About

I started teaching Monday Night Class at the Princeton Center for Yoga & Health sometime during 1997. While venues have changed, students have come and gone, and my focus has shifted from the form to the formless, still,  the practice and teachings remain basically the same.

When I first started teaching meditation, chanting, and the mysteries of the Hindu Goddess tradition, classes like mine were rare and I sometimes felt like a visitor from another planet.  Needless to say, times have changed.  These days I meet people who used to think I was weird — who have now completed yoga teaching trainings and want to know where they can buy a harmonium.

So where does one go from here?  Is there anything fresh or new I might write about the yogic tradition. Or has it all been said and re-said and said again fourteen zillions times until we’re all so sick of hearing about it, we’d rather go out for pizza and a glass of red wine?  Fortunately, there is great poetry.  This closing section from Rilke’s Turning Point, is about the best description I have ever seen of the teaching themes that pervade my work:

[Rainer Maria Rilke, Turning Point,
from Uncollected Poems, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell]

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.

* * * * * * *

If you’d like to immerse yourself in the heart-work of all those inner images waiting to be found and the sacred inner marriage of masculine and feminine meeting and balancing in love — then this path is for you.  The work is fluid, but the basics never change:

1.  I remain convinced that a regular meditation practice is one of the great weapons of transformational  work and that chanting Sanskrit mantras infuses that work with incredible power and delight.

2.  My instincts tell me that at this particular moment of history, as we struggle with a patriarchal mindset that damages men and women, the metaphor of Devi, the Goddess, offers powerful balancing medicine for the soul.

3.  I remain in awe of the depth and beauty of India’s Tantric tradition. It may well be the first and most complete system of archetypal psychology, pre-dating Jung by several hundred years. And more than psychology, it’s a sacred technology designed to break the heart wide open -and in that breaking, we discover our divine humanity — sacred  immanence, vibrating luminosity, pulsating divinity, in every cell.

4.  I will always believe that a little bit of art-making every day is good for whatever ails you.

5.  I have no doubt that everything we’re searching for is inside of us.