The Sex chakra and yoga

The second chakra, or energy vortex, is most closely associated with sex. Located in the region of the sexual organs, it is a powerful engine for self-expression and self-worth.

The Ancients saw sex as much more than the physical union of bodies leading to a crescendo of release. The yogic view of sex is a joining, a coming together in physical, spiritual, and psychic resonance. Modern lifestyles and the media have done much to distort and muddy the crystal-clear experience of this sacred union.

Our practice of yoga is aimed at rejuvenating all our organs to enhance their natural abilities to experience oneness with the divine. Deep-breathing combined with the rhythmic contraction of the internal organs during the outbreath followed by release on the inbreath harmonizes this chakra.

The yogic approach to sex was named tantra by the ancient yogis, a word that means to weave together beautifully. What a refreshing idea!

Peace and Love,

Abhay

 

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.” --Rilke



A physicist friend recently told me that he was working on modeling the cosmos in fourteen dimensions. “Use anything less than fourteen dimensions and nothing makes sense.

“Each part of the cosmos can be explained but each explanation contradicts our understanding of one or more of the other parts. We do understand the parts but not how they fit together. We don’t even have language to explain that.”

Physicist David Bohm, one of the giants of quantum physics and a spiritual seeker, said that the greatest piece of advice he received from his teacher, the philosopher J. Krishnamurti, was to always start from the unknown.

Swami Rama, one of the last great Himalayan Masters of the 20th Century said of Gandhi, whom he knew personally, that Gandhi seemed not to walk but to be propelled by the unknown.

To walk the path (and there is only one path) we stop trying to explain or understand the unknown.  We simply make friends with the unknown.

Abhay

Bend, Oregon.

Oct 17 2021.

Ten Yoga Questions Answered

Over the years I have been asked a lot of questions about slow yoga. Here are ten of them that I have picked with my answers:  

Question 1. What is slow yoga? Slow Yoga is a complete system of physical and mental attunement that was developed in Ancient India. The word yoga in Sanskrit means to join. Slow Yoga joins the mind and body, breath and movement, resulting in an enhanced physical ability for joyous experience and spiritual centeredness. It brings us home, to the speed of Life and Mother Earth. 

 Question 2. Was yoga developed for men and by men? Has it only recently adapted to the specific needs of women? Yoga has an ancient and long tradition of yogis and yoginis who fine-tuned and developed this art and practice that we now know as yoga. One of the important yoga texts was in fact written specifically for women. Yoga is alive and well in the traditionally matriarchal communities in the state of Kerala in India. Yoga was always intended to be practiced by both men and women (and children!). I grew up in India. In my own family, my first teachers were my grandma and mother. 

Question 3. Can I learn Slow Yoga by studying ancient yoga books? How about DVDs and streaming video? The Slow Yoga that I teach is an oral-kinesthetic tradition. It is meant to be passed down from teacher to student. It is one of the earliest forms of learning-by-doing and is meant to be learned from a teacher. When you learn yoga from a DVD or streaming video you don't have the benefit of a skilled yoga teacher monitoring your movements and making adjustments. That can lead to slight misalignments accumulating over time and causing problems down the road. 

 Question 4. Can you explain the prevalence of multiple schools of yoga? Which school do you belong to? The prevalence of many schools of yoga is a recent phenomenon. In India, where I grew up and studied yoga, there traditionally aren't really schools of yoga but different great teachers. I learned yoga from a teacher who in turn learned it from his teacher going back in an unbroken line many thousand years. I created Slow Yoga not as a school of yoga but rather as a political statement to return to the freedom inherent in the Slow Life and is a part of the international movement to live mindfully. 

Question 5. What is the ideal yoga practice? A short daily practice, lasting no more than 30 minutes, coupled with a good yoga class about once a week. 

Question 6. How is Slow Yoga related to meditation? A Slow Yoga practice can be thought of as moving meditation. Meditation involves stilling the mind and allowing the conscious mind to focus on one's breathing. Slow Yoga allows for exactly that with the added benefit of physical toning and perfect health.

Question 7. What is unique about your approach to yoga? To my knowledge no teacher in America teaches the kind of yoga that I do, prompting me to create the term Slow Yoga. The Slow Yoga I teach works with moving the prana (Sanskrit for life-force) energy through the body in combination with deep breathing and physical asanas or postures. In this way we work on three dimensions at once. It is a powerful and amazingly effective way of creating health, beauty, and longevity. 

Question 8. How is the Slow Yoga you teach different from Pilates and other forms of physical exercise? The Slow Yoga I teach works far more deeply than most other forms of exercise. Working with the body's energy system, breathing, and postures works not only on the sinews but also much deeper on the body's glandular systems. This provides the conscientious student with the possibility of deep transformations unavailable in most other forms of exercise. 

Question 9. I have heard of yogis who can lie on beds of nails, walk on coals, eat glass, bend steel poles with their eye-balls. Are these stories true? Can I get to this point? Yes. These are all true. Growing up in India I have seen all of this and more with my own eyes. If you practice yoga enough you may be able to do all these things if you choose to. But, as my teacher used to say, it is even more amazing if you can live with the rhythm of Mother Nature, eating when you are hungry and sleeping well at night. 

Question 10. Why do you practice and preach Slow Yoga? Because it is fun, healthy, and endlessly fascinating!

Minimum Effort

I wish you all a deep and healthy yoga practice. Yoga, the ancient art of India has been practiced for thousands of years giving its practitioners a long life, a beautiful body, and a serene mind. 

