Each night during our sleep we re-create the world. Stories and pictures dance through our minds even if we are unaware. We dream roughly every ninety minutes, but the frequency and duration of our dream life vary from night to night. Dream Sleep On a typical night, after falling asleep our first dream cycle of […]
Niyamas (Observances)
The Six Niyamas: Shaucha (purity). Cleanliness of the body and purity of the mind. External Cleanliness of the body is a means of controlling the mind. It includes daily bathing, wearing clean clothes, living in a clean house; on the subtle level, it is purity of action or selfless service. It includes the system of […]
Attitudes Toward the World –Yamas
In all spiritual traditions, ethics are central and provide a foundation for practice. The first limb of Pantanjali’s yoga system is called Yama-Sanskrit for discipline. The practice includes five moral attitudes toward life. These practices are common in many faith traditions. There is considerable overlap between yoga and Buddhism. Yoga emerged out of ancient Hindu […]
Hamsa meditation
The Sanskrit word Hamsa translates as a swan. In yoga, the word breath is also known as Hamsa. One method of using the breath in meditation is to focus on the mantra hamsa. This meditation comes from the short Hamsa Upanishad, which explains the mystical nature of Hamsa, the inner swan, located within all. The […]
How to Be Sad: Acceptance and difficulty
There’s a plethora of information about happiness. My literature search on this subject yielded over 13,000 scholarly research articles and over one thousand books. Advice about how to be happy floods the internet daily with simplistic listicles and click-bait articles that make it all seem so easy. But their advice, like telling a sad person […]
