escape. Finally, as he transformed from a buffalo to a human, Durga pinned him down with her trident and cut his head off with her discus. Fierce!

But not fierce enough to defeat Raktabija. The blood demon’s replications confounded Durga as she continually killed them and they multiplied. Finally she turned her fury inward, concentrating her brow and clenching her entire body. Kali emerged from Durga’s third eye, her skin black, her body emaciated, her tongue lolling. She wears a garland of 108 skulls and a belt with human arms hanging from it like a Hawaiian grass skirt. The roar of her birth alone destroys hundreds of asuras, as she comes out swinging with her ten arms each holding a weapon.

Kali is wise to the boon of Raktabija, and her tongue grows to cover the entire battlefield. She absorbs the blood of every slain asura into her being, all the while growing more powerful. Finally she is alone with the OG Raktabija. She slashes his throat open with the trident in one arm as she raises him above her head with another, and drains his body of blood, catching every drop in her mouth. She throws his hollow corpse on the ground.

O king, the mighty Asura Raktabija, drained of all blood, lay lifeless on the ground. Then, the gods attained immeasurable joy. ~ from the Devi Mahatmya

Kali then begins a wild victory dance, enraptured in her own power. The blood of Raktabija is potent, and she needs to process it through her system. Her entranced dance shakes the earth and creats vibrations throughout the heavens, threatening all life. The gods, once again, are worried. The go to Mount Kailash to find Shiva, who is deep in meditation.

Waking him from his concentration, they tell him about Kali’s wild dance. Shiva is a dancer himself, so he is not too concerned. He makes his way to the battlefield and calls out to Kali, but she has her cosmic earbuds in, playing psy-trance, and can not hear him. Her eyes are closed and she can not see him, either.

Shiva lays himself down at her feet, and she begins dancing on top of him, pulverizing his body into the earth. He smiles. Kali at last feels the familiar landscape of Shiva’s torso beneath her naked feet, and slows her dance. She realizes she is standing on her beloved, and her tongue falls out in shock and embarrassment. A relieved sigh from the gods cools the Earth, the birds begin to sing, and the animals come out of hiding. Balance is restored.

Of myth and allegory, MAGA and madness

It is wise to remember that none of us are perfect. In the Hindu myths, even the gods make questionable decisions. It is part of the lila, the divine play of creation. If everything was perfect, life would be boring and we would never evolve.

In contemplating the modern world, I see lots of asuras. The cruelty and malevolence of our president and his replicants creates great anxiety. At times, it is easy to feel the inevitability of their rise to power. The return of Nazi salutes is terrifying and unbelievable. It almost seems like the plot of a comic book.

Like Raktabija, the new regime uses self-replication to confound us. Every day there are so many attacks on decency and compassion that it seems impossible to fathom. The ecosystems of modern media helps spread the bad ideas and haunting realities. There are too many fires to put out, and too few of us are fire fighters.

Where is the Raktabija we need to defeat?

Looking for the source of our problems, it is easy to point to our lead narcissist, the master of chaos and lies. But even if the bullets at his rally had taken him out, there is an underlying core of rot that has eaten away at our democracy that he did not create. He just figured out how to use it to his advantage.

The Democrat versus Republican narrative has grown tired. We have to stop seeing the world as black and white. There are asuras on both sides, lusting after money and power, actively undermining the moral arc of the universe in it’s bend towards justice. War has been a constant with either party in power. The rich have grown richer, while the corporations that enrich them are often above the law.

No political party, company, or individual person is entirely good or evil. We are shades of grey.

In the philosophy of yoga the Sanskrit word samskara refers to mental impressions, recollections, or psychological imprints that are formed by our past actions and experiences. These impressions are stored in the subconscious mind and influence our current behavior, thoughts, and perceptions. Cultures, societies, and governments similarly become entrenched in their behaviors. Thoughts and systems get reinforced by repetition, and once established are hard to overcome.

The true battle is the inner one. We have devas and asuras in our psyches. If we give in to the hatred, or the greed, or in thinking too highly of ourselves, then we contribute to the problems of the world. Conversely, choosing kindness, compassion, and service in our daily lives leads to a better world. Our inner and outer worlds mirror one another.

Compassion takes courage. It does not mean being a pushover. As our country slides towards authoritarianism, we need to stand up and fight. Not with violence, not with hearts full of hatred and malice, but as spiritual warriors. We have to overcome the samskaras that keep us frozen in fear, complaining about the latest news stories, feeling hopeless. We also have to find empathy for the people who have been swayed by MAGA propaganda, with their flags and bumper stickers that make us feel ill. People who give away their power to abusers are unknowing victims, and becoming indoctrinated into cults is human.

The current dismantling of the US government is a calculated attack, which benefits the asura king and his billionaire sidekick. They want to take away our democracy by breaking it into pieces and then claiming it doesn’t work, to replace it with an authoritarian regime. No amount of money or power is enough for them, and no suffering created in their wake will slow them down.

However, chaos is hard to control. Parts of our government needed to be re-imagined. There is an opportunity within this moment to reform the system. Creating the new does not begin without dismantling the old. The terrorist DOGE cabal has awoken our inner Kali. We were in a state of comfortable inertia before this, and now we are forced to rise up.

United we stand, divided we fall

It is in the origin story of Durga that we get an idea for how to battle the multiplying MAGAts. Remember how the male gods all got together to create the feminine warrior? It might seem a bit patriarchal on its surface, but it is also the story of a culture moving towards balance.

In the early Vedic period (roughly 1500-1000 BCE), worship centered around elemental deities like Indra (thunder/rain), Agni (fire), Varuna (cosmic order), Surya (sun), and others. As Hinduism evolved, the Shaiva (Shiva-focused) and Vaishnava (Vishnu-focused) traditions developed somewhat independently. Shakta traditions (focusing on the Divine Mother) also have ancient roots, but gained particular prominence around the 6th century CE

The story of Durga being formed from the gods was told in the Devi Mahatmya, which was written around that time. In one sense, it was a way of reconciling the old with the new. Similar to the way that Christianity wove stories from the Old Testament into the New Testament, Hinduism honors the past gods by integrating them into the modern pantheon. The story has greater teachings.

Remember, myths are not facts. They are blueprints and archetypes. To defeat a megalomaniac and the cult formed around him, we truly do need to create great networks and communities. We need to create something greater than our individual selves.

Throughout history, we have seen the democratic party change. There have been glimmers of hope that it will truly represent the people it serves, but money always gets in the way. The idea that we just need to wait until the next election for action is short-sighted. We need to build coalitions outside of the two-party system that will be unstoppable. They should be diverse and rooted in compassion and empathy.

Our neighbors in Mexico and Canada are being attacked, Europe is being isolated, and people living under authoritarian regimes are being forgotten. We have this unique moment in history where we are all connected through the Internet. It is a tool that can be used to create connections, within and across borders. It could easily be taken from us, but in this moment we have it.

The Internet can be an organizing tool, but we also need to get out into the real world and take non-violent actions. Helping one-another in small ways, checking in on neighbors, sharing resources. Gathering in protest, boycotting corporations, creating group art. Reaching out to those who are hurting, even if they are wearing the red hat and shouting nonsense. We can’t win without them.

This is not a time for sitting back and seeing what happens next. It is a time for decisive action. It is time to furrow our brows, clench our fists, and to release our inner Kali out into the world. She is benevolent. She may drink the blood of her enemies, but she doesn’t devour feculence. And neither should you.

What I learned about the heart in school

In elementary school I was taught to put my right hand on my heart as I pledged my allegiance. My heart is on the left, I was told. I have been thinking about this lately, the heart being on the left. The right hand connecting to the heart. The balance of left and right.

I learned from other kids in elementary school how to use racial slurs, how to make fun of people with disabilities, how to identify the other and use their suffering to try to feel better about myself. How to fit in by casting out. I have had fear and shame turned against me, too. Kids are great at that shit.

Call me a dreamer, but I like to believe we can all outgrow othering, in spite of what we see on social media.

I was in fourth grade when the United States recognized Black History Month in 1976. I remember that year mostly for the Bicentennial, because I received commemorative stamps, books and two dollar bills as gifts from my living ancestors. Civil rights were not front and center in my childhood. But we were taught about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his role in the civil rights movement.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

King’s “arc of the moral universe” quote is second in belovedness only to his “I have a dream” speech. But is it true? Or does it just feel good to believe?

The moral arc of the universe bending towards justice depends on us — to desire, and to strive for, that trajectory. To me, the past election cycle seems to point to an unbending of the arc, if we are to include compassion and empathy as relevant components of morality. Although the margin was narrow, we the people elected an authoritarian who is actively trying to unbend the arc.

I think a good barometer for which way the moral arc is bending is in how humans treat one another. Is it with love and empathy, or with distrust, hatred, and indifference?

We have certainly all heard the “first they came for” quote by now, and perhaps felt a chill when contemplating it.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

Have they begun? The promised ICE raids are separating families. The purge of political opponents is chilling. The administration blaming the recent airplane crash with a military helicopter in Washington DC on DEI hiring. They are turning us against positive words in our own language? Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. Social Justice.

When do we speak up? Or, more importantly, how?

I have come to believe that the right hand, without the heart, is a dangerous idea.

An anatomy of the human heart

Although the heart is behind the sternum in the center of the body, it tilts to the left a little bit.

Our heart's left ventricle is larger and more muscular than the right one. It pumps blood to our entire body, whereas the right ventricle pumps only to our lungs. The left is bigger and heavier, causing it to tilt leftward.

The heart also has an anatomical feature called the "cardiac apex," which is it’s bottom tip, formed mainly by the left ventricle. This apex naturally points down and to the left, contributing to the heart's leftward orientation.

Here’s something cool. Our left lung is a little smaller than the right, making room for our heart.

Perhaps god created the human body as a template for our politics. If the right and left don’t work together, the system is thrown out of balance and perishes. We can’t survive in half a body.

So hear me out. For the moral arc to bend towards justice, the heart of our culture needs to tip slightly to the left.

A political history of sides

After millennia of side-lessness, it was the French Revolution in 1789 that brought us sides.

In the French National Assembly, supporters of the king sat on the right side of the chamber, while supporters of the revolution sat on the left. On the right were those who supported the traditional monarchy, aristocracy, and church (conservatives). On the Left were those who wanted radical change, including democracy and secular governance (liberals).

On the Right: Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Church.

How is it that the right today still wants what the right wanted as they were being hacked to pieces in the French Revolution?

“Make America Great Again” is a mantra that conservative-identifying people can project their own grievances onto, a placeholder for anger. For monarch Trump and his aristocrats, “great again” is a return to the era of robber barons. If we get rid of anyone who demonstrates the weakness of compassion, enriching the rich will be far easier.

The church is in cahoots, conivingly convincing its indoctrinated masses that god wants this idolatry and cruelty. The leaders at the top get the benefits of the aristocracy, the rest of us get to believe in a future heaven. The right has hijacked the Christian Bible and weaponized it. To believers it is an authority that can’t be questioned, the actual words of god. The clergy decide how those words are interpreted, and which ones to emphasize to keep their followers agitated.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.” ~Joseph Campbell

Pretending to be on the side of Jesus, conservative politicians can veil their greed and selfish intentions. Outright lies quickly turn into conspiracy theories. It is a small step from believing everything in a bible to be true, to believing there are lizards disguised as humans drinking the blood of children.

The true coup happens in the minds of the people, not in the buildings where government officials perform ceremonies.

The right has the bigger lung, the louder voice. It has enthusiasm, but lacks heart. Lying and name calling and greed are celebrated. There is a narcissistic child at its center, pulling the levers to see what they do. Or at least, how they will break.

All of that said, a right that is balanced by a left is positive. There are parts of culture and society that we want to conserve. Whatever is great about America’s past is worth saving and celebrating, especially when it is bending our moral arc towards justice.

On the Left: Radical Change, Democracy and Secular Governance.

The podcasts I listen to are left leaning, like our hearts. The voices of people I respect have been telling me that the Democrats (liberals) are rudderless, and have lost their bearing.

Because we have the bigger heart and smaller voice on the left, we have an uphill battle to win people over. Even in an increasingly complex world, trying to convey nuance is a handicap. Yet nuance is a necessary component of stability. Perhaps we just need to convey nuance in a simple way.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc of the moral universe bending towards justice is a powerful idea because it gives us hope, perspective, and direction. It may or may not be true historically, but it gives us a rudder. It gives us a compass. It contains multitudes.

The left is losing the battle of words and memes. The words diversity, equity, and inclusion are being denigrated by the right. Words of compassion. The right has compressed these meaningful words into the letters DEI and tarnished them with false narratives. Meanwhile real human lives are being harmed.

Inclusion is what the heart wants. We want to be part of a group. A church, a political ideology, a movement, a sports team. Our anxious, fearful selves seek the exclusion of others. These two parts are evolutionary traits, which can be integrated or exploited.

While the right ventricle is pumping the lungs up with anger, the left ventricle is desperately trying to keep the rest of the body alive.

Corruption runs through the whole political system. Greed is like water, flowing downhill into any crevice it can find. It takes a special person to seek political office and simultaneously be resistant to avarice. Money finds its way into everything, and subverts the will of the people.

Our system forces politicians to rely on money from big donors. The aristocrats. In this conflict of interest, compromises are made. Justice is sacrificed.

When politicians won’t admit who they serve, their word becomes meaningless. I feel that part of the problem with the left is that they are trying to serve two masters, the people and greed. The right only has greed. That means they can feel authentic, even when they are lying. They serve the corporations while redirecting the anger of the people towards the left. The lefty politicians have to thread the needle of serving the people without angering the corporations. They are left with nuance. How to explain the complexity of serving two masters?

The left needs honesty, because the heart is a symbol of truth. Tell us how we can change the corrupt system while being funded by it? Let’s get to the heart of the matter.

The balancing of opposites

As a practitioner, I look to the teachings of yoga for guidance.

Yoga is a practice of balance. In the pop way that many people think of yoga in the west there is, of course, balance in the postures. Standing on one leg while doing something aesthetically beautiful or acrobatically complex with the other, and then posting it on social media. The yoga that we see with our eyes.

Beneath that superficial layer, lies thousands of years of spiritual and philosophical technology and debate. Yoga is alive with conflicting views on how to practice, which form of god to devote ourselves to, whether to be a householder or a renunciate, what enlightenment is. There is a left-handed yoga, and a right handed yoga. The poses we glorify (or deride) in the west are a recent addition.

As humans, there is a conservative side within us that clings to what is, and a liberal side that moves us toward what might be. The seed of one dwells within the heart of the other, as the Taoist yin yang symbol reminds us. A black dot in a swirl of white opposite a white dot in a swirl of black. In a balanced system, the dance of the opposites creates harmony and health.

What would Patanjali do?

In the west most yoga teachers earned certification in trainings that emphasize the teachings of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It is a book of 196 aphorisms that had fallen into obscurity in India for several centuries until colonialist scholars from Great Britain stumbled upon it and translated it into English. A charismatic Indian yogi named Swami Vivekanada created an English commentary on the text and introduced it to the United States at the turn of the 20th century.

The definition of yoga in the Yoga Sutras is, “yoga is the cessation of the whirlings of the mind.” That definition is stated at the beginning of the text, and everything that follows is instructions on how to achieve such a feat. Most of us will find it impossible to quiet the mind, even with an instruction manual. With practice, the thoughts do slow down and we discover much about ourselves.