One of the principles of yoga that I would like to emphasize is the principle of Minimum Effort. I know that it seems like a contradiction to talk about a yoga practice and effortlessness in the same sentence. However that is precisely how the Ancients who conceived of the art and science of yoga describe the ideal yoga session. 

All actions, movements, and holds must be undertaken with the very minimum effort required. But how is such an effortlessness to be achieved? Through a continuous focus upon the breath! Breathe deeply using Ujjayi breaths. Concentrate all your attention on rhythmically breathing in and out and soon you will be doing yoga using the principle of Minimum Effort. 

My recommended yoga book is Vanda Scaravelli's Awakening The Spine. This is a beautiful book that could easily have been titled Zen in the art of yoga. Read it or simply enjoy the beautiful images of waves, trees, and yogis suspended in the air with a minimum of effort. 

Peace and Love, slowly,

Abhay

How to breathe

Essentially there are 2 kinds of breathing practices in the slow yoga that I teach. 

The first is used when an asana (posture) is HELD in stillness. 

The second is used when you flow from one asana to the next. 

When you hold an asana, you should softly go deeper into the asana on the OUTBREATH. You should always relax on the INBREATH. For example, in down dog, you should push back with your palms, roll the hips open, and sink your heels into the floor softly on the OUTBREATH. You should relax on the INBREATH. 

When you flow from one asana to another, breathe in when looking up and breathe out when looking down. More specifically, when your torso is extending away from your body is when you will be breathing in. When your torso in folding in towards your body you breathe out. 

I hope this clarifies one or two questions you may have about breathing. 

Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Moon Cycle

There are often questions from the women in my slow yoga classes about what to do when you have your period. 

Many traditional classes emphasize that women should NOT perform inversions such as Sarvangasana (shoulderstand) during their period. 

I never ask my female students to refrain from inversions during their menstrual periods because I am not convinced that there is any scientific evidence of it being a problem. 

 My personal view is this: Throughout history men have tried to tell women what was good for them and what was bad. It has turned out that almost all this 'advice' was nothing more than blind faith or even worse, manipulative dogmas designed to control women and prevent them from expressing themselves fully. 

A modern eclectic slow yoga practice is to be undertaken with common sense. 

Do not refrain from any asanas because some 'authority' tells you to. Instead, skip ANY asana when your body just doesn't feel like doing it regardless of whether you have your period or not. 

When you want to skip a posture in a slow yoga class or during your slow yoga home practice, simply go into Balakasana or Child's Pose and rest! 

 Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

How Slow Yoga was born

An old yogi was once asked for guidance by a young student who wanted to progress rapidly in his yoga practice. 

“Meditate,” was the answer. 

The student was baffled. He expected to be told that the way to progress would be an even more lengthy and strenuous yoga practice. Meditation was about not doing very much, in fact doing nothing at all! How could this help? 

The old yogi replied, “You are already doing too much. You are doing, doing, doing all the time. There is no chance for your body to absorb anything of value. So still your mind, meditate, and yoga will come to you like a lovely dream as you sleep.”

The student followed the old yogi's guidance. He sat in a comfortable cross-legged position with his spine erect each day for 20 minutes focusing on his breath, letting go of what the Ancients called monkey mind. 

And yoga did come to the young student as in a dream. The old yogi was right, there was very little effort involved. I know this story to be true because the old yogi was my teacher. And the young student? Ah, him I have known all my life. 

That’s how slow yoga was born. 

 Peace and Love, 

Slowly,

Abhay

A Guided Meditation

Sit in a comfortable cross-legged position such as the half-lotus. Keep your spine reasonably straight without forcing it. You may even use a wall or the edge of a sofa to support your back. 

Take some deep breaths and visualize each in-breath as a silken cord moving downward through your body connecting you to the center of mother earth. And visualize each out-breath as bringing energy up the silken cord, up from the center of the earth all the way up to your solar plexus or third chakra. Visualize the third chakra is a brilliant yellow. 

After a while you should feel very grounded. Now, visualize a warm, healing beam of light coming down from the heavens, entering your body at the crown of your head, moving down past what the ancients called the third eye (between your eyebrows), down to your heart. 

Once this has been established in your imagination, the rest of the meditation involves connecting the earth energy that is being drawn up the silken cord to your solar plexus and the light energy being drawn down to your heart. 

Sit as long as you like, rooted to mother earth and basking in the light of the heavens. Do it every day! It is like taking a slow energy shower. 

A slow shower of light! 

 Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Dedicating your slow yoga practice

Here is a wonderful way of staying on track with your slow yoga practice. 

Dedicate your practice on three planes. 

On the first, most immediate plane, you dedicate your practice to your self. Next, you dedicate your practice to someone you know who is in need of healing. Lastly, you dedicate your practice to healing mother earth. 

You do this each and every time you practice yoga, whether in class or during your home practice. If you start doing this consistently, you will find that in lazy moments when you'd rather be dozing on the couch instead of doing yoga, your dedications will "pull you slowly but firmly by the hair" and take you to your practice. Try it! 

Peace and Love, 

Slowly,

Abhay

Developing a home slow yoga practice

The Ancients describe the ideal slow yoga practice as one revolving around the four-fold classification of asanas or yoga postures. In the beginning do two asanas from each of the four groups and you have your own, personal slow yoga practice!

