A Sutra a Day: IV-24 – The Best Part of Ourselves

A Sutra a Day: IV-24 – The Best Part of Ourselves

In the early part of my life, I alternated between being a very good girl and a bit of a hell-raiser. I do have a few regrets, but I did manage to create some vivid memories along the way, as well as some great accomplishments.
I would say that the thing that tempered my tempestuous side was partly the discovery of yoga, but even more so becoming part of a wholesome community.
There has been a kind of evolution in my involvement with various communities. […]

A Sutra a Day: III-23 – Strengthening a Quality

  I’ve been with Daniel, my husband, for 20 years now. We met in a workshop called ‘Love, Intimacy and Sexuality’, became friends, and fell in love. These workshops, organised through the Human Awareness Institute, are led by Americans, and the one that I attended had a married couple as facilitators. I’d come through years of difficult romantic relationships and was ready to learn how to have a successful one. I admired the facilitators’ relationship and, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, put them up on a pedestal. […]

A Sutra a Day: II-10 – Sleeping Angels

Source: native-in-nature.tumblr.com via Lindsay on Pinterest

 
On Friday Daniel and I are going to the Central Coast to help produce a workshop sponsored by the Human Awareness Institute. We love these workshops called Love, Intimacy and Sexuality because they serve to bring out the best in the participants – in terms of both their humanity and divinity.
It’s often the case that people don’t recognise their own divinity. […]

A Sutra a Day: IV-24 – The Best Part of Ourselves

Vulnerability = Aliveness

It’s probably no wonder that people are wary of allowing themselves to be seen as vulnerable. The dictionary defines being vulnerable as “susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm.” According to that way of looking at vulnerability, you’d have to be mad or masochistic to practice it. Perhaps I am somewhat crazy then, as I do try to cultivate vulnerability and openness. Why? I’ve discovered over time that the effort it takes to keep up defences only serves to make me isolated, inauthentic, and not fully self-expressed. […]

Negative Fantasies

The first time I came across the term “negative fantasy” was in the workshops produced by the Human Awareness Institute. Over the last two days I have gone in and out of my own negative fantasies which had the effect of making me feel about as low as I have in a long time. Until I had a chance to talk about what was going on in my head, I was accepting the fantasies as being true pictures of reality – albeit highly emotionally charged ones. […]

Image Conscious

Part of what comes with being human is that we are born beautiful and  innocent, connected to our divinity, and then we undergo years of forgetting this happy state.
Maybe this is because we live in a culture that says it’s conceited to think well of ourselves. […]

Finishing School

Yoga isn’t everything. I don’t mean to be an iconoclast, but the truth is that Life is also a very good teacher, and there are many good teachers in the world who are not strictly speaking yogis. Think Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi or Mother Teresa.
I’m going to spend this weekend with two of my favourite teachers at a workshop called Love, Intimacy and Sexuality. […]

Intimacy

Intimacy

A friend and I have had a couple of beautiful conversations this week, and I feel closer to him then I ever have. I’ve wanted this sort of relationship, but didn’t know how to have it or when, if ever, it was going to happen.
The content of the talks was about my feelings. It’s so easy when I feel raw to try to foist my bad feelings on the other person. But I’ve learned from good role models that there is power in vulnerability. […]