“To preserve the innate serenity of the mind, a yogin should be happy for those who are happy, be compassionate toward those who are unhappy, be delighted for those who are virtuous, and be indifferent toward the wicked.” ~ Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1:33

This is the sutra that may be most relevant to this political moment. At first glance it all makes sense, until that last little bit. Indifferent towards the wicked? To understand that, go back to the beginning of the sutra. The goal of Patanjali’s ascetic yoga is to quiet the mind. Watching FOX news or even listening to NPR will not bring serenity. President Trump’s very existence depends on us paying attention, negatively or positively. He is ego writ large, and without the attention I think he would shrivel and fade away. That obviously is not going to happen now.

In other sutras Patanjali gives us instructions on how to treat others, with non-violence being the very first step on the path to yoga. His teachings, when followed, make us kinder and more self-aware people, which makes for a better society. Cultivating indifference to the wicked is useful, in that we make our best choices when our mind is calm. However, I would argue that the Yoga Sutras is not the yogic text to turn to for combatting injustice in government and politics.

Yoga is Skill in Action

The yogic text that gives us the best tools for fighting a corrupt system is the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God). It is the text that guided Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle to defeat British Colonialism.

The Gita imparts its wisdom in the form of a story that takes place on a battlefield. In the story, a warrior prince called Arjuna finds himself in a dilemma, because the army he commands and the army he is about to go to war with are each filled with family and friends. Before the fighting begins, he asks his charioteer, Krishna, to take him to the center of the battlefield. Once there, he admits to Krishna that he is so despaired by the idea of killing people he knows and respects that he can’t fight.

It turns out that Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu god of sustainment. Vishnu is the aspect of the divine that creates balance in the world, in between Brahma the creator and Shiva the destroyer. The stable center between the two extremes.

Four paths of yoga

Throughout the text, Krishna describes four types of yoga.

1. Raja Yoga - the path of meditation, which is similar to Patanjali’s yoga.

2. Jnana Yoga - the path of knowledge, which includes self-inquiry and philosophical discrimination.

3. Bhakti Yoga - the path of loving devotion, which prescribes complete surrender and love for the divine. It is said to be the quickest path to god, but it is not for everyone.

4. Karma Yoga - the path of selfless action, which is the yoga of warriors and activists and people who want to work to make the world more just.

Because Arjuna has become a hot mess in the beginning of the Gita, Krishna tells him that his dharma, or duty in life, is to be a warrior. To stand up and fight. Arjuna was not born to be a meditator or kirtan wallah, he was born to lead a righteous battle and bring balance to his society. His path is karma yoga.

Many commentators, including Gandhi, say the battlefield in the Gita is a metaphor for the fight that goes on in our minds. Remember, it is dangerous to interpret stories in sacred texts as factual. The Gita is not a text that glorifies war as an answer to life’s problems. The story is a conscious lie told to impart a greater truth.

In the allegorical interpretation of the Gita, Arjuna represents the individual facing difficult choices. Krishna represents higher wisdom/divine guidance/inner conscience. The Kauravas (opposing forces) represent negative tendencies like greed, attachment, ego, and the Pandavas (Arjuna's side) represent positive qualities like dharma, truth, courage. Just as Arjuna hesitates to fight his own family members, we struggle to let go of familiar patterns and attachments.

In the story, the Kauravas are definitely to the right, and the Pandavas to the left. Greed and status quo versus compassion and equity. In the prequel to the Gita (earlier chapters of the epic Mahabarata), Arjuna is given a choice between having Krishna’s entire army join him, or having Krishna as his guide. Arjuna chooses Krishna, heart over power. It turns out to be a wise choice.

The most relevant teaching to our situation now is that of yoga as “skill in action.” Krishna explains to Arjuna that karma yoga involves maintaining equanimity and skillful action while fulfilling one's duties.

Endowed with the wisdom of evenness-of-mind, one casts off in this life both good deeds and evil deeds; therefore, devote yourself to yoga. Skill in action is yoga. ~ Bhagavad Gita chapter 2 verse 50.

Equanimity is the quality we are tasked to cultivate in the Yoga Sutras, in part by being indifferent to the wicked. In the Gita we gain the equanimous mind by performing skillful action and then, importantly, not being attached to the outcome of our actions.

The world is vast and complex, and if there is a divine plan none of us know what it is. The Gita teaches us to use the various paths of yoga to know our true selves, and to determine what our duty in this life is. Then we make skillful choices and take skillful action. We dedicate ourselves and our actions to the greater good.

Remember the heart. Cherish that left-leaning vessel that delivers blood to our bodies and helps bring breath into our lungs. It may lean left, but we need the right. We need to conserve parts of what is while we imagine what can be. The weight of the heart will bend the arc of the moral universe in the direction of justice.

I feel that these times we are in will require a great deal from us to stand up to authorianism, inequality and greed. Posting on social media is not going to be enough. But what we do as individuals will vary. I can not prescribe what will work for you. Demonstrations, phone calls, running for office, donating to organizations, podcasting, placing your body in danger to prevent atrocity. Each of us have our own warrior journey.

What I can tell you is that to prevent burnout or despair, remember that your skillful action is an offering. Like raising a child, you do your best and then let them go out into the world. If you are true to yourself and to the greater good, that is the best you can do. Even if the result seems like a disaster, it may be the cloud that creates the silver lining the world needs.

Maybe the Trump presidency is like that. Right now, the clouds are dark. It will get darker before the dawn. Put on your headlamps and rain gear and get to work.

Most events get forgotten over the years. Some of those events are holidays. In fact, the majority of our favorite Christian holidays were once Pagan holidays. Christmas was once a Roman Pagan holiday celebrating of the sun god Sol Invictus. You know, a god who seemingly dies and then returns, like the sun. Arguably, Jesus did it with more pizazz.

As times change and humanity evolves, so do religions and cultures. Some holidays get co-opted and rebranded from one religion to the next. Many more are gradually forgotten. The Feast of the Ass is amongst those.

The Savage Takeover

As listeners to my Don’t Forget Yoga Podcast know, my memory isn’t the best. But I do remember this. I spent the aughts in Western Massachusetts, where there was (and is) a free local paper called The Valley Advocate that features local stories and events. When I first moved to the area, the paper featured a relationship advice column which I mildly enjoyed. I can’t find a mention of it on the Internet now (and of course can’t remember the name!), but I believe it was written by a woman. (If you know who the author was, or what the column was called, please leave a comment below!)

At the time I lived in Northampton, the home of Smith College and the self-proclaimed lesbian capital of the world. At some point a syndicated sex advice column called Savage Love replaced the other advice column. Savage Love’s author, Dan Savage, was (and still is) a gay guy. His column was a lot spicier, and in my opinion a lot more relevant and entertaining. It seemed to me at the time that Dan Savage’s column would be OK with lesbians. Not so much. The letters to the editor were full of vitriol. The readers didn’t want to hear about butt sex from a man. Butt… I did!

Over time the controversy died down and Savage Love became beloved by most. I imagine it is like that with the holidays. The Sol Invictus worshippers were probably pissed when Rome went Christian and Jesus replaced Sol, but nowadays no one is complaining much. There are bigger fish to fry, especially on Fridays.

The Rebirth of the Feast of the Ass

Over the years Dan Savage took his column online, and then caught the wave and created a podcast called The Savage Lovecast. As an early podcaster myself, I have been a listener since the beginning.

At the top of each show there is a rant that lasts about five minutes, which is often my favorite part of the show. Dan is outspokenly gay, and as an LGBTQ+ activist he keeps us updated on stuff going on in that realm. He spends just as much time advocating for cisgender women and their right to choose, and stepping into the political fray with strong liberal opinions. His advice to callers covers all genders and sexual preferences. I agree with his takes on most issues, sexual and otherwise.

What distinguishes Dan Savage from other advice podcasts are his contributions to the zeitgeist. Even people who don’t know who he is are probably aware of some of his contributions. Here is a short list:

• Following the suicide of 15-year-old Billy Lucas, who was bullied for his perceived sexual orientation, Dan founded the It Gets Better Project. The project encourages adults, both LGBT and otherwise, to submit videos assuring gay teenagers that life can improve after bullying in early life.

• Santorum is a neologism that Dan created based on a reader poll. There is a bigoted politician named Rick Santorum who built his platform on belittling gays and gay marriage, comparing gay sex to bestiality, etc; The poll asked readers to create a definition of the word santorum. The winning entry was “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” Dan created a website (no longer live) that went to the top of the search engines for the word, and it became known as Rick Santorum’s “Google problem.”

• GGG - good, giving and game. This is how Dan recommends we behave in the bedroom, in a consensual way. Think "good in bed," "giving of equal time and equal pleasure," and "game for anything—within reason."

• The Campsite Rule. In relationships with a large age disparity, at the end of the relationship, the elder partner should leave the younger in "better shape than they found them".

• There are many more of Dan Savage’s contributions to language that you can find on this Wiki, including: CPOS (cheating piece of shit), DTMFA (dump the motherfucker already), whatever lifts your luggage, monogamish, tolyamorous, saddlebacking, and pegging.

Dan’s contributions to language tend to be either activism against a bigoted politician or church leader, or a way to simplify his responses to the questions he receives from listeners. After listening for a while, I often know what he is about to say. But just as often, I am wrong.

It was in January of 2024 that I first heard Dan talk about the Feast of the Ass, a forgotten Christian holiday from the 1500’s. The original holiday celebrated Joseph, Mary, and Jesus escaping to Egypt to save baby Jesus from King Herod, who ordered the killing of all first-born males in the vicinity of Bethlehem.

The Feast of the Ass checks a lot of boxes for Dan. The name, of course, is perfect innuendo. Dan was raised Catholic, and even though all of Christendom was “Catholic” back in the day, it sounds especially Catholic now. The tongue in cheek nature of the name is certain to cause fanatical Christians to become upset if it crosses into the mainstream. It certainly evokes images of gay sex, which Dan celebrates. But, feasting on ass is not just for gays.

As I do every Tuesday, on Christmas Eve of 2024 I was listening to Dan’s rant at the top of the latest episode of the Savage Lovecast, Prepare to celebrate the Feast of the Ass. This year he went all in, and decided to use his cultural meme magic to bring the holiday back.

In the monologue Dan asks us, “ What do all holidays need?” and went on to explain that they need the four M’s; mascots, munchies, music, and merch.

1. The mascot is easy, a donkey. Dan chose to name the donkey Buddy, and Buddy has a girlfriend named Rose.

2. For munchies, since sticky buns are already taken by Good Friday, Dan chose the bundt cake, for obvious reasons. But NOT a fudge one, that’s a step too far. The Feast of the Ass bundt cake is vanilla with glaze. Mmmm.

3. For merch, the savage.love shop offers a Feast of the Ass hat (ass hat 🤣) and tee shirts.

4. And for music, a contest!

My entry into the Feast of the Ass

As friends and listeners to my Warrior One Podcast know, I found my inner songwriter during the pandemic. Before then I could count the songs I’ve written on one hand. Since then I had to convert to Hinduism so I would have enough and fingers and hands to count with. Many of the songs I write are about love, mysticism, and the search for meaning. Butt I also have a trickster side of my personality, and that side of me loves to write funny songs, and songs with innuendo.

When Dan announced the contest, I knew I had to insert myself into the Feast of the Ass. We had planned some time off to celebrate the traditional holidays, and so I had time to write. I brought my ukulele with me on vacation and started probing my brain for innuendo, scribbling thoughts down in my journal. I had until January 10th to submit the song.

We all have a playlist of holiday music forced upon us, and so I began to think about the common threads between songs. They are typically overly exuberant and naively optimistic, but also catchy. I wanted the song to be suitable for kids, but to have deeper layers of meaning for adults. I also wanted it to have a holiday sensibility, with some references to the original Christian holiday.

What came to me first was the line, “the Feast of the Ass is a holy day, we fill it with good friends and cheer.” And then, “So let’s raise our glasses and toast all the asses we’ve known throughout all of the years.”

For further research, I went to the Wikipedia entry for the Feast of the Ass, which is hilarious in and of itself. Here is a translation of one of the original FOTA hymns.

From the Eastern lands, the Ass comes, beautiful and brave, fit to bear burdens. Up! Sir Ass, and sing. Open your pretty mouth. Hay will be yours in plenty, and oats in abundance.

Was it innuendo back then? I don’t know, but probably. The mention of “pretty mouth” and “drape that ass” in my song both come from the Wiki.

I didn’t actually see Dan’s naming of the mascots as Buddy and Rose until I visited his FOTA page on January 8th. Once I discovered the names, I wrote the verses that my song was eventually named after rather quickly:

There's nobody like Buddy, like Buddy the ass,
But Buddy's sweet-ass girlfriend Rose
At the feast they eat bundt cakes with their pretty mouths,
And lick the glaze off of each other's nose

Come, come, Buddy & Rose,
Reveal to us the pleasures we seek!
And if we're offended when our lives get upended
Teach us to turn the other cheek

I had been trying to fit “turn the other cheek” into the song from the start, so that worked out! Getting the bundt cake in there was also key. For the FOTA, you have to pack it all in!

In the last line, “brings pleasure to all of our ears,” you can carry the R over from the end of our to the beginning of ears, and get a final cheeky chuckle.

On January 10th, the last day of the contest, I recorded my song in Garage Band and sent it off for consideration.

“Nobody like Buddy” makes it into the top 10!

The morning of January 14th, Feast of the Ass day 2025, I waited eagerly for the podcast to drop. Around 8 A.M. it finally showed up in my app. My heart sank as I listened. The rant at the beginning of the show did not mention me or my song. There were clips from other songs, some which I didn’t think were as good or clever as mine. My wounded inner child was angry and sad.

I know Dan loves musicals, and here he also reminded us listeners of his penchant for the songs that go along with our favorite Christmas animations, like Frosty the Snowman and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Songs that are, dare I say, rather gay. I don’t have that gay music gene in me, although I did once have a musician named Gene inside of me. Butt, I was experimenting. Other than that, my butt and my music have been pretty straight.

Dan’s choice of songs was leaning towards the musicals and Christmas specials. Inside I was cursing Dan, and cursing myself for not writing a musical. Butt, I have to be true to myself. I knew my song was great, and my girlfriend Lisa comforted me. I won’t say how.

I went to my 9 A.M. appointment to donate platelets to the Red Cross, feeling disgruntled. “Go ahead and stick me full of needles, I don’t care anymore,” I thought as the kind workers set me up in front of a TV screen with all the streamers to choose from. I decided to watch Deadpool & Wolverine for the second time. Hilariously, Deadpool mentions pegging (A Savage neologism) in the beginning of the movie as he is confronted by members of the Time Variance Authority with big sticks in their hands. I instantly forgave Dan.

The platelet process takes about 3 hours, while blood goes from one arm through a machine that removes platelets, and back into the other. By the end I felt better, albeit dizzy. At the recovery table on the way out I ate Oreo cookies (which are accidentally vegan!) and checked my email, where I received this letter from Dan:

I was gay for Dan all over again. I made it into the top ten! I could celebrate the Feast of the Ass!

Dan named the song Nobody Like Buddy and posted it on his Feast of the Ass page, along with the other nine songs. I recommend you listen to them, butt you can also listen to Nobody Like Buddy at the BOTTOM of this page.

I was hoping to get this post published on the Feast of the Ass day, January 14th. Butt, “man plans and donkey laughs,” as my Dad used to say. Hopefully it will age well and we can enjoy it for years to come.

Like we do with our birthdays, Lisa and I are spreading the ass feast out over several days. We are going to make a Vegan Hummingbird Bundt Cake with Vanilla Glaze tonight, and feed some of it to the donkeys that live near us in Weaverville, NC. There may be a video to go along with the song in the near future, if all goes well.