The four fold classification is based on the position of the body at the beginning of the asana. It is as follows:

a. Belly up
b. Belly down
c. Standing
d. Sitting

a. Belly up
Starting on your back you may move into the Bridge Pose. Remember to have your feet on the mat a few inches below your buttocks, hip distance apart. Your prana or life force is directed downwards through your heels pulling your buttocks and hips up towards the ceiling. Your hands are by your sides, palms active, facing down. Next you may come down and bring your knees to your chest, wrapping your arms around your legs just below the knees and play with rocking yourself side to side and forward and back in Little Boat.

b. Belly down
Starting with your hands and knees on the floor, arms and thighs perpendicular to your torso, you may move into a Cat Curve on the outbreath, curving your spine upwards, dropping your head. You would follow this with a Dog Tilt on the inbreath, your spine now sinking down towards the mat, your head is raised, looking up. Rhythmically move back and forth between these two asanas, allowing your prana or life force to move up the entire length of the spine. When you feel nice and warmed up you may want to slowly move into the wonderful asana, Downward Facing Dog. To move into Down Dog you would start from the Dog Tilt position and keep the hips in the open position, sitting bones pointing towards the ceiling. Next your arms move forward 45 degrees. Finally you come up on your hands and feet allowing your head to relax. Remember to visualize the line of prana energy is slowly sinking down your heels into Mother Earth, whether or not your heels touch the mat! 

c. Standing
Standing with your feet together, you may want to bend the right knee and bring the right foot to rest on your left thigh, a namaste mudra or Prayer Posture at your heart. Next your namaste moves to the ceiling, and hands come apart, palms facing each other at shoulder distance while your fingers curl like lotus petals. Look forward with a soft gaze and allow a smile to play upon your lips. This is the tree asana. When you are ready, switch legs. Also read my article "Get to know your tree" on this website. You may want to then move into Warrior I and II asanas on both sides.

d. Sitting
Lastly, sit in meditation in Lotus, Half Lotus, Open Lotus, or Vajrasana. For the Lotus variations you sit directly on your sitting bones with each foot on top of the other thigh. For Half Lotus, only one foot is atop the other thigh, with the other foot tucked under the opposing thigh. Or open up your Lotus and allow both feet and calves to rest comfortably on your mat. Now meditate focusing on your slow breathing. After a while, and you must be patient, you will feel as though you are one with your prana or life force. You ARE breath and nothing else matters.

Peace and Love,

Slowly, move as slowly as a bee collecting honey,

Abhay

Discomfort vs Pain

Most asanas, postures, in slow yoga ask you to leave the zone of comfort and move into the zone of discomfort. Experiencing discomfort is a good thing.

It is tempting to stay within one's comfort zone. But for slow yoga to effectively open up and change your body, it is important that you feel your self moving from the comfort zone to the discomfort zone in a conscious, willing way. 

However, when you leave the discomfort zone and enter the pain zone you have gone too far and are actually slowing down your body's yogic development. 

Slow Yoga is based on a centuries-old idea common in nature that everything worthwhile takes time to grow and is interconnected. The bee collecting nectar can not be rushed. As she moves slowly, purposefully, meditatively from flower to flower, pollen is gently deposited upon her back. The bee carries the pollen upon her back and scatters it far and wide—and the magic cycle of creation continues. 

Slow yoga is your entry into the magic cycle of creation. And to practice slow yoga you must learn to distinguish between discomfort and pain. 

Bodies are creatures of habit, and at first resist anything out of the ordinary including mild discomfort. Be kind to your self, engage your body in an inner dialogue and allow the discomfort while disallowing the pain. 

Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Temple in which your soul resides

In India, where I grew up, there is a belief that the body is the temple in which your soul resides. The healthier and more cared for the outer temple, the more serene and wise the soul. 

Yogic nutrition can be summed up in the Rule of 3. I am going to tell you what this rule is not first and then I’ll tell you what this rule is. The Rule of 3 is not about carbs, fats, sugars, or calories. The Rule of 3 is not about whether or not your body needs dairy or animal protein. The Rule of 3 is not about how much gluten you choose to consume or not to consume. 

Stop worrying about those at once. I mean right now! Use common sense. If you are allergic to something don’t eat it. If eating something makes you feel bad, don’t eat it.

Now let us turn to what the rule is.

The Rule of 3 asks us to focus on only three items in our diet. All we have to do is to keep our intake of these 3 items to the optimal. 

The first item in the Rule of 3 is water. Drink very large amounts of high quality water. Carry water with you at all times. And remember to drink water when doing slow yoga! 

The second item in the Rule of 3 is fresh fruits and vegetables. Find and eat only the freshest organic fruits and vegetables. Participate in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project and get a weekly box of organic fruits and veggies each week. It may be the best political statement about supporting a slow lifestyle that you could make while becoming healthy! Eat these every day, several times a day.

The third item in the Rule of 3 is Ghee. Ghee is familiar to Indian and French cooks (who refer to it as clarified butter) as well as yogis who swear by its almost magical properties. You can buy ghee at your local heath food store or Whole Foods. Ghee is butter transformed through an almost alchemical process rendering it very powerful in its abilities to do two things: First, to carry nutrients deep into your tissues and organs, and second, to detoxify. Ghee is unique in its ability to detoxify fat soluble toxins in the body. Most importantly, it tastes great! Try it on top of lightly steamed vegetables or cook with it instead of oil or butter!

The Rule of 3 provides a simple, yet comprehensive nutritional system for the development of a beautiful body. And the more beautiful your body looks and feels, the more you honor the soul that resides within your temple. 

Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Embrace Life!

Hi there beautiful slow yogis (anyone who practices yoga is called a yogi)! 

I hope you are enjoying my website and trying out some of my suggestions as well as developing a slow yoga home practice. I teach in Bend, Oregon and the Philippines so if you are interested in taking a class with me you can contact me at my contact information just below my photograph and bio. 

Play with the postures, experiment, and make sure you are having fun with them. Yoga literally means to join, to embrace. Yoga, particularly slow yoga, was created to help people embrace life more fully. 

