The Skinny
Come as you are. Don’t be a dick. Seek the Truth. And find someone to Love.
A Little More
Yoga is a sacred practice intended to illuminate our consciousness to our highest ideals - love, service, and connection with God. Like life, the yogic path is a spiraling journey of duality - joy and sadness, growth and setbacks, discipline and folly, moments of enlightenment and bouts of darkness. Like life, yoga is an individual practice that we do as part of a community. In the profound words of Ram Dass, “We’re all just walking each other home.” And yet, we all must walk our own paths.
We embrace the powerful teaching from the Rig Veda that “Truth is One, Paths Are Many.” There is one energy that underlies everything and created everything. Different philosophies, religions and people call it by different names, but it’s all the same thing. When we allow others to be who they are, and understand that we are all navigating our own journeys, we relinquish the need to control others and also the need to be accepted by others. These dual needs - to control and to be accepted - are both rooted in fear. Yoga philosophy teaches us that our deepest fear is that we don’t know who we fundamentally are. We have yet to realize that we are not separated from the Creator, and thus we fear death.
So who are we? And why are we here? Again we find wisdom from the Vedas in the powerful statement “So’ham Hamsah”, or “I Am That, That I Am.” We are each a unique manifestation of that same creative force which permeates the Universe - we have simply forgotten. Yoga is the path of connecting with our authentic selves so that we may conquer our fears and be of service to others through our gifts. Like a coiled rope that is misperceived as a snake in darkness until a light shines on it to illuminate its true nature, we gradually realize that it is only our limited thinking, fear and misperceptions of ourselves which inhibit us from achieving our full potential.