Until then, I will leave you with my sweet-ass song: Nobody Like Buddy

The Feast of the Ass is a holy day
We fill it with good friends and cheer
Let's raise up our glasses and toast all the asses
We've known throughout all of the years

Come, come, drape that ass
And bow at the altar with me
With no shame or scorn we can blow in our horns
And tremble in deep harmony

There's nobody like Buddy, like Buddy the ass,
But Buddy's sweet-ass girlfriend Rose
At the feast they eat bundt cakes with their pretty mouths,
And lick the glaze off of each other's nose

Come, come, Buddy & Rose,
Reveal to us the pleasures we seek!
And if we're offended when our lives get upended
Teach us to turn the other cheek

Joseph and Mary they've ridden an ass
And the Magi once rode an ass, too (that’s true)
If you are shy but still want to try
Find someone to share their ass with you

The Feast of the Ass is a holy day
It warms this cold time of the year
Be ye old or young let this song on your tongue
Bring pleasure to all of our ears!
Bring pleasure to all of our ears!
Bring pleasure to all of our ears!

To add to the madness, I had decided to make a vegan cookbook zine for our friends and families. This I did in the late evenings after our bodies were too exhausted to mud, sand, and paint. I get a little carried away with my design projects, and was adding photos, clip art, and stories to each of the recipes.

Somehow I always get myself into impossible situations. If I could afford therapy I would try to figure it out, but I am just too busy (and trying to keep up with my bills) to ever create a situation where I can indulge in self care. If I had a therapist they would disagree with that sentiment. Someday I will get the help I need.

In 2016 I was living in Brooklyn and working at the Jivamukti Yoga Center in Union Square. Marijuana was still illegal in NYC, but I enjoyed getting high sometimes. There were lots of underground delivery services, but I had some connections upstate and would go up and bring back enough to cook down into coconut oil. I found a really great recipe for vegan peanut butter cookies and made batches of them. I had a roommate who loved them, and a few other people around the city who bought them from me, so it was a little side hustle.

The thing about the cookies is that they are so delicious they are hard to stop eating once you have a bite. Sometimes I would make a second batch just to satisfy that craving without getting too stoned to walk. Usually I just practiced self-restraint. Maybe I don’t need therapy after all.

As Lisa and I chose our favorite recipes for the cookbook, I knew I had to include the peanut butter cookies. I wrote a funny version of the story above and had it all ready to go. Lisa looked at it and asked, “are you going to give this to your parents?”

I was. I thought to myself, “I am a grown ass man, its OK for them to know I partake in the kind bud sometimes.” After all, I had been busted in high school and then in the Marines, so it wouldn’t be a complete shock. I also wanted to let my friends know they could make the pot cookies with this recipe.

On the morning of December 29th, I had a change of heart. I could let my friends know without writing about it in the book. So I set out to write a different story to go with the recipe.

I brainstormed all of my connections to peanuts and peanut butter. In my mind I travelled back in time to when I was a young boy, and Jimmy Carter was president. He famously was a peanut farmer, and it was talked about often. All of the political stuff about him went over my head, but the peanuts spoke to me. The president and I loved peanuts.

And so it was that I began writing about Jimmy Carter on the morning of his death. I assume that since I Googled him and nothing about him dying came up, he was still alive at the time (or his death had not been announced at least).

Jimmy spent nearly two years in hospice, taking his time to say his good-byes. He was waiting for the opportune moment, transitioning through the bardo states towards the dissolution of body and mind that ends this round of incarnation. Perhaps his soul was seeking some final acknowledgement in order to let go. He was having an out-of-body experience checking out the devastation from Helene in Asheville when he floated by my house and saw me writing about the Jimmy Carter Peanut Statue in Plains, GA. He knew it was his cue to let go.

I know, it’s a sign of megalomania for me to think this way. Did I mention that I need therapy?

Another theory I have about his dying is that he couldn’t go through another Trump presidency. The two men could not be more different.

Unlike Trump, who stirs up race wars and anti-immigration tropes, Carter was a champion of racial integration in schools in America. He negotiated a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in the Middle East with the Camp David Accords. He was known for telling the truth, even though his honesty and compassion probably kept him from a second term. He did not get us into any wars, and transitioned out of office peacefully.

Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development"

It is my hope that he transitioned out of this life peacefully, surrounded by people who loved and cared for him. Maybe one of them brought him one of my peanut butter cookies.

I found out about President Carter’s passing after the cookbook was finished and on its way to the printer, so I did not mention his death in the book. It’s just one of life’s funny synchronicities. The news coverage has brought up a lot of memories of my childhood. I remember the long lines for gas and the Iranian hostage crisis that brought down Carter’s presidency. I remember Reagan taking over, and his ramping up of the tragic war on drugs that put thousands of non-violent people behind bars, mostly people of color. I don’t think we have had as honorable a president as Carter since then.

I finished the remodelling of our home the just in time for Lisa’s daughter to arrive, and got the cookbook printed in time to share it with my family during our New Year’s visit. I am going to send a copy to all of my paid Substack subscribers, you can use the form below to sign up. I have big plans for content this year, and hope you will stay connected. Happy New Year!

“If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.” ~Ram Das

Like most people, you probably have mixed feeling about the holidays.

Perhaps you are a naysayer. Have you had it up to here with the ghastly inflated plastic Santas, the cringe-worthy songs of joy and peace, the black friday-cyber monday-giving tuesday-broke ass wednesday charade? Maybe you dread hearing Uncle Bob gleefully gloating about Trump winning the election, and you aren’t sure you can keep calm and carry on?

Or, perhaps, you are a Christmas fanatic. You revel in being surrounded by loved ones while laughing, reminiscing, and eating delicious food. You delight in the perfect gift given or received. You are intoxicated by the smell of pine trees, the fresh blanket of snow covering the landscape, and the happy faces of children playing with their new toys.

For most of us, we will weave between the two paths. Our minds will veer drunkenly from one to the other, with our wounded and wound-up inner child at the wheel.

Do you have a strategy for getting through the short days and long nights with your soul intact?

For me, the holidays begin the last week of November. I celebrated an intimate vegan Thanksgiving at the home of one of my yoga students. She invited my partner Lisa and I, along with a married couple we were meeting for the first time. Everyone except me had a little wine, and after the meal we were chatting it up. At one point the wife looked at me and said, “Pashupa has the most peaceful face I have ever seen!”

That statement caught me off guard, but my ego enjoyed it and we all started laughing. Peace face. I carried those words home with me with the leftovers. Ego said to me, “she can tell how enlightened you are, wise yogi!”

“Shut up, ego,” said the wise yogi part of my brain.

When we got home and talked about it, Lisa agreed I had a peace face, but then reminded me of the other aspects of my personality. Those mischievous and feral parts of me. The part of me that yells a prolonged “fuck!” at the top of my lungs, audible to our whole neighborhood, when I ordered a door with the wrong inswing twice in a row. The part that puts a glob of peanut butter on our puppy Bodhi’s nose to amuse myself watching her lick it off. The part of me that somehow upsets Lisa once every day or two.

I have named these parts of myself. Peaceful Pashupa, and Derek the Destroyer. We all have various aspects of personality, and knowing who we are in any given moment can help us determine our best course of action when problems arise.

Yoga for our inner puppy

In the Yoga Sutras, yoga is defined as the “quieting of the whirlings of the mind.” It is not the only definition of yoga, but it’s the one you will hear most quoted in the west.

Our internal and external worlds mirror one another. When our mind becomes agitated, the world around us seems more chaotic. A chaotic world puts our thoughts in a mixing bowl and whisks them into pancake batter. Once we smell our brain burning on the cosmic griddle, we know we are cooked.

Fortunately, the opposite is also true. A calm lake reflecting a shimmering sunrise slows us down to appreciate the beauty of the world. Manifesting a meditative mind truly calms the world around us.

With the physical practices of yoga, we are using our bodies to bring awareness to our mental states. Get into an uncomfortable position, stay there, breathe, notice what the mind is doing, stay present, breathe, stay calm. Change position, start again.

Seated meditation is similar. The body starts out comfortable, just sitting. We watch our breath, or chant a mantra, or focus awareness on an object. Soon the body is uncomfortable, the mind is wandering, we want to squirm or itch, change our leg position, give up until tomorrow. But if we can stay there and endure, we get to know ourselves a little better.

It’s the awareness that makes the difference. The simple path is to let the mind whirl. Ride it back and forth from past to future, with brief stops in the present to make-believe you are paying attention. “Yes, honey, I am listening deeply to everything you said. Could you repeat that last thing?”

The simple path is not the easy path. Simple simply means there are less steps. Complexity is the process of combining several simple steps to achieve something more profound. Complex paths take longer, but bring more ease. Simple, but not easy.

Watching the mind is like raising a puppy. You can put some peanut butter on her nose to keep her busy, but soon enough she licks it all off and starts chewing up the furniture. You really need to create some rituals of attentiveness to get her under control. “Mind, sit!” Mind, stay!” “That’s a good girl!”

And then she runs away and pees on the couch.

Over time, with enough treats, we can train the puppy mind to sit and stay. It is a complex process. In the end, it brings us more joy and peace.

Five ways to not lose your shit this year

I have been thinking about my peace face. Is it a mask to hide the undertow of my chaotic soul? Not exactly. I have been vegan for almost thirty years, and practicing yoga for over half that time. I know some things about peace. I’m also a hot mess at times. I have a spastic face, too. Turns out I’m still human after all these years.

Here are my tips for you to make it to 2025 without losing your shit.

1. Don’t Forget to Breathe. When someone says something fucked-up, or when something fucked-up happens, and you feel the emotions flooding your system, you have a couple of seconds before you lose your shit. Take a deep breath and fill your lungs, then release it while slightly constricting the throat. Repeat until you feel your face becoming peaceful. Then respond thoughtfully.

2. Redirect the Energy. Social media bubbles have increased tribalism and put us all on edge. We have forgotten how to get along. The simple response to subtle (and not-so-subtle) insults and politically-charged statements is to dig in and defend our positions. Uncle Bob’s gonna see that reaction and start throwing tear gas. Don’t dig in! Ask Bob how he came to his beliefs, be genuinely curious about his life. Keep him talking about himself. Maybe you will learn something.

3. Create Boundaries. Sometimes you will have enough. Enough food, enough conversation, enough criticism, whatever it is. Speak up for yourself. In the Yoga Sutras, non-harming (Ahimsa) is the first step on the path to yoga. Truthfulness (Satya) is the second. The wise person will tell always tell the truth unless it causes harm. If you can say, “I have had enough,” without hurting someone else, that is the best path. But sometimes you will have to bend the truth to not hurt someone’s feelings. Remember, lies often come back to bite us. Be as honest as you can, but let people know you have boundaries they can’t cross. Create a safe space around yourself.

4. Be Love. Most of us want the best for others. Most of us have kindness in our hearts. If you resonate with that, how can you manifest it? Do you have a peace face? Try to find a kind thing to say to each person you encounter. Especially the people who trigger you. If you have followed the second item in this list, perhaps you have learned something about Uncle Bob that you respect, or identify with. Tell him. Our ego’s all want to be seen and complimented.

5. Use the Peace Face Emoji 😌. OK, this is the most esoteric on my list. Only for advanced yogis. In researching peace face, I learned that there is a relieved face emoji. As 2024 draws to a close, we can all feel relief. What could go wrong in 2025? When your partner sends you that anxious text message, or you get spam from an unknown source, respond with the peace face emoji (formerly known as the relief face emoji). Teach gramma how to use it. It is the gif that keeps on giving.

Resting Peace Face

One question I am often asked, “Is there a resting peace face?”

The laws of physics say that a face in rest tends to stay in rest. Whatever face you display the most will become your resting face.

The laws of psychics say that behind every face is someone who will pay to know what the future holds, and therein lies the anxious face.

If we look far enough into the future, we will understand that nothing we do will be remembered for long. Don’t sweat the temporary stuff.

In the short-term, it’s not what you say that people will remember, but how you make them feel.

Your peace face is contagious. The woman who told me I have the most peaceful face surely now has one of her own. I have been spreading my peace face around. Although no one knows what is behind my beard. That’s where my turbulent chin and undulating neck rolls dwell.

Wishing you peace on Earth, and goodwill to all the genders.

I just watched the final episode of the heartbreaking four-part series Breath of Fire on HBO Max with my partner Lisa. It is a documentary about Kundalini Yoga told through the lives of its founder Yogi Bhajan (Harbhajan Singh Puri), and the charismatic heirs to his throne, Guru Jagat (Katie Griggs) and Hari Jiwan Singh.

Spoiler alert… Yogi Bhajan was a monster. Like the disgraced Bikram yoga founder, Bikram Choudhury, he used his reputation as a spiritual teacher to sexually assault his students and employees. Like the fallen guru Rajneesh (Osho), he grew a large cult following and manipulated the members for his own gains.*

Guru Jagat, a female Kundalini teacher, was poised to become the heir to Bhajan’s empire (thanks in part to the behind-the-scenes coaching from Bhajan’s right-hand man, Hari Jiwan Singh). She was younger than Bhajan and Jiwan, and became an influencer in the yoga world by harnessing social media and celebrity associations.

In 2020, sixteen years after his death, one of Bhajan’s top students named Pamela Dyer released a memoir, “Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan,” and it began a cascade of revelations about the sexual abuses and manipulations of Bhajan. An Olive Branch, an independant Buddhist-inspired group, was hired by the umbrella group overseeing Bhajan’s legacy corporations and nonprofits, was hired to conduct an investigation and file a report. The resulting 76-page report laid it all out:

The details of the extremely brutal acts of sexual abuse that came forward need a trigger warning for survivors. Reading the report can be retraumatizing.

Around 300 people were contacted by the team of An Olive Branch, half supporters of YB and half reporters of harm.

The report divided the community. Some teachers and trainers distantiated themselves from the community and the organizations. Either they stopped practicing or teaching Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, or they chose to go their own way.

While he did not live to see his legacy destroyed, Yoga Bhajan died in terrible health. He had not been practicing the yoga he taught, he was overweight and diabetic. Parts of his foot were amputated. No amount of wealth and fame can protect us from karma.

While Guru Jagat may not have been aware of the sexual abuse during Bhajan’s lifetime, she herself claimed to come to Kundalini for healing because she was sexually assaulted. Much of her popularity was due to her promotion of female empowerment woven into prosperity theology. When the book and the report came out, she had a chance to denounce Bhajan and stay true to brand.

Instead, she took the advice of Jiwan Singh, the Dick Cheney of the Kundalini administration. He was the living parallel to the deceased Bhajan, a bearded old white man with a dark past playing the role of guru. He was also the power and money behind Ra Ma, Jagat’s yoga brand, community, and studio. He certainly had secrets to keep, and Jagat had become a money-obsessed shadow of her former self. She doubled down on Bhajan’s innocence, and in doing so rolled out a karmic yoga mat to practice her own undoing.

Throughout the documentary we watch Jagat become increasingly paranoid and susceptible to conspiracy theories (along with a large swath of the wellness industry during the pandemic years). She gained a lot of weight, and in 2021 broke her ankle in Germany. Choosing to fly back to the US before having it treated may have been her final undoing. Shortly after getting surgery on her ankle, she died of a pulmonary embolism.

*There are many yoga scandals in recent history. Wikipedia has a Sexual abuse by yoga gurus page listing some of them. Check out the Netflix documentaries Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator and Wild Wild Country (about Rajneesh) to find out more about two of the most prominent ones.

Full disclosure: my Kundalini connections

My partner Lisa completed the Kundalini Yoga teacher training in 2011, the same year I did the Jivamukti Yoga teacher training. While I was working at the Jivamukti Yoga headquarters in NYC, I noticed there was a significant number of students who practiced both.

Jivamukti is one of the original vinyasa styles in the US. The founders Sharon Gannon and David Life studied Ashtanga Yoga with K. Pattabhi Jois, who invented the vinyasa that permeates much of the yoga world today. Vinyasa means “to place in a special way,” and was developed to link movement and breath in order to bring awareness to the connection between body, mind, and spirit.