The story is told of a teacher who ran a school in Ancient India wherein students copied the old classics. A new student who later went on to be one of the great yogis pointed out to the teacher that the students were using copies to copy the text from. Shouldn't they be using the originals? The teacher gave some thought to this and decided that the young man was right. The teacher then proceeded into the basement of the temple where the originals were stored. An hour went by, two hours, three hours and so on. The students started getting restless. Had something happened to the teacher? He was a very old man after all. 

The young student was sent to look for the teacher. In the basement the student saw the teacher sitting on the floor weeping. The student was surprised by this. He had never before seen his teacher weep. He proceeded cautiously towards the teacher. The teacher, who could instinctively feel the young man's presence said, “There is a word we've been copying for decades which I now realize is wrong, an error. We've been writing CELIBATE when it says right here in the original CELEBRATE.” 

Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

karma and ahimsa

Karma is seen by many as a law that teaches an eye for an eye. It has been compared to Newton's laws. The idea seems to be a quaint one: a violator will be violated, a thief stolen from. That is a common, though violent and misinformed idea of karma.

Karma is seen in our practice of yoga as a repayment of rna, or debts. If someone does something to you, let us say steal from you. In doing so they are simply repaying past rna. With that act, the olds debts have been paid and you are now free as long as you do not respond to the act by creating a fresh act. Governments get entangled in ever increasing violence by being reactive and recreating new karmas that are then acted out and reacted out infinitely.

The key to understanding karma is this. The act has no power whatsoever on your essence, the real you or your higher self. It is only with your ego-identification with the act that you create rnanubandhana, or debt-bondage.

Ahimsa, the absence of violence, is the only reliable way to end karmic ties with what is undesirable. For once we have paid our debts we are free!

Peace and Love

Slowly

Abhay 

 

Circles vs Straight Lines

As slow yogis (anyone who does yoga is a yogi) we often find ourselves reaching for our toes in Uttanasana or reaching our heels towards the floor in Down Dog. 

Whenever you find yourself reaching for something in an asana, posture, try moving in a circle rather than a straight line. 

Now that may be counter-intuitive at first. In western culture we are taught to "think straight," and guard against "circular reasoning." I call this the engineering approach. Applying the engineering approach works well when your goal is to build something inorganic and inanimate, a modern skyscraper for instance. It does not work very well when you are dealing with something organic and animate like your body. 

When you want to reach body part A towards point B on your body or on the floor or the ceiling, start making little circles with A. Continue making circles describing a spiral that moves you towards point B. 

The Ancients believed that a slow yoga practice moves energy along the 7 energy centers in the body that we call chakras. 

Chakra, in Sanskrit, also means circle. 

Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Journey of Soul

Slow yoga initiates a number of changes in the body and psyche that are deep, fundamental, and long-lasting. 

Thirty years ago when I had just moved to Chicago from India, my first American student asked me whether she should quit smoking in order to practice slow yoga. 

I said no and let the matter rest. 

She continued to perform the slow yoga asanas, postures, regularly. Three months later she came to me pretty agitated and said, “I can't smoke anymore! I mean it just makes me nauseous!”

The serious student of slow yoga may find her body loosening up in a geometric progression. At the same time such a deep transformation in patterns of holding our bodies that may have been unchanged for generations (think about something physical you do with your body such as slouching and think about your parents, grandparents, tracing it back in time) are bound to result in a profound release of some sort. 

The release may come in the form of sudden bouts of crying or laughter, inexplicable anger, or a general sense of distress. These should not be cause for alarm. 

They will pass. 

On the bright side the student of slow yoga progressively experiences a deeper connection with her body, a greater acceptance of her natural beauty, and embarks on a journey like no other. 

The Ancients called this the Journey of Breath, a word in Sanskrit that also means the Journey of Soul. 

 Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Get to know your tree

A student once asked me how she could improve her balance poses particularly Vrksasana or Tree Pose. 

“I keep falling over,” she said. 

I asked her, “When you are in Vrksasana, what kind of tree are you? What are your branches like, your leaves? Do you provide shade for a weary pilgrim or a cow? How exactly do you sway when the monsoon winds pregnant with water droplets appear from the south?”

Get to know your tree and over time its roots will take hold. 

Get to know your yogasanas, slow yoga postures, with acceptance, understanding, and humor. Your breath and your imagination are your allies in this endeavor. 

There is no way to fail in slow yoga. Remember this! 

Peace and Love,

Slowly,

Abhay

Wide, well-lit, and strewn with fragrant flowers

Do not seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions and desires are engendered, for if you do, you will be dragged through the rough wilderness of life, which is far from Me. Whenever you feel that your feet are becoming entangled in the interlaced roots of life, know that you have strayed from the path to which I beckon you, for I have placed you in broad, smooth paths, which are strewn with flowers. I have put a light before you, which you can follow and thus run without stumbling.

--Krishna 

Meditation is paying attention. It is not an attempt at quieting or controlling the mind but rather an active watching of the mind. We start by paying attention to the physical sensations in our bodies. We watch without control. 

Over time we watch whatever we are presented with. These are gifts from the cosmos. Our work is to watch. 

The cosmic gifts on one hand are divergent. They are as varied as we are. Some of us begin to see colors. Others hear words. Still others see images and inhabit them. The gifts are endless in their variety. We may see, hear, feel, sense, understand. We may think, dream, sleep, know, investigate. 

On the other hand the cosmic gift of meditation is convergence. Choices fall away. Where we once saw two roads ahead we now see only one. Where we once struggled over our choices--so many paths to so many possibilities, good ones and bad ones, hasty ones and well thought-out ones--we now experience no struggle. 

