Aligning with Grace

I decided to "refresh" my website, only three days after launching  a new one on meditation. Over a year and half ago, I changed the name of my site, after an inner prompting urging me to call it "Dwell in Your Heart." Since I first launched a website in August of 2007, I've been lucky and blessed to have been led to people that helped execute what I had in mind for a reasonable price. But I had never done the work of building or maintaining a site myself. It was simply beyond the purview of my skills and ability. Recently, a couple of friends re-did their own sites, and following their suggestion, I decided to take a stab at doing so. It was incredibly easy to do, and very empowering in the end. Not only was I able to create and redo two sites, I also successfully transferred my own domains and hosting services. As I prepared to begin a new session of yoga classes, just as I was revamping my site, I reflected on what it truly means to dwell in the ...

A few days ago, my eyes glanced upon a book I had read back in the early eighties. I pulled The Way of the Heart, by Henri Nouwen down from my bookshelf, and flipped through it, looking at what I had chosen to underline or make a note of then. What enables us to go more deeply into the heart? This is the question I posed to my yoga students this morning... What is the way of the heart? When we go into the heart - what do we experience there? Different responses were given: love, wonder, compassion, and so forth. I noted, that when we go into the heart and live from there - we experience oneness. Nityananda, the sage of the Siddha Yoga lineage, once said: "The heart is the hub of all sacred places. Go there and roam!" We must go into our hearts to experience oneness. But the experience of oneness, also leads us back into our hearts. Our practices lead us to experience oneness - and unity in diversity. It is in the heart that we know that we belong to each other. Our practic...