Unfortunately K. Patabhi Jois had a posthumous sex scandal of his own. Ashtanga Yoga (and Jivamukti) is known for its yoga adjustments, which are hands-on movement of a student’s body by a teacher to help the student find correct alignment, or get deeper into a pose. There are multiple photographs and videos of Jois touching students improperly, with his hands on their genitals, man and woman alike.

While it seems obvious in a post #MeToo environment, asking consent to give yoga adjustments wasn’t the norm before then. I gravitated to Jivamukti in part because I loved receiving adjustments. As a teacher I loved to give them. I still do, but now I am very careful to get consent and use the techniques appropriately.

Kundalini and Jivamukti both have gatherings where most of the participants wear white. Yogi Bhajan built the Kundalini brand to be associated with Sikhism, appropriating the turbans and mantras of the religion without placing them in proper context. Wearing white at our gatherings was the part of Jivamukti that felt most culty to me, but in day-to-day practice and work we did not dress that way, and never wore turbans.

Jivamukti had its own scandals, but Gannon and Life have never been accused of sexual impropriety and as far as I can tell, the scandals involving other teachers were really about scorned lovers seeking retribution. Of course, being a Jivamukti Yoga teacher who worked as their web editor during those times, I have some bias.

In 2018 I volunteered to photograph the Sat Nam Kundalini Festival in Western MA. My friends were working in the kitchen and it was a chance to escape NYC and connect with them. Being in that environment, surrounded by people wearing white clothing and turbans, with mystical musical performances and strange movement classes, was fun. The people were all very sweet and kind. No one tried to recruit me or manipulate me.

Here’s a funny story. I did not know anything about Bhajan at the time, but I wanted some memorabilia from the fest and bought a tee-shirt with a cartoon drawing of him with the letters WWBD above it. The letters stood for “What Would Bhajan Do?”, a riff on the “What Would Jesus Do” meme. The shirt really tickled my fancy. I wore it at the festival, as seen in the photo above. It mysteriously disappeared after that, and for some time I was vexed that I had lost it. Now I know that there was a higher power looking over me.

Spiritual communities attract predators

There is a larger pattern in regards to spiritual teachers, and it goes beyond yoga. We all know about the scandals of the Catholic church and altar boys. A 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News report named 220 Baptist pastors, ministers, deacons, volunteers, Sunday school teachers and others who were found guilty of sexually abusing churchgoers over 20 years.

This year in Malaysia, police rescued 402 children after sex abuse allegations at Islamic welfare homes. From the Orthodox Jewish tradition, we have the case of a Brooklyn yeshiva teacher named Yehuda Kolko (David Framowitz), who sexually molested children for decades. New York City changed its laws so that he could be convicted for crimes that were previously sheltered by the state’s statute of limitations.

Even the peaceful Buddhists have their scandals. In 2017 Sogyal Rinpoche, an influential Tibetan Buddhist lama, author of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was accused of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.

Spiritual beliefs open us to predators. We are vulnerable because we have an innate longing to connect with the divine. The divine is mysterious and unknowable. A psychopath who pretends to have a deeper understanding of the divine can manipulate people who are seeking to know the unknowable.

Bhajan was able to seperate children from their parents and send them to India, where they were starved and abused. The parents believed they were doing the best for their children. They did not perceive that Bhajan was a pedophile, rapist, and child abusing monster.

What comes first, the predator or the cult?

Cults tend to form with a charismatic leader, who may be a predator. Cults that grow large enough eventually become categorized as religions. Religions attract predators to positions of power, giving them access to the bodies and minds of their communities. There are certainly leaders who start out with good intentions and then get corrupted by their power over devotees.

The phenomenon of Donald Trump’s rise to power can be compared to cultish behaviors. He is a sexual predator, and seems to be surrounding himself by other predators. His followers don’t seem to mind. Many see him as a holy man, fulfilling prophecy. To people like me, who see something else, it is disheartening and strange.

The baby and the bathwater

An interesting question that many of us have grappled with lately is whether it is OK to enjoy the works of a person who has done terrible things. Is it OK to listen to Michael Jackson? Can we practice Kundalini, Ashtanga, Anusara, Kripalu, Bikram, or any other yoga whose founders were problematic? Is it OK to teach from these traditions?

What brings many of us to yoga is the possibility that we can connect in a deeper way to our spiritual nature. And many of us do. Modern yoga practice has evolved from thousands of years of spiritual seeking. It contains multitudes, including Hinduism, Tantra, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the influence of Buddhism, Ayurvedic lifestyle, capitalist influence, New Age dilution, and on and on.

I was recently listening to an interview with yoga innovator Judith Hanson Lasater on the Let’s Talk Yoga Podcast (episode here). She was talking about her first time teaching yoga and something she said really stuck with me. It was over 50 years ago and she hadn’t taken a teacher training, back then you taught when your teacher told you to. She found herself frozen in front of a room full of students, but then had a vision of her teacher being part of a lineage going back into the past. Each teacher stood behind the next, passing a bucket of water from one to the next.

…they were handing a bucket of water forward to me. And in a blinding flash of the obvious I realized, “Ah, I am the bucket! I’m not the water.” And it gives me chills. Every time I tell that story, it just gives me those chills up and down my back. Because I took from that, that it’s not me.

It was like an initiation. It was, that I’m now part of this lineage, this sacred lineage, and I want to hand the lineage forward. I don’t want to put myself forward. I am the bucket, not the water.

Understanding our place in the world is a lifelong journey. I admit that many of my actions in the past came out of ego. I often mistook myself for the water. I feel blessed that I never became a super popular teacher at a young age, I may have fallen into darkness. Especially since I was abusing alcohol in those days, and longing for connection and admiration.

Now I understand, I am the bucket. As a yoga teacher and person trying to live with compassion and awareness, I find myself navigating many worlds. Is my love of, and connection to, the yoga tradition a form of cultural appropriation? How do cultures evolve and religions spread, if not for appropriation?

Part of my love of the Jivamukti Yoga method is that we try very hard to follow the teachings in the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. It is not just a workout, or series of poses. There are imperfections, and the yoga I teach now is not strictly the yoga I learned from my years with Jivamukti. But I do try my best to remember my bucket nature, and keep the water I share pure.

Practicing what we preach

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is the primary text most yoga teachers and studios reference, but it was written for seekers who would renounce material gains for spiritual attainment.

In the Sutras Patanjali laid out the yamas, five ways that we should treat others if we seek enlightenment. The very first yama is ahimsa, non-harming. The fourth yama is brahmacharya, which early commentaries tell us is abstaining from sex. Modern yogis change the interpretation to be about using our sexual energy wisely. In the Yoga Sutras, the lists that Patanjali makes put the most important concept first. If we do have sex, we should do it in a way that does not harm others.

Fortunately (or not) for modern practitioners, the yoga tradition has many other schools and texts. In 2020 I took my advanced teacher training with yoga innovator Amy Ippoliti, and she taught from a tradition of Tantra, as taught by Douglas Brooks. Instead of trying to escape the world and become enlightened, Tantra is the path to realizing the perfection of life in this moment, using the material world as a tool. It still has moral obligations, but sex and even eating flesh can be integrated. Tantra, is not all about sex though, that is a modern western misunderstanding. Some tantrikas will abstain from sex as part of their practice. Traditionally the teacher will prescribe practices that will help the student evolve spiritually.

What we do know is that yoga practice has helped many people in the west find ease and comfort in their lives. It has helped some people heal from PTSD. It has helped others heal their bodies. It gives us plenty to meditate on, and many technologies to improve our hearts, minds, and bodies.

What Bhajan did was certainly appropriation of the Sikh culture in a dark and inappropriate way. The documentary says he made everything up, but the mantras are from Sikhism. Some of the asana practice is legit, too. There are parts of Kundalini I have always thought strange, like lifting and lowering my arms for a very specific number of minutes and seconds. Kundalini teachers looking at their watches did not feel timely to me.

Interestingly, many of the asanas we practice today evolved from British gymnastic practices (thanks to the British colonization of India, which is also the reason Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras was recovered from obscurity). There has been an exchange of ideas and philosophies going back to prehistoric times. It is what humans do.

Breath of Fire: the practice

One example of a yoga baby we can seperate from Bhajan’s bathwater is the pranayama practice that is also the name of the documentary about him: Breath of Fire

Breath of Fire is the modern name of an ancient breathing technique called Kapalabhati, which translates to “skull shining”.

It is one of the classic kriyas or purification techniques of Hatha Yoga, and it is referenced in both the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Gheranda Samhita, the two texts that form the basis of most modern yoga practice. ~Siddhi Yoga

In Sanskrit, “kapala” means “skull,” and “bhati” means “to shine.” Kapalabhati is one of the six yogic cleansing techniques called “shatkarma kriyas” in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.

Kapalabhati has been reported to improve cardiovascular, respiratory, mental, and physical health on different parameters.

To a casual viewer of the documentary, the "breath of fire” probably seems strange. The creators of the series give us the impression that Bhajan “made up everything,” but that is an exaggeration. He borrowed and appropriated many parts, and made up the rest.

In the end, it’s up to us to seperate the baby from the bathwater.

Final thoughts

Lisa and I moved to Asheville in August, and started practicing at our local studio. There was a Kundalini class which we took a couple times, and soon Lisa was subbing for the class. She is now the primary teacher.

After watching the documentary, we are shaken and wondering how to move forward. The studio owner thinks that the number of people who have benefited from Kundalini yoga over the years justifies keeping the name of the class, and a photo of Bhajan on the wall next to other influential teachers.

Lisa and I took the photo down in a moment of passion, without consulting the owner. We then explained, and returned the photo to them. The photo is now back on the wall. The photo of a smiling rapist who separated children from their families and then starved and abused them. Who groomed underage girls so that he could rape them once they became adults. K. Patthabi Joice is up there, too, with his groping hands. Luckily this wall is over a desk and not above an altar, but still… I don’t believe those men deserve to be honored.

The community at the yoga studio is beautiful. Great teachers, wonderful students. The owner is a good person, who probably didn’t watch the documentary. We are in discussion with them. We can ultimately do more good from within, than from without. Only light can dispel the darkness.

The mantra Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu reminds us to live in a way that honors all beings, everywhere. Spiritual practice is surrounded by pitfalls, and finding a path that is pure and true is part of the journey. Discernment is the key, and it is the biggest challenge. Our hearts our eager, and our minds can get carried away by our emotions, like bridges in a flood. Fortify yourself, keep asking questions, and don’t be afraid to cut your losses if something doesn’t feel right.

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om tare tuttare ture soha ~Buddhist Green Tara Mantra

In this life we are an amalgamation of stories we tell ourselves and dreams we dream quietly or out loud. Sometimes we can sense the frailty and impermanence of it all, while other times it seems life will always be as it is, now.

My friend sent me a text the other night with a link to a Facebook post. Tara’s sister had posted that Tara was going into hospice. She had hoped to go to Germany to seek out a treatment for the cancer, but time ran out.

I did not know Tara was sick, I hadn’t spoken to her in a few months. She had subscribed to my Substack a couple days earlier, so she was on my mind. She was a sweet soul always supporting her friends. I had no idea that I would never see her again.

The Buddhist Green Tara mantra “om tare tuttare ture soha” is a mantra of liberation. Tara is “the mother of all buddhas,” a Bodhisattva who relieves our suffering. Buddhism would weave its way through our friendship over the years, and it makes sense that she would share an auspicious name with a goddess and mantra that Mahayana Buddhists hold dear.

This photo is of Tara the day I met her. It was April 2nd, 2005, and she was volunteering at a table for Lantern Books at the Grassroots Animal Rights Conference in Harlem, NYC.

I was in the heydey of my veganism, I was at the conference with my camera. The event was a lot more radical in its ideology than most vegan conferences at the time. I liked that.

I was also recently single, and getting crushes on everyone. I definitely had one on Tara after meeting her. She was soft spoken, kind, friendly, and seemed a little shy.

At the time I was living in Western MA and visiting NYC whenever there was a good reason to. I visited NYC a couple months after the conference and went out to dinner with Tara. I remember being infatuated with her, and enjoying a lovely evening. She told me she was seeing someone else and so we said goodnight and promised to keep in touch.

Tara ended up marrying that someone else a year later. They had a fancy vegan wedding and I got to meet Tara’s family and friends. She was a lyricist, librettist, composer, teaching artist, and seasoned vocalist, and so there were lots of theater people there. I was her photographer.

I don’t remember exactly the timeline of our friendship, but at some point I connected Tara with the Vipassana meditation course in Shelburne, MA. I had participated in the 10-day silent meditation retreat around my birthday in 2002, and felt that it had a profound effect on my life. Tara did the course and got hooked, and it became a deep connection for us over the years.

During that time Tara had a beautiful son named Elijah. Her marriage ended and there was weird custody stuff going on that I did not understand. I don’t know enough about the circumstances to weigh in. I just know that Tara was full of love and I could feel her pain. In the end I know Tara and Elijah had a beautiful relationship, but the dad could have made it easier. Taras are known for their unconditional love, and part of that love is patience.

Tara and I remained in touch through the years. It was funny, because I ended up moving to NYC around the time that she moved to Western MA, so we lived in each other’s worlds but never in the same one at the same time.

I find myself now feeling some guilt. Tara was often the one to reach out, to let me know she was going to be in the same place I was, or that she was thinking of me. I am not the best at keeping in touch with people. The last time I saw her we met at an ice cream shop in Northampton in 2023, and enjoyed the vegan “no moo” flavors. It was a quick visit, and I got to meet Elijah as a teenager. I wish I had been the one to reach out more. How could a year go by and I not know she was sick?

Tara made much of my introducing her to Vipassana and being a vegan inspiration with all of my creative activism. She saw the good in me. Sometimes it made me feel a little uncomfortable, I don’t think that highly of myself.

So here I am, thinking about friendship and loss. Limited by time and space, and the business of our lives, it is not possible to always be there for anyone. How can we make each moment count?

I have been reading the posts on Tara’s facebook page, trying to understand the fullness of who she was. She was loved, she was talented, she was kind. She had a life that was both blessed and challenged. She had good friends.

Thank you sweet Tara for choosing me as one of them. Blessings on your journey. I believe we all dissolve and recombine, in the spirit world as in the biological one. I feel your peace and love. I will always think of you when I chant the mantra or see an image of Tara. Or when I am reminded by any number of more mundane things. I send my infinite love.

The Meaning of the Mantra “Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha”

Om is the sound of the cosmos and the cosmic consciousness — the cycle of creation, sustainment, and dissolution that repeats eternally.

Tare is Mother Tara relieving our suffering, from birth, old age, sickness, and dying.

Tuttare liberates us from eight particular dangers, each of which represents a corresponding human mental problem:

• lions — pride

• wild elephants — delusion and ignorance

• forest fires — hatred

• snakes — jealousy

• robbers — wrong views, including fanatical views

• prisons — greed and miserliness

• floods — desire and attachment

• demons — doubts caused by delusion

Ture reveals the Bodhisattva path, how to liberate ourselves and others from suffering. The Bodhisattva is one who reaches enlightenment and chooses to come back and help others. Tara had this spirit.

Soha is a “may it be so” or “fuck yes!” kind of statement.

Works by Tara Bahna-James (1973-2024)

Ophelia Sleeps

Singing

A couple of days ago an oarfish washed up on an Encinitas, California beach. It is the second time it has happened in California this year. According to Japanese mythology, it is a bad omen.

In traditional Japanese legend, oarfish were known as "ryugu no tsukai" meaning "the messenger from the sea dragon god's palace." People believed oarfish would come up from the deep to warn people when an earthquake was imminent. This myth caused a stir in 2011 when 20 oarfish washed ashore in the months before Japan was struck by the country's most powerful earthquake.