We see just the one path. Wide, well-lit, and strewn with fragrant flowers. 

Black Forest

Germany

20 September 2018

Either we are asleep or we are awake. This is not a matter of choice. It is a simply a description of a state of being. 

When we are asleep we are split. When we are awake we are whole. 

When we are asleep we are in a world of choice. Should I do this or that, choose this or that, what if I do / what if I don't. If we are conscious while we are asleep we worry about our choices. We want to be good and make the right decisions. Whether unconscious or conscious, when we are asleep we are engaged in what the ancients called maya, or illusion. 

To be awake is to be whole. To be without choice. Then moment by moment life presents the right action and we live it. 

Good Friday 2018, Singapore. 

We create stars

When you look up at the night sky do you have a friend up there? One that you feel intimately connected to. A planet, a satellite, a star, a constellation, a galaxy, anything out there. A friend.

When we first met we would go on night walks and Krista would point out Orion. Having grown up in busy, polluted Bombay, I had never noticed the night sky. But from that very first walk in Evanston I have had a friend in the sky.

I always look for Orion. Or rather Orion looks for me. When I look up at the night sky Orion's right there, twinkling at me.

When you look into the horizon do your eyes rest upon another friend--the sea, a river, mountains, valleys, woods? I was born by the Arabian Sea and the sea has always been my friend. Sometimes far away at another seashore I wonder if I can touch the sea of my childhood. And I realize that she is the one reaching out to me.

Have you taken a close look at your heart? For your heart is also your friend. The first time I really noticed my heart I felt her open to me.

If we first pay attention to our friend heart, and then up to our friend in the night sky, and then down to our earthly friend, we create a triangle.

If we create triangles at different times, in different parts of the world, together we create interlapping triangles of attention. When our triangles of attention across time and space interlap, we create stars.

Singapore
2 February 2018

Although I was born in Bombay I spent the first four years of my life in Hyderabad, the capital of a rambling ancient kingdom ruled by the Nizam until a decade and half before I was born. For those four years of my life I did as I pleased, spending my days, as the song goes, singing long before I could talk. 

Early mornings with birds and our neighbor's water buffalo, days playing with Legos brought to us by our father's friend from Vienna, nights of huge parties on our veranda with our parents' friends from all over the world. 

Music, laughter, dancing, and play. 

Freely expressing the little wild anarchist inside, and aping the Telangana revolutionaries, I even threw tiny stones at jeeps sporting corrupt cops. (A few years ago Telangana was finally recognized as a separate State within India.)

For the first four years of my life I was following life. Then for many years and many decades I tried to make things happen, opted for control over following life, only to come to the point now where I can clearly see that to live following life is the only way to really live. 

And when the holidays come along it is a gentle reminder from life to give up controlling things and to enjoy each other, our lives, and our beautiful earth. 

Wishing all my friends a wonderful Christmas, happy holidays, and a fabulous new year in which we let our little anarchist within sing and leap for joy!

We speak for the creator

I love Sanskrit words though I don't speak or write Sanskrit. Sure, I can read it, but that's really cheating because Sanskrit uses the same script as my mother tongue Marathi and shares many root words with it, as Latin does with English. 

A Sanskrit (and Marathi) word that I love is namaste. 

It is three syllables long and pronounced num-must-tey. Or if you prefer, the syllables rhyme as follows

1st syllable rhymes with come

2nd syllable is simply the word must

3rd syllable rhymes with say

(Not naa-must-tey nor num-mast-tey)

So what I want to say about this wonderful word is that looking at its roots fascinates me. That's because 

namas means to bow, and

te means to you

As you know the word is not said as a command. When I say namaste I am not asking you to bow. The word is said as a greeting, so when I say namaste to you, I am saying, 

bow to you

and there is no I involved! Who bows to you when the I is absent? 

No one. 

When it is no one doing the bowing it must be the all doing the bowing. 

The all is the creator.

We speak for the creator when we greet everyone, wish everyone well, love one another.

Namaste!

Abhay

When the mind is clear we can feel the pulse of life moving through us. 

When the mind is clear choice falls away. We are left only with right action. 

Right action does not mean there is one right action. It only means right action in the moment. 

When we keep our minds clear and follow the pulse we follow life. 

Lightness Laughter Hugs

When I was 13 I had an experience that changed my life. I was sitting cross legged at the Aurobindo Ashram in what had once been Aurobindo's bedroom. I had sat down for hardly a minute or so when the great heaviness which had followed me all my youthful life lifted. I understood that I was not a separate body but energy, lighter than a feather. I learned that life was lightness. 

When I was 15 I had another life-changing experience. I was a voracious reader and read novels, short stories, and poetry late into the night perched on a marble bench on our large veranda. It was very late that night and the foxes had visited and gone to sleep. As I read the last few words of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, I started laughing heartily and could not stop laughing for a week. During the week I was guided to visit all the people in my life that I cared about. I would go over to their homes laughing, and soon my laughter would result in everyone laughing uncontrollably with me. I suppose I was lucky to have been born Indian. In the India I grew up in, the tolerance for what we might call weirdness was infinite. No one bothered me, and laughed along with me when I was around. I learned from that experience that life was laughter. 

When I lost my father at 16, my mission became to speak to him again. In the thirty five years that have passed since he died, I have tried to speak to him every day. I have only succeeded once. That one time, he came through so clearly and forcefully that I was overwhelmed with his love. He was not 'dead', but very much alive in a way that transformed me. He gave me a hug that I will never forget. I learned that life continues after death, that we can not understand life but that the closest we can get to understanding life is a hug. 

