When the smoke cleared from the California fires, I deeply felt gratitude for clean air – for a few weeks. I felt enormous gratitude for firefighters and their huge sacrifices for a few weeks. Then, back to normal. On Thanksgiving I always reflect on what I’m grateful for, and on gratitude, itself. What are my […]
Your pain is your power
It’s 4am. I just woke up from an intense dream, where I leaving an enormous shopping mall, and when I got back to my parking spot, I found the huge 1980’s station wagon that I had borrowed from a friend, swinging 7 feet in the air, suspended from some kind of massive amateurish steel and […]
Unlearning Patriarchy
It is time for men to step up and unlearn the destructive ways we have been taught. Let’s work together, learn from the marginalized, move forward. This is mostly a “Coming soon” page. Look forward to a wealth of resources and community to help transition us to a healthy world.
Fall – letting go
Fall – The time of letting go – Releasing the leaves it’s been creating since Spring, trees let all that work go, and rest back into their essence. “But I worked hard on that,” said no tree ever. The leaves were there for a reason, two seasons, and can be released now. To me, trees […]
Seeing Clearly When Triggered
Trigger warning: this is all about triggers. It was one of the hardest things I’d tried to teach. To teach a class for a popular teacher is hard enough. The students don’t already know me, and people are rarely totally open to a teacher that is new to them. To make it more challenging, this was […]
Ending Suffering
I attended a beautiful meditation gathering last Friday, and after we sat, they posed a question to the group about what ways pain had been transformative for us. I don’t think they knew that the previous weeks had been one of the most painful periods of my life. Emotionally, I had been grieving Jerry Candelaria […]
Diving in
The lifeguards had already left, and I was ready to leave the beach, too. I was sitting in the last bit of sun, waiting for my wife and our bestie to finish packing their stuff in the shade that had engulfed our blanket, when we’d heard the commotion. “Do you need help?!” I called. “Yes!” […]
Yoga teacher confesses: stretching is bad for you
If you take a rubberband with a knot in it and pull on each end, what happens? It gets longer from end to end, but the knot in the middle gets tighter. The typical body is filled with tension. The act of forcing bodies into exaggerated shapes not only drives the tension deeper in, but also tugs and […]
Post Election Trauma Yoga
Post Election Trauma Yoga Out here in the Berkeley area, I, and most of the people I’ve talked to, have anxiety about Trump’s election. People tend to be braced for the worst, depressed, and grieving. So what does yoga have offer us in this situation? Plenty. First of all, yoga is about the present. Yoga […]
Smell, Shamelessness, and Liberation
While you may have smelled hot chocolate a million times, that smell might just trigger one specific childhood memory. For me there is one winter day: coming inside from playing in the snow, shivering, my mom wearing that welcoming smile, the chocolate smell filling my senses as I quickly peel off my wet clothes, and […]