~Livescience

The oarfish is known as the doomsday fish. It lives in the deep sea, and is rarely seen by humans. It can grow to be 30 feet long. It looks scary, but it only eats tiny creatures that it filters through its mouth, and wouldn’t hurt a human (a flea in the sea should be careful though).

As most of you know (or may infer), I am not a deep sea fish. I try to exude an aura of mystery and depth, but I am not overly either. I am a human, and have that same proclivity to recognizing patterns in my environment that you do. But alas, I have never been to the sea dragon god’s palace.

In 2019 I got dumped by my fiancé. I was living in NYC and kinda wanted to get the fuck out of there anyway, so I did. After wandering around the country for a few months I ended up in Boulder, Colorado. It was all mountains and rainbows for a little while, but then 2020 rolled around and the pandemic hit.

I’ll be honest, I enjoyed the pandemic. Or at least the lockdown part of it. I sat by the creek behind my apartment, played my ukulele and sang songs. I made a really great podcast. I drove around in the mountains in a four wheel drive UPS truck. I knew that people were dying, and I felt guilty that I was having a good time. But what kind of harbinger of doom would I be if I was just sad all the time?

Eventually I decided to help my friend Matt in Northampton, MA with his carpentry business. He couldn’t find a skilled carpenter so he agreed to teach me carpentry in exchange for my labor. I moved there in 2021 and began my training.

During my time in Northampton, there were no apparent disasters. But for Matt, there was an ongoing one that looked a lot like me. How much I cost him in bad cuts and damaged property we will never know, but it was a lot.

Matt has always called my by my last name. When I fucked up, he threw in my first. “Jesus, Goodwin!” was a refrain I heard often.

Which led me to realize why Jesus became the savior. He was really bad at carpentry. Think about it, when do you hear about anything Jesus built? You would think the Bible would be full of stories about buildings and bridges that are still standing today. But everything he built was crap. That’s why he began preaching. Every mistake led him to deep introspection, and eventually he found the fountainhead of divinity.

At least that’s my theory.

After three years of causing Matt’s hair to turn grey, I decided to strike out on my own again. I found a wonderful woman named Lisa to share my life with, and convinced her to move to Asheville with me. I never told her I was the harbinger, but I assumed she knew.

We arrived in August of 2024, and it was lovely. Breathtaking mountain views, wonderful vegan food, friendly people. Except that guy that threw a full beer can at Lisa while we were biking. He sucks.

We bought a cute little house on a hill in Weaverville, about 20 minutes outside of Asheville. There was a cool swimming hole nearby, and neglected fruit trees to be reclaimed.

By September 26, we had heard there was a hurricane coming, but felt pretty safe in the mountains.

We woke on Saturday morning after Helene to find our power was out but our phones were still working. We called our families to tell them we were alright. A couple trees had fallen in our yard but it all seemed pretty mild. We went outside and waged war with the poison ivy on our property while waiting for the power to come back on. Then our cell phone service died. Must be some lines down.

Eventually we went down to our swimming hole. The day before it was a cute little creek, but now it was a raging river. The bridge at the end of our street had washed away, along with a neighbor’s house. The top of a car was poking out at the center of a whirlpool of water. Giant trees were washed up on shore, along with twisted I-beams from the bridge. People were standing around shaking their heads.

Lisa asked me if I was the harbinger, and I just nodded my own head and sheepishly grinned.

The weeks since then have been a strange and inspiring time. Strange to live in the wake of a disaster, but inspiring to see how resilient people and communities are. We live close to the town of Barnardsville, which has been a hub of neighbors helping neighbors. I even helped out with my carpentry skills a bit. Sorry, neighbors.

The truth is, every cloud has a silver lining. It’s only in the dark that you see the stars shining. It’s only in love that you can break your heart. It’s only after a flood that you can see cars in trees.

I am planning to stay put for a while, but if your town is in need of a shakeup don’t hesitate to invite me. I will wash up on your shores and create chaos.

I am a harbinger.

Most people remember their time in the service by the wars they fought. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. I joined in the mid-eighties, and there was no war. Sufficient time had passed since Vietnam that it seemed like the mistake of a different generation. The horrors of the desert wars were still ahead of us. I loved practicing martial arts and playing Rambo in the woods. I was young and drinking too much. But mostly I didn’t know myself well enough to realize I wasn’t cut out for the military.

My father was a Navy veteran, and also enjoyed peace time service. He got to climb Mt Fuji in Japan and to be one of the first humans to set foot on the South Pole while he was in the Navy. He thought the military would be good for me, too. Even though rebelling against authority was my primary impulse as a teenager, I still loved him and took his advice to heart.

I was led to believe that the Marines were the most bad-ass, and that I could get in and become part of the Marine Corps Recon, which are the Marine equivalent of the Navy Seals.

As soon as I arrived at Paris Island for boot camp and had my head shaved I realized I had made a big mistake. I was made well aware that I was now government property. I was not going to be Rambo, I was going to be a nameless and faceless soldier that was completely disposable.

After boot camp was Infantry Training. It was there that I got the first ding on my record, getting caught with beer in my locker. It was the beginning of the “pattern of misconduct” that would eventually get me discharged early.

After boot camp and Infantry Training, I got stationed in Camp Lejuene, North Carolina. I was assigned to the Headquarter Company of the 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Battalion as a TOW gunner. The TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided missile system) is an anti-armor system that is mounted to the top of a Humvee. Even in the 80’s is seemed like an antiquated system, a missile that was guided by two wires that stayed connected to the cannon that it shot out of. But it was better than being a “grunt,” the ground soldier of the Marines. I got to drive instead of march.

I spent the next two and a half years trying to drink and party as much as I could while keeping the appearance of being a soldier. I got along with most of my platoon, except the super hard-core Marines who didn’t have much respect for me. I joined hoping that I would get to see the world, but we didn’t really go anywhere. Except a couple notable exceptions.

One night while out partying with friends I woke up at a stop light with a policeman knocking on the window of my pickup truck. I had my foot on the clutch and the engine still running. It was my first DUI, and another ding on my permanent record. It earned me a trip to alcohol rehab at a Naval base in Jacksonville, Florida. That turned out to be one of the most memorable times in the Marines. I snuck out to see Iron Maiden, and got to hook up with two female soldiers, one in the Navy and one in the Marines. I also got to check out lots of AA meetings and experience sobriety for a little while. It didn’t last.

Some time later I got to go to 29 Palms California for desert warfare training. I was only there a day or two when I got into a drunken wrestling match with a corporal friend of mine. He body slammed me and broke my collarbone. I spent the next two weeks on guard duty at our barracks instead of out blowing shit up with my platoon. It sucked.

The next ding on my record happened there. I was wearing a cast on my right arm when I walked by a Colonel. Not knowing what to do, I panicked and saluted him with my left hand. Oops! Ding!

Most of my time in the service I was also smoking weed. I had some contacts in headquarters who gave us a heads up when a piss test was coming. I used to keep a warm bottle of Mountain Dew next to my belly and pour it into the cup at the urinal. Finally I got caught. The punishment was to be a month of “Correctional Custody Platoon,” a repeat of boot camp with the added joy of smashing rocks with a sledgehammer. No thanks.

I loaded up my pickup truck and drove to Syracuse, my home town. I hid out with friends for about three weeks, though no one was looking for me. I turned myself in after 28 days, because at 30 days I would become a deserter. I went back expecting a court martial and discharge.

Most people who did anything close to what I did ended up doing time in the brig (military prison) and getting a bad conduct discharge. Somehow I pleaded my case well enough that I got a light sentence. Two months of restriction (couldn’t leave the base, had to check in every hour) and a $600 fine. Better than Corrective Custody Platoon! I was both relieved, and sad that I still had two years left to serve.

Everything went pretty well after that, I didn’t get in any more trouble for about a year. Then one day while on guard duty at our armory, I decided to read a book. It was a book by Jonathan Winters that my mom had sent me. Another Colonel caught me, and that was the final ding. Ding, dang, done!

The Marines decided to give me a less-than-honorable discharge, but I appealed it and got out with a general discharge under honorable conditions. It was a victory, I was out and free!

Since then, I have kept my military past in the closet. I wasn’t proud of being kicked out. It took me a long time to realize I had a problem with alcohol, too. Many years and many drunken nights went by.

In 2019 I moved to Colorado. I didn’t have a job or health insurance, and so I decided to look into whether I had any military benefits. I was pretty sure I didn’t. But there was a question on the VA website form about being stationed in Camp Lejuene between 1953 and 1987 (I was there from 1986-1988). As I went down the rabbit hole of why that question existed, I found out that I was being poisoned throughout most of the time I was enlisted!

During that time, United States Marine Corps (USMC) personnel and families at the base — bathed in and ingested tap water contaminated with harmful chemicals at all concentrations from 240 to 3,400 times current safe levels. An undetermined number of former residents later developed cancer or other ailments including ALS, fatty liver disease, infertility, and Parkinson's Disease, which could be due to the contaminated drinking water. Victims claim that USMC leaders concealed knowledge of the problem and did not act properly to resolve it or notify former residents. ~Wikipedia

Thanks to a bill passed by President Obama, people stationed at Camp Lejuene (both civilian and military) during that time no have VA care for life. During the Biden administration the PACT Act was passed which gives us the right to sue the government should we become sick with one of the related diseases. It also cares for military vets affected by burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortunately I have not become sick with one of the recognized diseases, although I have some health issues that began back then.

Looking back, I realize that it was my disobedience and bad behavior that may have saved my life. I got out 14 months early, which saved me 14 months of poisoning (allegedly the poisoning ended before I got out, but I don’t really trust that the water became safe overnight). At any rate, I feel like I served my country and sacrificed my own well-being to be there. I am now proud to call myself a veteran.

On Valentines Day of 2020 I gave myself the sweetest gift of all, and gave up alcohol. Looking back on my life, it has been the single most destructive habit. All of my low points have booze tied to them. I never hit rock bottom, by the grace of god, but I wasted so much time, money, and opportunity and I live with regret. I have seen it destroy countless lives, and hope that in my life I can help others find sobriety to pass the gift on.

In May of 2024 I did a Mindful Resilience for Trauma Recovery yoga teacher training with the Veterans Yoga Project, while living in Massachusetts. In August I moved back to North Carolina, this time in Asheville. I hope to begin giving back to the local veterans (and other trauma survivors) by offering yoga classes and spiritual guidance.

To mark Veterans Day today, I am setting a goal of posting one piece of content per day to help others. I will be offering yoga and breathing exercises, along with music, mantra, and musings. I am not 100% sure where it will take us, but it’s my next step. I hope you will join and support me as I go forward.

Semper Fidelis, always faithful.

After a Humvee accident, the person driving hit a tree and my head hit the metal dashboard. I still have the scar.

Dressed for success.

In the spring of 2011 I found myself at the Omega Institute in upstate NY, sleeping in a tent, and spending twelve hour days immersed in the Jivamukti Yoga Teacher Training, along with 118 other students from all over the world.

In the months leading up to the training yoga had helped me heal from the worst breakup of my life, while creating a sense of ease in my body, and peace in my heart. I found Jivamukti Yoga in New Orleans at the Swan River Yoga studio. It was one of the most respected lineages of yoga, influencing much of the vinyasa yoga teaching that we see in the world today. I loved the way it included the chanting of mantra, an exploration of Hindu philosophy, a call to be kind to animals, and a very challenging method of asana practice. I was hooked.

My desire was to become a teacher so that I could pass this gift on to others. I marveled at how my favorite yoga teachers seemed to effortlessly teach classes that opened my heart physically, mentally and spiritually. It was like magic. I wanted to be that kind of magician.

Now I was in the thick of the training, and realizing the amount of information expected of a yoga teacher was daunting. We had experts in anatomy and Sanskrit come teach 3-day modules that barely scratched the surface of those disciplines. In addition, we were studying the Yoga Sutras, Bhagavad Gita, Haṭha Yoga Pradipika, dozens of mantras, vinyasa sequencing, yoga assists (huge in Jivamukti), meditation, creating themes for classes, and more. It was overwhelming!

How could I possibly remember it all?

Teaching yoga is not as easy as it looks!

At the end of 2011, 300-hour yoga teaching certification in hand, I migrated back down to New Orleans for the winter. I was blessed to be asked to teach at Swan River. I took advantage of the fact that all of the teachers were taking a week off for the Christmas holidays, and got permission to teach one class per day during that stretch.

In those halcyon days of my teaching I did not worry so much about how many students showed up, but I had lots of anxiety about being able to give the ones who did a great experience. I had serious imposter syndrome. There was so much to remember in each class! The class theme, the sequence, the names and anatomical foundations of the poses, the names of students, etc; I would look out at the student’s faces, and no one would be smiling. I perceived each serious student face as a personal failure. Shouldn’t they be smiling?

Over that week I worked through my insecurities. There was a student named Sara who kept coming back. She wasn’t smiling, either, but she was consistent. She was my lifeline. This was helping someone, even if it was because I had the only class on the schedule. Yet after the other teachers came back, Sara still came to my class. I still feel so much gratitude for her.

My brain is not a fried egg, but I might have scrambled it.

My momma talkin' to me tryin' to tell me how to live. But I don't listen to her 'cause my head is like a sieve. ~Cheech & Chong’s ”Earache My Eye”

About the time that Cheech & Chong were at the peak of their popularity, I was a teenager smoking way too much pot. First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign and the this is your brain on drugs commercials only made me want to smoke more. It was obvious to me that the dangers were being overstated, and I would neither become a heroin addict, nor the stinky part of a breakfast sandwich. I just wanted to fit in with the cool kids who hung out in the woods behind my house.

If I could, I would go back and say to that younger self, “hey buddy, wait until you are in your twenties.” Science is finding that pot is not good for the developing adolescent brain. I don’t know if it was the weed I began smoking regularly at 15, or just the brain I was born with, but now I have a really hard time remembering things.

I forget faces, for example, a mild and self-diagnosed case of prosopagnosia (facial blindness). It happens when I see someone I know in a place where I don’t expect to see them, like seeing a yoga student at a hat store. They will start talking to me and I will be frantically trying to figure out how I know them, and why I am in a hat store.

Of course I forget names easily, which is more common. I forget large swaths of my life; friends tell stories about me that spark no memory. I forget the details of almost everything I read. I forget the dialogues in movies. My mind truly is like a sieve.

For most of my life I have been very self-conscious about my memory. I use humor and wit as the smoke and mirrors that disguise my memory deficits. I lean heavily on the parts of my brain that work better. I have good pattern recognition and excel at puns and rhymes. I am intuitive with placement of objects in space. I am a great listener, and don’t get annoyed by people who tell the same story over and over. It’s all new to me.

Knowing all this, it is no surprise that remembering all of the intricacies of a yoga teaching practice is a challenge.

The song that began my journey of remembering.

In the United States we just can’t help ourselves. As much as most of us hate standardized testing, it is still a model that most educational systems use to validate a student’s progress. The Jivamukti Yoga Teacher Training was no exception. We had a written portion of our final exam that we needed to pass in order to be certified. My ally in the quest to conquer the test turned out to be the ukulele that I carried around with me everywhere I went.

One of the skills that I have developed in the place of memory is the ability to make up songs about whatever is going on around me. And so it was that I wrote my first mnemonic song, the Shatkarma Kriya Song. The Shatkarmas are six yogic techniques to purify the body, outlined by Svatmarama in the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā. We all knew they were going to be on the test. I played the song for a couple friends, and soon I was playing it for little groups of students wherever I went. I was on to something! Music helps us remember.