Wishing all my friends lightness, laughter, and hugs on this Thanksgiving weekend,

Abhay

There are no short cuts in life. But surprisingly, there is a whole industry of short cuts: wise women and wise men bringing intuitive, channeled, and self-realized messages. These messages talk of how we create our reality, how intentions are the creative force of our lives, how visualizing success leads to success. 

I am not a wise man. I have no messages to bring. I have no authority over such matters. However, it is my opinion that all these 'messages' offer short cuts and in my own experience short cuts tell half-truths. 

My experience of life teaches me that life can not be fathomed. Things happen to us that we can not possibly understand, let alone be responsible for. We create our reality in a very narrow sense that we have just one choice -- do we follow life or try to control it. That's it. Very few people actually follow life wherever she takes us. Most people try to control life. When we are told that we create our reality we are asked to take control of our life. That is a very impoverished understanding of what we are here to do in life. We are not here to create abundance, or be happy, or forgive people, or say, "I know I created my own cancer -- I am to blame, now I can force myself to magically get rid of it since I create my reality." This viewpoint is all about control. I control life--My life is out of control--I will read the books and listen to the recordings of this wise person--I will regain control of my life. 

But control is violence. To follow is nonviolence. In the industry of short-cuts, violence trumps nonviolence. Few people simply follow life in all its complicated richness. That's how I try to live my life. I try.

By now it is widely accepted by many people with a spiritual bent that intentions matter. That to live a good life, a full life, we must practice holding intentions. But intentions are control, it is choosing to control life rather than follow her. We can hold intentions but holding intentions are practicing control, which is violence. I like the nonviolent path of not holding intentions but rather simply following where life takes me. 

Visualization is also control. It is violence. I prefer to visualize nothing. I prefer to follow life, the nonviolent path. 

The problem with creating our reality, intentions, and visualizations is not that they do not work--they do! My problem with all three approaches is that they are half-truths. I do not for a moment believe that our lives are what they seem to be. We are multidimensional! While the three approaches can create all kinds to things in three dimensions they are violent and screw things up and limit life experience in multiple dimensions. 

Our reality does not have an objective, independent reality, outside of us. Our reality is us. If we are trying to shape, to improve, to control our lives it means that we don't really understand who we are. We are magnificent, multidimensional beings. The reality we are aware of is a tiny little three dimensional spot in an infinite multidimensional space which is our Reality.

The messages of the wise women and wise men do not show an understanding of Reality (multidimensional) only reality (three dimensional). We can certainly create our reality but we can not create our Reality, which is beyond our capacity to even fathom. 

In creating our reality we use violence. We can set intentions, we can visualize, and these will certainly affect our reality. But when we do so we choose controlling life over following life, violence over nonviolence. We mess with things we don't understand. 

So this is what I understand about myself: I am magnificent, multidimensional energy, not what I think of as my reality. I have only one choice: to control or to follow. I choose to follow. Which means that I do not create my reality, I do not set intentions, and I do not visualize. 

I simply follow life. I do not 'like' that my partner has stage four cancer, that I am jobless, that one day my savings will run out, that my life is very hard. But I don't try to change anything. I simply follow, willingly, life where she leads me. 

The journey from I-may-be-wrong to I-don't-know

Meditation is the journey from I-may-be-wrong to I-don't know. 

We worry. We take action. We worry some more. Why do we worry? We worry because here we are taking action and that action could be insufficient or even wrong. At the root of it is the fear, I-may-be-wrong, and then what's going to happen? 

Uncertainty-Action-Worry-More Uncertainty and so on is the pattern that many of us find ourselves in. Meditation moves us away from I-may-be-wrong. We disengage those parts of ourselves that imagine ourselves in certainty followed by worry about the reliability of that certainty. 

When we meditate we simply pay attention. It is not a passive state. Our bodies call out to us with physical sensations. We listen. In the state of I-don't-know, we are able to be still and watch ourselves. We are more than the doers of things. We are also witnesses.

We accept that we don't know. We can not be wrong when we simply don't know. That's the I-don't-know state.

Peace, love, and community,

Abhay

Meditation and evolution of human consciousness

The evolution of human consciousness follows the same pattern as the evolution of our practice of meditation. There are three steps in this process.

1. The Plan

In the first step towards greater consciousness we live our lives by a plan. We either follow a socially prescribed one or imagine what we want and then make a plan to get it. When the plan doesn't work the way we imagined it would, we create a new plan, a better plan, and follow it. 

When we start a meditation practice we pick carefully structured processes that we can follow and a system for the development of our consciousness. When our meditation practice doesn't work we abandon it and pick another, equally structured one. 

In this way of living, human consciousness has very limited expression. Its evolution is minimal, but it is present. 

2. Intention

At some point our consciousness evolves to the point where we see plans as limiting and move our attention to intentions instead. We set positive intentions for our lives and meditation and are often rewarded with the manifestation of our intentions. 

The interesting thing about intentions is that holding them does work but is ultimately limiting. As human beings we can not possibly know and understand all the possibilities inherent in a single moment let alone an entire life. We get what we ask for, but is what we, as three dimensional human beings, ask for, anywhere close to the multidimensional potentials of the moment?

In this step there is what appears to be a great leap of consciousness. However the potential of human consciousness is far beyond that which is tapped into by holding intentions. 

3. Following life

The third step in the evolution of human consciousness is that of simply following life by paying attention moment by moment. We stop judging things as good or bad. We hold no intentions, no expectations. 

In our meditation practice we simply follow the predominant physical sensation in our body and keep following even as it evolves into colors, images, words, and wordless knowings. 

