I’ve been sad lately. On April 12, I celebrated 10 years of continuous 12-step recovery; it was a moment shared with over 100 people, including my mother and so many dear friends, to celebrate this gift of life I’ve been given. In the moment, one …
Read more "April 12, 2012"a blog post in five parts by Vikram Surya Chiruvolu I. A Global Culture of Addiction To begin with a small example: a friend recently posted to their Facebook page about the book, It’s Just a Plant — a children’s book about marijuana. In the prev…
Read more "Yoga, Addiction, and Recovery"A friend recently asked me about my view on how to get started with meditation. Here’s my answer in the form of five keys. The first key is — know that meditation is anything that centers you, purposefully. Different people at different times in …
Read more "Getting started with meditation"Worth watching! This is the first sane discussion of U.S. economics that I’ve seen in a very long time. Thanks to http://www.christiansarkar.com/ for posting.
Read more "A Useful Discussion of Current US Economic Theory"There was a Newsweek piece today cheekily entitled Bow Down to the Yoga Teacher that brought up some interesting thoughts for me on why people do just that. Posted three comments about it, two to YogaDork.com where I first heard about it – http://…
Read more "Celebrity and Refuge"I’ve been meditating recently on how better to describe the type of yoga I practice – and its relation to all the other ‘yoga’ out there. An intuition has been evolving and recently distilled itself into this: My yoga is decidedly not the objectif…
Read more "Objectification and Yoga"One of my first spiritual and most important teachers in adult life was my great uncle Dr. NC Surya, an Integral Yogi in the Sri Aurobindo tradition. He wrote that yogic speech is accurate, compassionate, appropriate, and useful. If it can’t be al…
Read more "Teaching yoga and spiritual activism"My great-uncle NC Surya wrote often about the topic of ‘specific diseconomy’ — a measure of the degree to which systems are self-undermining. In his case, as a doctor, he was interested in the degree to which the medical system contributed to peo…
Read more "Specific Diseconomy of Nonprofits"In response to this article from Dr. Aseem Shukla in the Washington Post online entitled The Theft of Yoga, and comments from Deepak Chopra and many others — Love and Light to you all! In the healthy debate over the origins and intentions of yoga…
Read more "Paths Many–Truth One"President Obama carries in his pocket a figurine of the Hindu deity Hanuman – the embodiment of the divine strength that arises from humble, devoted service. Tonight, I adapted this page from the Neem Karoli Baba website to create a PDF of a word-…
Read more "The Hanuman Chalisa, word-by-word"