Here is the song I wrote to help remember the shatkarmas:
(My friend Helida recorded this video in a canoe the day after the test)

The Shatkarma Kriyas song recorded at the 2011 Jivamukti Yoga Teacher Training.

Without going too far down the shatkarma kriyas hole, here is a quick overview:

There is a lot more to know about the shatkarmas than the one-word descriptions in my song, but single words can remind us of larger concepts. They are the seeds for memory.

• Dhautī is washing the digestive tract.

• Basti is cleansing the colon.

• Netī eliminates mucus from the sinuses (using a Neti Pot, for example).

• Naulī is churning the abdominal muscles.

• Trāṭaka is fixing the gaze, most famously by staring at a candle’s flame without blinking.

• Kapālabhātī is a breathing technique that “shines the skull.”

• Agni Sara, literally fire wash, is a pranayama technique that purifies the organs of the abdomen.

The yoga of memorization

Thousands of classes later I am an accomplished yoga teacher. I have learned to manage the challenges of remembering. My best classes are journeys that begin with my harmonium and chanting of mantras. We then flow through philosophical themes, storytelling, playful sequences, anatomy tips, and demonstrations.

My advice to new yoga teachers. Be humble. We can’t be everything to everyone.

Svādhyāya, besides being fun to say, is the Sanskrit word for self-study. It’s the key to success in business and in life. Trying to see ourselves clearly is really hard. I didn’t want the world to know I have a hard time remembering things. To my ego, it feels like admitting I am stupid. Yet wisdom and intelligence take many forms, and we all are wise and intelligent in our own unique ways. Understanding what those qualities are, as well as our weaknesses, is svādhyāya.

The clarity that comes from self-inquiry is useful. It is useful to know what we are passionate about in the yoga realm, and who we want to serve. Then we can stop putting energy into learning the things that don’t serve our mission. If your goal is to teach trauma-informed yoga, then perhaps learning the Sanskrit names of the poses are not as important.

I personally love beginner to intermediate-level vinyasa, chanting mantras, meditation, and yoga philosophy. I don’t spend much time learning the gentler forms of yoga; yin yoga, restorative yoga, chair yoga, trauma informed yoga, yoga nidra. I am also not obsessed with doing complex arm balances and super advanced asana. Those are all incredible practices, and I have some familiarity with all of them. But I actively pursue deepening my knowledge in the forms of yoga I am passionate about. If a student wants something different, I refer them to another teacher who can help them.

Cutting out the parts that don’t serve me, there is still a vast ocean of knowledge I immerse myself in. To help me navigate those waters, I have developed a strategy of remembering.

Mnemonic Methods of Mastering Memory (mmmm…)

1. Decide if it’s worth remembering. Use svādhyāya to ask yourself if something is truly worth putting extra effort into remembering. I think of my brain as a hard drive with limited space. If it fills up with spam then there is no room for important data. I enjoy dad jokes, but I don’t really want to spend my precious time remembering them.

2. Establish a connection to something already remembered. Our brains create neural networks that strengthen over time with use. This is helpful with remembering names, for example. When someone tells me their name, I will think of other people with that name, or something it reminds me of. Connecting a visual image is powerful here. If you meet someone named Matt, imagine them rolled up into a yoga mat. Let them go when you get to your next yoga class.

3. Use wordplay mnemonics. I love words. Rhyming, acronyms and alliteration are all great tools. Music is the most memorable way to remember for me. If there is a song that has a chorus I can swap out words with, it is very helpful.
   
   For example, I had a hard time remembering how to pronounce “mnemonic,” because the ‘m’ at the beginning would trip my mind up. I began practicing the mantra “Kali Durga Namo Nama” by chanting “Kali Durga Namo mnemonic!” Now I say mnemonic the right way most of the time! Kali helped me overcome the demon of mispronunciation!

4. Through repetition, the magic will rise. My teacher Sharon Gannon loved to tell us this. She said it so often that I easily remember it. The more we repeat something silently or out loud, the more likely we are to remember it. But remember, it takes time.

   
   We have all studied for an exam using flashcards. This is a type of repetition that is helpful. If you are like me, most of the facts and figures you crammed into your brain like that have probably slipped back out. The element of time is the other important factor. If you circle back regularly to those flashcards, or to your journal, or to a book you love, and remind yourself of the facts and figures, you are more likely to remember them in the long term.

The transformative power of remembering

After my teacher training, I got a job orking at the Jivamukti Yoga Center in NYC that lasted for six years. During that time, there was a teacher there whose classes were always full, in a room that held over 75 yogis on their mats. Her name is Rima Rabbath. She has great dharma talks and her vinyasa sequences are imaginative and challenging, but not more so than the other Jivamukti teachers who taught there, who had smaller followings. There was one thing that I noticed about her that really set her apart. She remembered everyone’s name.

Because there were so many people in her class, the first part of the class was spent moving mats around (fortunately she had assistants helping her). Whenever a new face came into the room, she would ask them their name, and repeat it back. She would find out who they knew, how they got there, making connections. At some point in the class she would say their name again, giving them encouragement. She would mention lots of people during the class. In a sea of students, we were each made to feel special. Even if it was our first time there.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

As I evolve as a teacher, what is most important to me is that I give my students an experience. I want every class to be a journey. It begins with letting them know that they are part of the journey, that I remember their name. When we are meeting someone, we often get overwhelmed with the emotions they spark, and their name sometimes slips through. So the yogic practice of breathing and being present is powerful. Remembering names will revolutionize your teaching practice, especially when it’s a student’s first class and they are deciding whether they want you to be their teacher.

All of the great yoga teachers I know have their own unique method for teaching. If you pay attention, you will notice they repeat themselves. The repetitions will show up in their alignment cues, the philosophy they share, the way they pronounce Sanskrit words, the themes they choose. I used to see this as a personality quirk, but know I realize it is a sign of mastery.

A great teacher follows their passions and leaves out the parts of the practice that don’t serve them. Through repetition they create an experience for the students that is reliable and that becomes familiar and comforting.

By letting go of trying to remember everything, I have become better at remembering some things quite well. I use all of the tools in my Mnemonic Methods of Mastering Memory toolbox to help me.

I use it to plan my classes. I can now tell stories that continue throughout the class, so that the climax of the story happens around the time the students are moving into the peak pose. I can connect elements of philosophy to specific poses, or parts of the story. I have songs about anatomy that help me remember muscles and their connections to bones.

Being able to manage memory, and apply it to your teaching practice, is powerful. I have been able to overcome imposter syndrome by realizing that I have lots of gifts and wisdom that I can share. I have befriended with my brain's limited capacity for memory, and instead of seeing it as a handicap, I see it as the catalyst for this unique journey I am embarked upon with mnemonics.

I have even gotten much better at remembering students’ names, and can usually get them to smile when I mention them in class. To be yogic about it, their smile and mine are one and the same. I wish the same for you.

The Don’t Forget Yoga Podcast

If you are a new yoga teacher who struggles to remember all of the aspects of teaching, check out my new Don’t Forget Yoga Podcast, helping new yoga teachers absorb yogic wisdom with music, mantras and mnemonics. I will be diving deeper into all of the ideas mentioned in this blog post, and talking to other teachers and memory experts along the way. I hope you will join me on this journey!

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.” ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Preface

Today I am home riding out my second bout of Covid, which has given me time to reflect and organize my life. In doing so, I found this blog post, which I had begun writing in April of 2020, in the midst of the first wave of Covid. During that “pause” I had reconnected to my creative spirit, and was writing a lot, but never finished this one. At the time I didn’t realize how many of my friends and family members would become amateur scientists and doctors during the pandemic. I am still surprised at the certainty most people feel about their own opinions being facts.

I found some interesting themes running through this piece and decided to finish it now that we have some hindsight, even though I don’t think any of us are seeing 2020 with 20/20 vision yet. Nor will we ever.

Conspirituality: a hybrid system of belief

Conspirituality is a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews . . . It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new paradigm’ worldview.

~ Journal of Contemporary Religion, The Emergence of Conspirituality

The Covid-19 wet market conspiracy

When I first heard that a pandemic was emerging from a wet market in China, I was not one bit surprised. I went vegan in the nineties during the era of Mad Cow Disease. Feeding cows to cows was the crime against nature that started it. The news cycle exaggerated it. The Texas cattle ranchers were suing Oprah for mentioning it. Ag-gag laws were becoming prevalent in reaction to the nascent animal rights movement highlighting the horrors of factory farming.

More zoonotic diseases came afterwards; SARS, Avian influenza, Swine Flue. I saw each of them as karma from the way we treat animals, and dress rehearsals for something bigger. In 2020 the Covid-19 virus made is way across the sea. It was inevitable, and I thought to myself, “now people will see how abusing animals comes back to haunt us!” Of course, for the umpteenth time in my life, I was overly optimistic.

It wasn’t long at all before the US president began sewing seeds of confusion and Covid-19 conspiracy theories started appearing. Of course.

I reluctantly admit, there is equally probable possibility is that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Without an admission from the Chinese, we will never know. As the virus became politicized, the story of the liberal media suppressing the lab leak theory became well known. Censorship leads to conspiracy, because we all want to know what is being hidden from us, and without reliable information our imaginations will fill in the blanks.

Along with the lab leak theory, I started hearing wilder conspiratorial whisperings from my closest friends, and it got me thinking. What’s really going on?

The chaos theory of conspiracy

As a scientist of the internal realms, the yogi observes the rhythms of the natural world as it is. She understands that relative truth has no single-pointed location in mind nor matter, and ultimate truth is beyond the reach of either.

All matter is vibrational, meaning it pulsates. Life is an interplay of expansive and contractive forces, and our individual and collective understanding of everything is always changing.

Mainstream media, a conspiracy?

Many of the official stories we hear from the mainstream media about Covid-19 are contractive. Anyone we meet could pass a deadly disease on to us, or we could be the vector that transmits the virus to them. These ideas become the white noise in the background of every human interaction. Part of us clenches like a fist.

We bring our worldviews and prejudices to the table. For those of us who accept that established news sources are being truthful, we still have to choose sides. Within the boundaries of mainstream thinking, the liberal tribe tends to lean towards expansive explanations, and the conservative tribe tends to ratchet things down another notch.

The real conspiracy driving mainstream media is money. Whoever is paying for, or profiting from the news, is going to shape it to fit their narrative. It used to be that giant corporations selling products were the driving force, influencing stories from the top down. The age of social media has shifted the paradigm, because now each individual gets to “choose” what we click on, and that influences content from the ground up. News outlets and viewers become more tribal; the most outlandish headline gets the click, and the individual joins the wave of his tribe in manifesting the reality we want to buy in to.

The Venn Diagram of Conspiracy + Reality

The stories we hear from the conspiratorial dark web offer a boundless, expansive view of the world. Flat Earth, aliens, and illuminati are all discussed rationally. Nothing is outside the realm of possibility.

Within the overall expansive nature of conspiracy, there are subsets of expansion and contraction. The liberal-leaning tribes tend to go with new age explanations, which push us out towards the cosmic. The conservative-leaning folks are attracted to beliefs in secret cabals and lizard people, intermingling racist interpretations that draw us into a paranoid worldview.

There is even a fun conspiracy middle ground. The aliens and illuminati are trying to control the world, but the more powerful forces of the divine plan will bring in the Age of Aquarius. At last, a space where all conspiritualists can get along!

Inhale. Exhale. Truth is the wave, we are the particles.

Some are saying that Bill Gates may have created coronavirus to microchip people with a quantum tattoo. There is also the one about Covid-19 being caused by 5G technology, or alternatively created as a diversion so the technology can be rolled out. The mainstream media reaction is to discount all of these theories completely. But is 5G a benign technology? Does Bill Gates have an agenda beyond creating vaccines to reduce suffering the world? Was Covid-19 created as a bioweapon?

Mathematics, the language of the universe, is perhaps the only reliable system for generating true statements. Once we mix capitalism, politics and religion together within a human language, all bets are off.

My way of interpreting all the data I get from the outside world is to apply the “as above, so below” paraphrase from the Hermetic Emerald Tablet, (proving that my conspiracy theory credentials are solid). My armchair understanding of physics surely puts me further into conspiritual territory. Nonetheless, thinking about particles and waves as metaphors for truth might be useful.

When we look out at the media landscape, it is a swirling wave of possibilities. We google “coronavirus” and millions of possibilities are displayed. We click on the one that appeals most to us (or to the A.I. that presented them to us), and get our particle of truth. We accept or reject the results, and the A.I. roulette wheel spins again, so we can pick another particle of “truth” from the wave of organized chaos. We believe we are scientifically curating our results into a big picture of truth, but are we?

It surely gives us hits of dopamine every time we find a ‘fact’ that aligns with our beliefs, and we go seeking more of it. Zooming out, we are the particles, becoming our own truths, finding the similar human truth particles swirling in our communal wave of truth. Culture is the scientific experiment, waiting for the various waves of truthiness to fight it out and establish a new paradigm of absolute truth. A paradigm which will eventually crumble, because we are humans, not mathematical equations. If we invest all of our certainty in truthiness bull market of the day, we are likely to lose when it crashes.

Make sure you buy some other possibility bonds.

Can’t We All Get Along?

I don’t know… I hope so. As I tell people in my life about getting covid again, I get the waves of answer paradigms. “Are you vaccinated?” “Are you OK?” “Did you wear a mask when you (…)?” I can almost read the thoughts beneath them. “Is he one of us, or did he have it coming?” I hope that is not the case, but it’s where my mind tends to go.

From my experience as a particle, the virus hasn’t been to hard to deal with, and the vaccine didn’t cause me any side effects. I wish it was the same for everyone, I feel sadness for all of the suffering caused by both. Some of us have strong immune systems, and some need a… booster. And sometimes one persons medicine is another’s poison. Our bodies are complex systems, and all react differently. Sometimes we get lucky, sometimes we draw the shortest straw.

To my friends, acquaintances, and everyone else who might read this, here is my suggestion; Don’t assert your certainty. Be humble, put your truth out there as something you are open to discussing. Our minds are more resilient in wave form.

We pulsate. Being talked down to by angry people asserting their righteous truth, makes us contract. Hearing people explain their beliefs with humility and the willingness to admit uncertainty, is attractive and expansive. (Having no beliefs at all is the negative result of too much expansion, which we should also be wary of).

The middle path is the way back to the center of the Venn diagram, where truth is a wave of possibilities, often overlapping. The center is the place where collaborations and solutions are discovered. Lab leaks and wet markets both suck and spread disease, we should deal with them rationally. The center is where we can weed out the most extreme narratives and find common ground.

We are more similar than different, let’s find the Venn diagrams between us!

Last question: What kind of a S.N.A.G. conspiritualist would I be, without ending this piece with an overused Rumi quote?

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”

―Rumi

hex:

• verb - cast a spell on; bewitch.

• noun - a magic spell; a curse.

It was the summer of 2011 and I was housesitting in Massachusetts. A friend had given me a joint that had DMT sprinkled into it, and I was sitting outside on the porch looking out into the verdant vines and foliage of a perfect sunny day. I took several draws on the joint and laid back with my eyes closed, hoping for the blast off into realms of machine elves and exquisite realities I had heard Terrence McKenna talk about.

With my eyes closed I began to experience beautiful colors and sacred geometries, unlike anything I could imagine in normal conscious states. The geometries were turning and twisting, and though they were fascinating I knew that I was not getting the full experience of rocketing into another dimension McKenna often described. I did not get a big enough dose perhaps, and there was a little fear keeping me grounded.

Still, I was having a revelation. The geometries were a wall that I needed to break through to get to the next level, but the wall was not made of visual shapes. I suddenly had an epiphany that the boundary between everyday consciousness and universal awareness was made of words and language.