When we follow life we do not try to make things happen. We simply pay undivided attention to what is actually happening in the moment. 

When we follow life we tap into that infinite potential that we call our selves. 

Meditation is consciousness, and consciousness is life. We are consciousness, and consciousness in its fullest expression needs no plans, no intentions, just following. 

Peace and love,

Abhay

Experiments with Truth and Untruth

I have developed my meditation practice from experiments in truth and untruth. Gandhi titled his autobiography My Experiments with Truth but I think it is just as important to experiment with untruth as it is to experiment with truth. 

Just as I was developing my meditation practice as a teenager, my cousin was possessed by a spirit. My uncle, concerned about his daughter's well-being, consulted with his sister, my mother, as well as their mother, who was grandmother to both me and my cousin. 

They all decided to pay attention to what the spirit had to say for himself, for it was a male voice that my cousin would speak in when possessed. Every night the spirit  would appear to enter my cousin's body and over time the story of his life was presented to us. He was a man who had lived in a different time and place, had done terrible things including beating his wife, and was now, in spirit, asking for help to be released, to be free. 

Through their extensive network of contacts aaji, grandma, aai, mother, and mama, uncle found masters of the dark spirit arts, and enlisted their help. They all said the same thing: the spirit had to be passed off to an unsuspecting victim. But each had a dramatically different method that had to be followed to the letter to work. One of them made a toran, long string of lemons and chillies, claiming to have cajoled the dark spirits to push the possessing spirit into the toran. All that remained was to find a volunteer who would visit the temple toran in hand, then cast the toran into the street, and not look back. The next person to step over the toran would then be possessed by the spirit and my cousin would be free of her possession. 

Aaji volunteered to carry the toran containing the spirit to the temple. Then she left it lying in the street.

The thing about untruth is that even when it seems to work the solution is never wholeness. Untruth leads to further splitting and splitting, as illustrated by J. K. Rowling's Lord Voldemort, is the fundamental problem facing humanity. Even wizards are not exempt from it! So the spirit returned to my cousin's body and possessed her even more firmly than before. In our desperation the family experimented further with untruth, pushing my cousin deeper into the dark world of spirits.

Then unexpectedly we heard from a simple man, a retired government servant, who had prayed to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, all his life. He offered to help. He would light incense sticks during his prayers to Ganesh and collect the ashes. He believed that the ashes from his life-long practice of praying could heal my cousin as well as heal the spirit possessing her. That what they needed was not exorcism but healing. 

At that point the family had tried everything else so they resignedly accepted this simple man's offer of healing through the ashes of prayer. A little bit of ash was placed upon her forehead each day after the simple man finished his prayers. Bit by bit my cousin got better. A year later the spirit had left her. They had both healed. 

This experience taught me that truth is simple, it does not involve manipulating energy, forcing of any kind. That it takes time. That if I was going to meditate, I needed to simply follow rather than lead and spend my entire life doing it.

Peace and love,

Abhay

We meditate to integrate

By paying attention to our body we become aware firstly of our body, and secondly of our awareness of our body. 

The predominant physical sensation in our body naturally draws our attention to it. Following this becomes our first act of awareness. Awareness then expands to include colors, images, words, and knowings. 

Later we become aware of the awareness of our body. This is our second act of awareness. We start seeing the effects of our meditation on our physical lives and in the material world. 

Thus meditation is not only a movement from the dense to the subtle but also simultaneously a movement from the subtle to the dense. It is not just leaving the world and climbing up to the top of the peak of the great mountain. It is also bringing the peak down to our lives and to the great, imperfect, heavy world around us. 

Meditation is a cycle and both parts, the up and the down, are equally important. We don't meditate to escape but to integrate.

Peace and love,

Abhay

Satyagraha of the soul

All life is interconnected, not only in our world, on our earth, right now, but across the cosmos, in all worlds, and at all times. When life brings us something, pleasant or unpleasant, wanted or unwanted, we discharge past rna, or spiritual debts, in all worlds and at all times. 

We treat all experience with equilibrium, poise, and acceptance; we engage in deep listening. We acknowledge that past spiritual debts have been repaid; we respond from that place of deep listening rather than react to what is happening. 

If we react to what life brings us with further action that comes from the will, we lose touch with our selves. We force things to happen and in doing so create rnanubandhana, or spiritual debt bondage. 

Once when Gandhi was walking down a 'whites-only' sidewalk (a sidewalk thus designated by the whim of a bullying policeman) in South Africa, he was attacked and badly beaten by a policeman. Friends and supporters who rushed to rescue him urged him to proceed against the policeman. Gandhi simply said, "I have pocketed the insult," and having thus forgiven the man, spoke no more about the incident. However, in the next few years, he created Satyagraha, put it into action, and brought hope and justice to all people of color in South Africa, and eventually all over the world. 

Meditation is a nonviolent practice. It is inner Satyagraha: Satyagraha of the soul. We never force anything to happen. We pay attention to our own bodies, sensing the predominant physical sensation nd listening deeply to it. When colors, images, and emotions come up, we listen deeply to them, returning to our predominant physical sensation when they run their course. When our predominant physical sensation travels and changes character and intensity, we follow it with our attention. 

Every minute spent in meditation allows us to discharge our past spiritual debts, be less reactive and more nonviolent in our daily lives, and be free of spiritual debt bondage.

We need less force and more love in our lives. And love is just another word for deep listening. 

Peace and love,

Abhay

Happy New Year!

I wanted to get better at my practice. Every day after school I would ride my bicycle from the most rural part of Baroda, where we lived, surrounded by orchards, nomadic herdsmen, and gangs of fierce monkeys, to the old city. I would ride into the insane crowd of the railway station, then on broad avenues past the grand palace of the Maharaja into the madness of the old city, and finally get to the ashram, always a tranquil oasis of calm. Once there, I would practice.

But I wasn't getting any better. I would try to get my teacher to be more involved in my lack of growth but he always seemed to be distracted when I would talk about it. One day I confronted my teacher and demanded that he tell me there and then: How could I get better? My teacher looked at me in an odd way, then keeping his eyes on me said,

"I see you ride your bicycle into the ashram every day and hop off your bike. You always do it on the right side. For a month try hopping off your bike on the other side when you arrive."

It wasn't an answer that I expected. It was a strange answer, but then my teacher was a strange man.

For a month I practiced hopping off my bike on the left side. I started awkwardly but in a few days I was comfortable with the new hopping off routine. I found myself exploring new aspects of my bicycle riding, like riding with no hands, hopping off the front of the bike, singing and whistling while riding, and even riding with my eyes closed. My bike was becoming a friend, and riding was becoming play.

A month passed. The bike routine was now effortless. As for my practice, it was no better than before. My teacher didn't seem to notice. We never talked about it again.

But something had changed. I no longer cared about getting better. I realized that life is a circle. Getting better or getting ahead simply brings us back to where we started. What really matters is not to change our practice but to change our selves; to be open to strange answers, to the unexpected. Happy new year!

Peace and love,

Abhay

We are the change

We cannot change circumstances, events, and people. But we can change ourselves. Gandhi asked us to "be the change you wish to see." We cannot be the change by willing it. To be the change we must meditate. 

All life consists of the dense and the subtle. The world of matter, what we think of as reality, is dense. The subtle consists of energy patterns that are just as real as matter, though invisible and unknown to the dense. 

In everyday life we often work only with the dense, trying to make things happen with great effort. This is a very difficult approach to change. Great effort in the realm of the dense often leads to little real change. 

When we begin to meditate, we bring the subtle to the dense. We feel the dense in our bodies as physical sensations. By focusing on the predominant physical sensation in our own body, we join the subtle (focus) to the dense (physical sensations). 

We don't try to change anything. In meditation we are the change. We simply pay undivided attention, a state that I call deep listening. We may experience shifting bodily sensations. Sometimes colors, images, or memories appear. We listen deeply to whatever comes up. When the episode of colors, images, or memories runs its course, we return to the predominant physical sensation as the base of our meditation. 

If we really want to change our reality we must make meditation our reality. It is the union of the subtle and the dense that makes us the change we wish to see. 

When we change the world changes.

Peace,

Abhay

work + mindfulness = nonwork

Vinoba Bhave, the saint and amateur mathematician, derived a wonderful formula from the Bhagawad Gita:

karma + vikarma = akarma

or,

work + mindfulness = nonwork

We are being asked to engage in our work--whether it is washing the dishes, making artwork, teaching, healing, or running a business--mindfully, that is to say, 

1. with complete, undivided, attention to the work at hand,

2. with playfulness,

3. with no thought of the fruit of the work. 

When our work is done with mindfulness what results is nonwork--that state of joy that is called lila, or divine play.

Peace and love,

Abhay

The energy ball

I sit with my hands comfortably in my lap, palms facing up and slightly facing each other. I feel a ball of energy in my hands. If I watch this energy ball very carefully and with patience, it will change in color, size, and shape.

Sometimes it is a little, soft, golden ball of energy. At other times the ball turns into a blue crystal tower shooting up from my palms. When I play with the energy ball with others, our energies seem to blend. I do not control the process. I understand my work to be simply to engage deeply, to focus on what is happening.

Each of us, regardless of who we are or what we do, has our own energy ball. As children we intuitively know what to do with a ball. We were all children once so we can trust that we'll know what to do with our own energy ball if we take it out and play.

Peace and love,

Abhay

Disappointment as a seed of lightness

In seventh grade, a school trip during the Diwali vacation took us from Bombay, where we lived, to Madras. We traveled from the West coast where we overlooked the Arabian Sea to the East coast overlooking the Bay of Bengal on a very slow train pulled by a steam engine. There were no showers on the train and two days later when we arrived we were covered in black soot. I was restless.

From Madras we traveled south to Pondicherry, once a French colony, the site of the Aurobindo Ashram. The atmosphere of the Ashram grounds, right on the beach and water was wonderful after the long journey. Most of us settled down to a routine of play and sleep. But I was still restless. When a small group of tenth grade students asked me to join them in meditation inside the ashram I was delighted.

Sitting cross legged on the cool floor of the ashram I could smell incense, sense the presence of my fellow students, and relaxed into my first experience of meditation. We must have sat there for an hour. But when we left I felt only a little less restless than I had before. I was disappointed.

In eighth grade my father abruptly moved our family from our family home in Bombay to Baroda, a small city just north of Bombay, which was once the center of culture and spirituality under the Maharaja of Baroda. Although I found it hard to adjust to being in a smaller, less Westernized, less cosmopolitan city, I soon found an oasis of peace and tranquillity--the home of Sri Aurobindo. He had lived there when he first moved back to India after being educated in England. It was a large wooden house with a beautiful courtyard and garden. I would spend hours here after school. 

One day I went up to the second floor of the house to what had once been Sri Aurobindo's bedroom. I sat down cross legged on the floor. And I began to meditate. Soon I experienced a oneness, a lightness, and my restlessness lifted. 

My visit to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry was linked, in a circular, non-linear way, to my experience at Sri Aurobindo's house in Baroda. My disappointment in Pondicherry was the seed that sprouted as lightness in Baroda. 

Peace and love,

Abhay