“In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained,” ~Robin Cahart-Harris

We come into this world a blank slate, knowing how to cry and suckle but without the patterns of language that transform our reality from immediate urges and objects into the secondhand symbols of mouth noises and eventual written symbols that allow us to communicate our experience. Longing for connection, we learn these symbols as we grow and develop in order to communicate our needs and understand the world around us.

Caught in the Devil’s Bargain

With every word we learn and every sentence we speak, we are trading the felt experience for symbolism. It is an unavoidable aspect of learning language. We are born in specific places and times, and as babies we have no choice in the matter. Arguably, as souls we have no choice in the matter we are born into.

As babies primed for spoken language by evolution, we begin to learn the symbolic mouth noises from our parents and other children and adults around us. Some of these lessons come with intensity and trauma, giving certain words and ideas more power. To become a member of a family, community and culture we gradually give up the open-mindedness of our infant consciousness, and create structures for our thoughts, words and actions.

These structures become the contracts we make with the world. They are truly hexes on our perceptions of reality. Before we have a choice, we have the language of our ancestors, as full of contradictions and misguided notions as it is of useful understanding. We are bound by the stabilities and/or psychoses of our family members. We are under the spell of the culture we are born into. For most of us, we are hexed by faith religions that are deeply flawed and designed to control our minds.

A common spell to break the spirit

I remember a moment in high school, I was walking and singing a song. Someone nearby said “don’t give up your day job,” implying that my voice was not good enough. I took this spell to heart and passed it on to others when I heard them singing, regardless of how pleasant their voices were. This is a common spell, telling someone that they can’t sing well. It seems like a joke, but many of us believe it and give it power. Singing is one of the purest expressions of spirit, and this spell is meant to crush that spirit. Wether intended or not, it comes from a place of jealousy and has kept many of us from being able to express ourselves through song.

Trump and the Art of the Hex

It is hard not to feel discouraged in these times, seeing societies becoming more divided. I have gained some understanding by knowing my mother. She is one of the kindest people I know and my compassion and gentleness certainly were learned from her, but there is another aspect of her psyche that transforms her into a fervent supporter of our president. She comes to this support through her religious faith, a form of born-again Christianity. While the world struggles with climate change, gun violence, war, famine and factory farms, the religious right focuses their energy and resources on ending homosexuality and abortion, which they have convinced their followers are the main evils of our age. Certainly we should have open debates about if and when abortion is justified, but cursing people for their biologically-based sexuality is in no way justifiable, and neither topic is at the top of the list of world problems. I sometimes wish I was born gay so I could be a better teacher for my mother.

My mother was born in Kansas, and like most people born in rural USA in her time, the hex of Christianity was placed at an early age. If she was born in another place she might have been hexed into being a Muslim, a Hindu, a Jew or a Jain. In her place and time she was indoctrinated by her family, culture and community to have the Christian worldview. The hex is deep and cunning, one that only a devil could devise. For within it, there is the spell cast that whoever questions its authority is being influenced by its deepest enemy, Satan. To entertain any other worldview is to be condemned to eternal suffering. The truth might be out there, but to seek it is a sin.

Through similar vexing hexes we are witnessing the Christian religious ‘moral’ majority in the USA supporting the presidency of one of the most immoral humans to ever occupy the job. Vile and divisive words come from his lying mouth daily, words that cast spells on the minds of people already trapped like flies in a web of lies. In the past week we have seen mail bombs sent by a Trump supporter to the president’s critics, and a Jewish synagogue shooting by a Jew-hating psychopath. The president blames the media, his so-called “enemy of the people.” Does he know not what he does?

The Abrahamic religions all evolve from a common beginning, honoring a god who is vengeful and jealous and violent. He is the human ego writ large, much like the president himself. A god created in our image. A hex cast thousands of years ago, refined through the telling of it, manipulated by governments and monarchies, and fed to our children before they have a chance to understand the implications. Christians justify Trump’s lies and hate speech because it furthers their agenda, and his rise to power is even called a biblical mandate by some. The bible foretells of an apocalypse, and the believers work to make it so.

A.I. and the future of hexing

“as machines are getting closer to acquiring human-like language abilities, they are also absorbing the deeply ingrained biases concealed within the patterns of language use.” ~Hannah Devlin

With the rise of artificial intelligence we are ourselves becoming god-like, or at least like the gods in our mythologies. We are creating machines in our image, and teaching them to ‘think’ with our languages.

There is a fear that we will create a machine intelligence that will become self-aware and then decide to destroy us. We know that our actions are creating havoc on the planet, and that a powerful yet rational life form would probably want to mitigate that problem by whatever means necessary. In Hollywood we create new mythologies of Killer A.I., showing our own fears and prejudices.

The clear and present threat posed by A.I. is not that is will wake up, but that it will remain as it is, hexed by the same uses of language that hex us all. Programmed mostly by men, fed data that fills it with racial and gender bias, giving more powerful tools to the spell casting inherent in our own psyches. We now know that social media uses algorithms that divide us by showing us content that reinforces our own beliefs, no matter how flawed.

How to break the spell?

This is the question I ask myself every day. Although I am a person who believes in compassion and equality, I do not claim to be hex proof. Human life is a path that begins with learning what others around us believe. If we are lucky we are given tools to help us dissect that knowledge and realize universal truths. The introspective practices of meditation and the use of psychoactive plant medicines can be powerful techniques for breaking the spells we are under. Sharing our insights with others helps us all refine and move forward.

There are thought leaders attempting to put fail safes into A.I. that will protect us from harming one another and ultimately protect us should machines become self-aware, but we are not putting enough effort into becoming aware of our selves. We are deeply entangled in our own misunderstandings of reality, and our us-versus-them ways of seeing the world. As woke as we intend to be, becoming woke is not an easy process.

The world’s religions are major purveyors of harmful hexes, but as Sam Harris writes in his book Waking Up:

“…I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.”

We are at a defining moment in history, with science helping us dissect fact from fiction. Yet without a spiritual wisdom to ground us, scientific understanding can still amplify our worst impulses. We should not throw the baby of spirituality out with the bathwater of religion, but instead learn from these traditions that Love is the true holy grail. I love my mother, as much as I disagree with her worldview. I see the goodness in her soul beyond the harm she supports with her religious views. I don’t expect to change her, but I do hope to offer words to help others change themselves.

The Golden Rule is still golden. Let’s have meaningful debates, talk about things that matter, try to understand where we are each coming from. We must denounce the thoughts, words and actions that divide us and cause harm. We must find it in our hearts to love the sinner, and discredit the sin.

The YMCA was involved in a good amount of my childhood adventure. I remember wearing a headdress and earning feathers in the Y Indian Guides. It was a place for father and son to bond. The program began in the 1920s with St. Louis YMCA Director Harold S. Keltner and his guide, Joe Friday, an Ojibwe Indian. In speaking with his friend, Keitner saw the wisdom in the Native American family traditions, and formed the organization in response.

When I was a bit older my parents sent me and my sister to YMCA Summer Camps in Upstate NY. The first was a day camp called Camp Iroquois in Manlius, NY. When I got older I spent stretches of my summer at an overnight camp called Camp Tousey, north of Syracuse near Alexandria Bay. At both camps we were divided into “tribes” named after the Five Nations, comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. I didn’t understand where the names came from, or what genocide was, or how the use of the Native names by white people in the United States was problematic. I was a child, and it was the seventies.

When it came time to play cowboys and Indians, I always wanted to be the Indian. I thought the Native Americans were so much cooler, with bows and arrows, beautiful headdresses and long hair, all the other tropes that I was presented with at that age. I was moved by the famous commercial of the “crying Indian” paddling his canoe through a polluted river to stand by the roadside as white people throw litter out of their car. I have been an environmentalist ever since, even if the source material was problematic. When my father watched football my favorite team was the Washington Redskins, because of their logo and Native American branding.

As with all of youth, I am working to let go. I am not a football fan, but I am glad the Redskins changed their name. It is good to know that the Y Indian Guides are now Adventure Guides, and that we are waking up as a culture to all of the harms we have caused, and continue to cause, and how words have meaning and can be tools of oppression. The white European settlers committed a genocide, and that kind of karma sticks around for a long time even if it is perfectly acknowledged and we try to do make amends. But we are human, and perfect is not what we do.

Every time we remember we rewrite our own history.

My father sent me a letter last year, telling me that Camp Iroquois was changing its name to Camp Evergreen. He asked me if I remembered going there to plant evergreen trees. I do remember, now that he mentioned it.

I am not sure which memories are true. It is the human condition to mis-perceive, and therefore mis-remembering is a given. Every time we remember we re-write our own story. I think that there were some seedlings planted in my head by all of the Indian lore, as flawed and culturally insensitive as it was.

I went on to appropriate a bit of Korean culture when I studied Tae Kwon Do, which led me to appropriate the wisdom of Buddhism, and then to appropriate yoga philosophy from the Indian culture. I have sat with shamans from Latin America, and I have sung with indigenous people in Mexico. Looking at my life, it seems most of my spiritual beliefs are from somewhere else, and the Christianity my ancestors gave me finds no fertile ground in my heart, much to my mother’s dismay.

Should I be a Christian because I was born in Syracuse? Or do I get to decide my own spiritual path, because I am human?

My spiritual name, Pashupa, is of course not the one I was given by my parents. It came into my life when I was younger and more naive, but also from a pure place, and now it is part of me. When I speak to myself, it is the name I use.

I have seen what I have seen and done what I have done. I live serving to respect all beings and asking for forgiveness where I have caused harm.

But the memories are there. The feelings of closeness with my father forged in Y Indian Guides are ones that I have worked all my life to regain, after the trials and tribulations of my adolescence pried us apart.

It is the diversity of this world that I love. I love of the ones who treat the Earth with kindness, the ones who understand the depth of the interconnectedness that runs through animal, rock and plant. I don’t know how to bow to spirit without thinking of the four directions, the sacredness of water, or the connection I have to Agni, Hindu god of fire.

I would not teach wisdom to another in the same ways that I gained it, but I am grateful for the teachings. Some traditions would say that this all happens the only way it can happen. The world is an amalgamation of traditions that have been flowing together peacefully and forcing themselves onto one another violently since we were monkeys living in the trees. Or maybe since we were single-celled life looking for ways to double up.

Life is complex, and we either live in flow with paradox, or suffer by trying to force the world to fit into our worldview.

There is something evergreen in the truth, and all the rest eventually falls away. I long for a world where all sacred traditions are held with reverence and shared with gratitude, and where we all learn from one another with curious compassion. May it be so.

The Carpentry of Yoga Anatomy

In March I moved from Colorado to Western Massachusetts to apprentice with a friend in his carpentry business. I had always wanted to learn the proper way to build things, and the current shortage of skilled carpenters worked in my favor. That same month I began an advanced yoga teacher training led by American yoga innovator Amy Ippoliti and her school, Vesselify.

I wondered if my brain could handle learning two different disciplines at once. It turns out that carpentry and yoga anatomy have a lot in common!

Level, Plumb and Plane in Carpentry

My first day on the job my friend and carpentry boss/friend/mentor Matt Kozuch asked me, “Are you down with LPP?” He then went on to explain that in carpentry we should always be aware of Level, Plumb, and Plane.

• Level is the horizontal plane. Using a bubble level (also called a spirit level!), we can determine when an object is parallel with the Earth. Liquid naturally becomes level with the earth due to gravity. Spirit levels have translucent tubes filled with liquid spirits, often ethanol. An air bubble inside of the tube floats on top of the liquid, and indicates where level is (here’s a fun spirit level history).

• Plumb is the vertical plane. It is 90° perpendicular to the level plane. Plumb can be found in empty space by suspending a pointed weight on a string (plumb bob). If a vertical structure exists, then a spirit level held vertically on its surface can be used to find plumb.

• Plane is the relationship between two structures, the alignment. Absolute horizontal (level) and vertical (plumb) planes are relational to the Earth, but structures must also align with each other. Two pieces of drywall on the same plane should fit together without one protruding, and if the room you are building is rectangular, the planes of the walls should intersect at 90° angles (square planes).

Level, Plumb and Plane in Yoga Anatomy

In studying human anatomy, we divide the body into planes so we have reference points. In yoga anatomy, when we want to help students find alignment, these reference points are essential. There are three main anatomical planes to consider.

• Coronal/Frontal Plane divides the body into front (anterior) and back (posterior).

• Sagital Plane divides the body into left and right (medial is towards the middle, lateral is outward to the sides.)

• Transverse Plane divides the body into top (superior) and bottom (inferior) at a chosen point in the body.

The anatomical planes of our bodies move in relationship to the Earth, but level and plumb are still useful concepts to integrate into our yoga practice. It is also useful to identify planes in our bodies.

For example, the top front of our pelvis has bony protrusions on either side called the anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS). Some yoga teachers call them hip points. If we are standing in tadasana with perfect alignment, they will be level to the ground, and parallel to the front of the mat. Stepping the left leg back into lunge, the left ASIS will move back to be slightly further from the front edge of the mat than the right one. The plane of the pelvis is now facing slightly left, at about 30º. If we lowered our back heel and transitioned to trikonasana, “opening” our hips to the left, the angle will be around 150º (I’m estimating the angles; it will vary from body to body). It is helpful to become aware of the pelvic alignment in each pose. A slight turn of a foot or toso will affect pelvic alignment, which will in turn affect alignment up through the torso.

Building with alignment in carpentry

If a carpenter begins installing a frame for a window, and the sill isn’t level, it creates a misalignment that affects the boards around it. The vertical framing boards will either be out of plumb, or out of square. Instead of 45º angles in the corners, each board will need to be cut at a different angle. The window will have trouble opening. The homeowner will get upset and grumpy, and soon the whole neighborhood will be up in arms.

Corrective Carpentry

The window in this photo was part of my first carpentry remodeling job, installing new windows on a porch. We are looking at a side view of the porch, which is connected to the main structure of the house, on the right. The porch has settled over time. You can see the red arrows pointing in a downward angle to the left, in line with the original framing. The yellow arrows show where we built new level framing and installed the windows. Because those lines are level, the windows are vertically aligned with the blue plumb line. All is squared at 90º angles.

Misalignment and the Kinetic Chain

The way the musculoskeletal parts of our body move together and effect one another, is called the kinetic chain. From toes to heels to shins to knees; from femurs to hips to spine to shoulders, arms, elbows, and hands. From the souls of our feet to the seat of our souls.

Misalignment in our bodies moves through the kinetic chain, with one joint compensating for another’s weakness or avoidance of pain. We carry the traumas of our past not only the ways we think, but also in the ways we move, and in the ways we hold ourselves in stillness.

In the photo above, the man is standing in his natural posture. Without the arrows a casual observer would probably not notice anything amiss. Humans are asymmetrical, and we are used to seeing each other that way.

Because his pelvis tilts to his left and his shoulders to his right, his left side body is elongated. His head and his pelvis are misaligned in the sagital plane, and he is most likely compensating for these misalignments in the ways he moves.

The two photos of the woman show how we can become misaligned through laziness. Our smart phones and other devices have brought the term text neck into our lexicon. For every inch that your head sits forward, it increases the weight of the head by approximately 10 lbs! It can cause everything from headaches to thoracic kyphosis and spinal degeneration.

By pressing her thighs back and engaging her lower back muscles, the proper alignment moves up through her kinetic chain. It feels natural to draw the shoulderblades onto the back, and the head and neck move towards the back plane. You can see the plumb line of good alignment runs from the top of the head through ears, shoulders, hips, knees, and down to the ankles. It takes some awareness and muscular engagement. Because our bones are the sturdiest parts of our anatomy, stacking them along the plumb line creates balance and allows our muscles to work as they were meant to.

Let’s Demo!

In carpentry the removal of pre-existing structures is called demo, short for demolition. During this phase the underlying framing is revealed. It is common during this phase to find that foundations have shifted, or that previous carpenters were sloppy.

In yoga, demo is short for demonstration. Yoga teachers will demo a pose to “break it down”, showing the common misalignments, and then rebuild it by demonstrating the proper alignments. Here we are going to look at a yoga pose that students commonly misalign in, Agni Stambhasana.

Alignment in Agnistambhasana

Also known as fire log pose, ankle-to-knee pose, or double pigeon.

In Sanskrit agni is fire, stambha is log or statue. Agnistambhasana is a pose in which our hips are on fire and our legs are the logs. The posture helps create opening in the hips. The photo above shows:

• Yellow arrows - The log plane. Proper alignment of shins and hip points (anterior superior iliac spine) of the pelvis, which are parallel to each other and the front of the yoga mat. The stacking of the lower legs like fire logs is where the pose gets its name. The feet should be dorsiflexed so they are at 90º angles to the shins. Keep the feet engaged so they don’t roll onto the tops, but stay on the outer edges.

• Blue arrows - The plumb line. In this pose, the ankles and knees are stacked in a plumb line. Even if our hips are too tight to allow the opposing ankles and knees to touch, an imaginary line dropped from above should go straight through both of them.

• Red arrows - The plane of ankles and knees in the photo shows the misalignment. For the student to be in proper alignment, he would need to move his top leg towards the left side of the image, until the red lines are in line with the blue lines.

If you have tight hips, it might take time and practice to get your hips open enough to come into that alignment while sitting upright. Inwardly rotating the thighs while plugging the femur bones into the hip sockets will help. In the video below, I teach the proper alignment, and give a variation for people whose hips are too tight to sit upright in the pose.

How to achieve proper alignment in Agnistambhasana, also known as fire log pose, ankle-to-knee pose, or double pigeon.

Building a solid structure

Yoga is a tool that can help us bring mindfulness to our alignment. Over time we can reduce pain and discomfort by finding the level and plumb lines in our bodies, and developing the strength and flexibility to align our musculoskeletal planes.

I will be going deeper into the metaphysical concepts of yoga and carpentry alignment in an upcoming episode of the Warrior One Podcast, so make sure you subscribe to go deeper into these concepts and how they relate to yoga philosophy. For an in-person or online assessment of your body’s alignment, with exercises to correct them, reach out for an appointment! If you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below.

Oṃ pūrṇamadaḥ pūrṇamidam pūrṇāt pūrṇamudacyate
pūrṇasya pūrṇamādāya pūrṇamevāvaśiṣyate
oṃ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ

That is whole. This is whole. From the whole the whole becomes manifest. From the whole when the whole is negated, what remains is again the whole.

from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. (listen to audio of Manorama chanting the mantra.)

The sun makes a sacrifice

In the Rig Veda Vishvakarman is the personification of ultimate reality, the creative aspect of the divine. He is known in various places as Pashupati, Purusha and Narayana. 

Vishvakarman had a daughter named Sanjana, she was spiritual consciousness. She married Surya, the sun, who became too bright for her over time. Vishvakarman stepped in and cut away one eighth of Surya’s body. The fragments fell smoldering to earth, where they became the discus of Vishnu, the trident of Shiva, and many other divine totems. 

In this story we witness spiritual consciousness, born from ultimate reality, influencing the Sun to sacrifice some of his brilliance. From his light body matter is created. He becomes both the manifest world and the light energy that allows us to see it. 

Energy is mass (multiplied by twice the speed of light)

Billions of light years later, a rather intelligent man named Albert Einstein would look up at the stars with disheveled hair and proclaimed, “E=mc2!”

The Solar Caterpillar

Those miraculous stars Einstein once gazed upon are billions and billions of Suryas. They are born from cosmic gases and dusts that are mutually attracted by the invisible force of gravity. The particles rubbing against each other eventually cause enough friction to create fusion. A star is born, fusing the most abundant gas in the universe, hydrogen, into helium. The energy created pushes out from the star’s core, keeping it from collapsing inward, while lighting the darkness.

The Cosmic Cocoon

After about ten billion years, the star begins to run out of hydrogen. Its core weakens, and it collapses in on itself. The fusion in the center stops while the outer layers continue fusing and expanding. For a while, it becomes a red giant. Eventually the outer layers burn off, and what remains is called a white dwarf. 

If the white dwarf is large enough its core will again become a reactor, fusing heavier and heavier elements and radiating energy outward. Once it fuses everything up to iron, the twenty-sixth element in the periodic table, shit gets real. The fusion of iron uses more energy than it radiates, and the star rapidly collapses in on itself. 

The Interstellar Butterfly

The star becomes as condensed as the laws of physics will allow, but the outer layers keep collapsing inward. The resulting backlash is an explosion we call a supernova. Supernovae are responsible for life as we know it. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson poetically describes the process:

“They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.”

The Hindu myth of the sun sacrificing part of himself to give us life is not far from the truth

To fuse the scattered elements of our mundane life into the higher purpose of radiating spiritual wisdom, we need time spent in introspection. Knowing ourselves intimately, we are able to give a part of ourselves to the greater good. There is no need to be overwhelmed by this thought. Just take one step at a time.

The next time your yoga teacher tells you to press down into your index finger knuckles in downward facing dog, remember the butterfly effect. The energy you place into that seemingly small movement will bring muscular tone to your arms. Your strengthened arms will support your heart to open. The fusion of molecules building muscles in your core will support your spiritual awakening. The contractions that strengthen your foundation will fuel the convictions radiating your wisdom. Your confidence and joy will ripple out from you like sonic waves from the explosions of stars. You will propagate the elements that support the life of your community. From one right action, the world is forever changed.

“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” ~ Hāfiz

Blessings to you, my friend, on this Easter Sunday. I was born on Easter, March 26, many moons ago. The date of Easter changes every year, based on the cycles of the sun and moon. It occurs on the Sunday following the first full moon, on or after the day of the vernal equinox. I have had two birthdays on Easter since my appearance on Earth, and am planning a big party for my next Easter birthday in 2062 (now you have enough clues to determine my age).

Christians celebrate the death and rebirth of Jesus on Easter. Others argue that the resurrection idea comes from older myths. If we apply science and intellectual curiosity, it is rather apparent that the stories are inspired by the cycles of the seasons that herald the death and rebirth of nature’s abundance, and longer days of sunshine. No matter the scientific stability of our own, personal, genius—most of us still find comfort in the stories.

Today I have been reflecting that springtime 2020 is a strange juxtaposition of days becoming longer and the fecundity of nature returning, while our response to Covid-19 is to go back indoors to reflect and socially isolate. It is as if Easter and Groundhog Day got mixed up; Jesus came out, saw his shadow, and decided to roll the rock back over his tomb and chill in the underworld for a few more days. In a thousand years, maybe that will be the story.

We can look at life as mundane and scientifically explained, or as a miracle with divine purpose. As a yogi, I like to ponder life from both perspectives.

What now seems like a lifetime ago, I took my (then) girlfriend to Georgia, to watch the Great American Solar Eclipse. We found a spot by Lake Blue Ridge in Chattahoochee National Forest and looked up as the sky darkened and the animals became quiet. Through solar binoculars we watched the Moon slowly cross in front of the Sun, until it perfectly covered the disc of the Sun. At that moment we could look with our naked eyes and see the Sun’s corona, the spectacular aura of plasma that surrounds the Sun.

In centuries past, it was a mystical experience to witness an eclipse. Before astronomy, we relied on stories about gods to explain natural occurrences. These gods always seemed to have human qualities, and be up to some kind of mischief. In Hindu mythology the god Vishnu, in female form as Mohini, was distributing the nectar of immortality (amrita) to the Hindu gods (devas), whose immortality had been temporarily lost. A demi-god (asura) named Rahu disguised himself as a deva so he could get the nectar. Just as Rahu took a sip, his deception was revealed by Surya and Chandra, the gods of the sun and moon. Mohini drew a sword and chopped off Rahu’s head, which had already become immortal from the amrita. The nectar had not made its way into his still-mortal body, which withered and died. His vengeful immortal head ate Surya (the sun). Since Rahu no longer had a body, Surya came back again. This cycle goes on, and thus the solar eclipse is explained!

Now that we understand the laws of physics that govern the orbits of the Earth and Moon, we know scientifically why solar eclipses occur. We also understand that the reason the moon exactly covers the sun during a solar eclipse is because “the sun’s diameter is about 400 times larger than that of the moon, and the sun is about 400 times farther away. So the sun and moon appear nearly the same size as seen from Earth.” What are the odds? Having watched it with my own eyes, knowing the science, I still had a mystical experience.

Corona is Latin for crown.

The corona of the sun, seen during solar eclipses, is created by sunlight bouncing off dust particles and scattering off of free electrons. It extends millions of miles into outer space and is much hotter than the surface of the Sun. 

The name Coronavirus refers to the characteristic appearance of virions, the infective form of the virus, under an electron microscope. The virions have “a fringe of large, bulbous surface projections creating an image reminiscent of a crown.” The microscopic images of the virus are quite stunning, and if we did not know what they depicted, might even be seen as beautiful.

It is easy to witness an eclipse and feel connected to the mysteries of the universe in a way some would call spiritual. It is not so easy to relate to the coronavirus from such a perspective. From a dualistic religious perspective, we might see and eclipse as holy and the coronavirus as evil. But is anything really that simple?

In yoga and in science, we look at these phenomenon differently.

Science can explain the physics of an eclipse, and the chemistry and biology of a virus. That helps us overcome superstitions. 

Yoga is both a science of internal observation, and a devotional path of reverence for the mystery of life. The yogi understands that everything is imbued with consciousness. The yogi views life through the lens of karma, which means action, not retribution. 

If I were to say to you, “this has happened because of that,” you should not believe me. I don’t know the secrets of the universe or understand the complexity of karma. I am skeptical of anyone who says he does. What I do believe, is that we have been living out of harmony with the natural world for some time, and that our behavior has consequences.

If we commit atrocities against the animal world, and in doing so come into contact with a virus that wipes out a percentage of the human population, that is karma. It is the action of humans encountering the actions of a virus. Science and yoga are in agreement on this explanation, although the scientist and yogi might disagree on where consciousness begins and ends. We can not change the actions of a virus, but we can change our relationship to the animal world. Compassion leads to peace. That is karma.

For the yogi, god is everywhere. For the scientist, god is nowhere.

The sun shines on us all just the same. The virus cares not what we believe. The question, then, is how do you want to live this one wild and precious life?

I admit it. I am scared.

Maybe not like you think. I am not scared I will run out of toilet paper or hand sanitizer. I am not even scared that I will get Covid-19, lose my ability to breathe, and then die alone in an overcrowded hospital. I know it is possible, it is just not what I am afraid of right now.

Right now I am scared because tonight I am hosting my first online Meditation and Sharing Circle. I am scared people will show up on Zoom and I will not be able to guide them through the 90 minutes cohesively. I am scared no one will show up. I am scared strangers will show up and judge me. I am scared friends will show up and be disappointed.

Did I mention that the theme of tonight's session is, "Love & Fear?"

Where does FEAR come from?

When we are born, we experience the universe as part of ourself. We don't know separation. Over time, we learn our name, how to differentiate this from that, wrong from right. Thus, the ego develops. The ego is very useful in helping us navigate through the world of objects, people, and places. It is not evil, or something to transcend. It is a tool.

It is only when we become completely ego-identified, that the trouble starts. When we take on separateness as our true identity. Our ego wants to control the world, but it is impossible to do so, and so we become fearful.

For example, when I start worrying that my online meditation class tonight will go badly, it causes me anxiety and suffering. All of the fears that I listed above are about my status in this world. Will I lose friends? Will strangers judge me harshly? Am I not good enough at this thing that I am offering for free (what my marketing guru Seth Godin calls imposter syndrome)?

Where does LOVE come from?

Some of what we call love is one ego clinging to another. "If my partner loved me, he would do so and so." When we give this kind of love and it is rejected, it crushes our ego, and we suffer.

The Love that conquers Fear is altogether different.

Ram Dass explains it thusly, "there’s the other part of you. The Atman, the heart, the intuitive wisdom, whatever that is, that merges, that goes out and balances and flows, and gives away everything and doesn’t care, it’s like the lilies in the field, the unconditional lover."

What yoga teaches us is that we are all droplets of water in the vast ocean of the divine. Each of us is perfect, as we are. We are aspects of god in conversation with herself. Unconditional love and compassion are infinite; the more we give the more there is to give.

So I need to circle back to my work tonight. If I look deeper, I remember I am not creating the meditation and sharing circle for my ego, the little me. I am channeling the idea of building a community, an idea that precedes me and does not belong to me. I am doing the work of the universe. If I can do it selflessly, then whatever happens is the will of the universe. It is the will of all of us, together. Thine will be done.

The great teaching that leads to happiness is to serve others, and not be attached to the outcome. The same way that the earth, air, water, and sunlight share themselves with you. The present, is a gift. Share it.

But what about Covd-19? Its effin' scary!

The truth is that we will all experience moments of fear and uncertainty. We can't simply love the virus out of existence. The teachings of yoga are not meant as an escape from physical reality, but as a means of engagement.

As I write this, I don't know anyone personally who has the virus. I expect that within a month, I will know several people who do, and perhaps I will have lost loved ones. I am mentally preparing myself for that, and for the possibility that I may become infected. No matter what comfort we take in our beliefs about the afterlife, there are hard times ahead.

I also see another side. The Earth's ecosystems have been overwhelmed by human activity for some time now. We have been taking her for granted and treating her with much disrespect. Nature has a way of finding equilibrium. Perhaps the virus is part of the Earth's immune system. The closing of businesses and travel restrictions have certainly slowed air pollution globally. It is a blessing that the Earth can take a breath.

I hope I don't come off as glib or uncaring. We are at the beginning of a long process, and none of us knows the ending. Our ego's greatest fear is not being able to control outcomes, and I experience that fear as much as anyone.

Love vs. Fear

I could not find hand sanitizer anywhere for the last couple weeks. I put more people at risk because I couldn't sanitize my hands as much as I would like to. That effect will spread back to the hoarders. Panic and fear will destroy us.

My Sanskrit teacher and friend Manorama teaches that we should "see everything as God." That includes the good and the bad; the behaviors of people, plants, animals and minerals. It is a difficult practice, but when we can ask, "how is this God ?" it at least gives us perspective.

When I look at the microscopic images of the Covid virus it seems to have aesthetic beauty. My mind recoils at this thought, but there it is. "How is this god?"

Another thought that causes me internal struggle, is the gratitude I feel for what my yoga teacher Amy Ippoliti this morning called "the Pause." This slowing down of the world is entangled with so much suffering, death, and fear. But it has, at the same time, created a space for us to connect more deeply, remember what is truly important, and dust off old projects we had set aside in order to run on the treadmill of modernity.

We are One.

One of the lessons that Covid-19 is teaching us, is that we are all connected. The speed that it has spread around the world is, pardon the expression, breathtaking. Six degrees of separation memes to be an underestimate. We are all in this together. There are no real borders between countries or citizens. We are one.

It is OK to feel your feelings, to acknowledge your fears, to cry and to retreat into yourself when you need to. It is also important to reach out and support your friends, family and neighbors. It is a blessing we have the internet to keep us connected from a safe distance. There is no better time than now to say, "You mean the world to me."

Nurture the love that comes out of compassion. Practice patience with your loved ones, and remember they are reflections of the divine. Give someone a roll of toilet paper and some hand sanitizer. Wear a mask for them, not for yourself.

May you all be safe and healthy, and may we hug again in the physical world soon enough. Namaste.