I agree that this is something to consider but perhaps not in the way that she meant it. Amara and Rebecca, the host, talked about these particular wisdom keepers and it struck me how this category doesn’t begin or end with the generation of Western teachers who built the studios, certifications, and even, the industry infrastructure we now live inside. I love this podcast because Rebecca’s (and her guests) insightfulness always gets me thinking.

I think it’s essential to keep in mind that modern, Western teachers were never the source of Yogic teachings and were more along the lines of a relay point. This isn’t to diminish what they gave to the world. However, the actual wisdom keepers, the ones who have held this for centuries before any of us arrived, are the lineages and teachers in South Asia that the Western yoga world spent the last hundred years borrowing from, often without much acknowledgment of the borrowing. If we are worried about a demographic cliff, maybe the first move is not to panic about losing the last generation of American Yoga teachers but to ask whether we have been listening to the actual source at all, or whether we skipped past it so quickly that we never learned to hear it.

The question from me became….

Is this a call to action, or a call to listen?

I don’t think it’s only a call to action in the way we usually mean that phrase, more programs, more organizing, more infrastructure. I think it might be a call to a different posture entirely. The Bhagavad Gita is specific about how knowledge is transmitted, and it isn’t through acquisition. Krishna tells Arjuna, “tad viddhi pranipatena pariprasnena sevaya,” which means: “Know that truth through humble approach, sincere inquiry, and service”. Could this mean, not by extraction or certification? But by prostration, asking real questions, listening and by showing up to serve.

The Mundaka Upanishad describes the seeker approaching a teacher “with fuel in hand,” ready to tend the fire, not to take something and leave. That image in particular strikes me as important right now. When I think of how much of the last two decades of yoga in the West has been about arriving empty-handed and leaving with a certificate, a brand, and a niche. Rebecca named this exact pattern in the “soloist era,” where a teacher would find a niche, build a following, sell a course, and/or write a book. While that model produced income, and dare I say, ownership, I’m not convinced that it ever produced listening.

What she said about lineage, and what I’d add

Amara addresses lineage directly later in the episode, and she said it well. She pushed back hard on what she called “this automatic colonial take that traditional lineages are a problem,” on “this narrative about how traditional lineage practice is somehow dangerous or inherently abusive.” Her own position on the topic was a well informed opposite of that. Lineage traditions, she said, are “the only ones with the guardrails,” because “you can track things... you can see who trained with who,” and because a lineage carries “an expectation for lifelong learning” and “long-term mentorship” that a certificate never will. She set that against the newer, unmoored styles built around one personality: “a lot of the new stuff is tied to a specific teacher. It will not sustain them if they die... it’s just going to disappear as soon as that teacher [stops teaching] and the knowledge they have is going to be gone.”

I see this as the same fear of the demographic cliff, but another level down. For me, it points toward the source. A structure already exists that solved the problem of surviving past any one teacher’s lifespan. The move isn’t to build a Western substitute for it but to go closer to the source texts and the living lineages that were built for exactly this purpose.

Here’s where I’d add something Amara didn’t quite say but came up for me in my own listening. The Western mind hears “lineage” and hears another word for “rules”. Lineage, a strict container that contains and restrains ie; taking away the freedoms that the Western mind is geared to protect. The word lineage can conjure up the interpretation as a set of requirements, a chain of custody for verifying who’s legitimate. What is often missed in masses is that a lineage isn’t primarily a rulebook but a pranic line moving teacher to student to teacher to student, unbroken. What actually gets transmitted through long-term study isn’t so much the information but a living current. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika clearly says: “supta guru-prasadena yada jagarti kundali, tada sarvani padmani bhidyante granthayo ‘pi cha,” which means, “when the sleeping kundalini is awakened by the grace of the guru, all the lotuses and knots are pierced.” That isn’t poetic language about mentorship. It’s literally saying the guru’s grace, moving through the line, is what actually moves prana in the body. The Katha Upanishad says something close to this about knowledge itself: the Self “is not easily comprehended when taught by an inferior person... but when taught by one who has become identified with it, there is no further question.” The teacher has to actually carry the thing (prana), not just describe it. This is the difference between wisdom and information.

If that’s true, the Western habit of confusing the container with containment has it backward. We hear “you have to be initiated into a lineage” and assume we’re being fenced in and kept from something. While we run towards everything that seems to represent our perception of freedom, we fail to recognize that the fence was never the point. The pranic line is the point, and it’s a supply line. Cut yourself off from lineage and you haven’t freed yourself from rules. Instead, you’ve cut off your own access to the prana that was flowing through it. That is a much bigger loss than losing a set of standards. It’s losing the current itself.

Is treating yoga as an industry problem part of the problem?

That structural diagnosis is real and I’m not disputing it in the least. I do keep wondering if the entire frame, yoga as an industry with a problem to solve, is itself downstream of the same colonial habit of mind that let the West treat yoga as something to be picked up, packaged, and optimized in the first place. An industry is something you own, manage, and fix. A living wisdom tradition is something you receive, and it is not obligated to conform to our management strategies. And it knows this. I believe that could be what it is trying to tell us right now and we need to listen and get out of the way.

What would it look like to consult the actual texts instead of a strategic plan? The Isha Upanishad opens with a line that has become almost a throwaway quote in yoga marketing, but it is not a throwaway line: “isavasyam idam sarvam yat kincha jagatyam jagat, tena tyaktena bhunjitha ma gridhah kasya svid dhanam.” Which means, “Everything that moves in this moving world is enveloped by the divine. Enjoy through renunciation. Do not covet what isn’t yours.” That is not a business framework but a direct instruction against the very impulse to own, brand, and extract that built the modern yoga industry. If the text itself is warning against grasping, maybe the solution to an industry built on grasping isn’t more oversight of the grasping but less grasping.

What if the Western wave already did its job?

Here’s a thought I haven’t heard anyone say out loud yet. What if the last decades, the celebrities, the boom, and the flood of teacher trainings, the contraction Amara described so well, was never the main event? What if it was simply the mechanism by which yoga got a foothold in the West, full stop, and now that the foothold exists, and it doesn’t need that particular engine anymore? A wave doesn’t fail when it recedes, it’s just doing what waves do. Maybe what we’re experiencing as contraction and crisis is actually yoga itself declining to be owned by an industry that was only ever a delivery vehicle. This doesn’t make Yoga less potent or yoga teachers irrelevant but perhaps is ensuring that we stay right sized.

That reframes the demographic cliff Amara described, too. Yes, we are losing individual teachers who hold enormous knowledge, and that is a real loss to grieve. But the traditions themselves are not aging out. They are still very much alive at the source, in the lineages that never needed the Western industry’s permission to continue. Aparigraha, non-grasping, is the fifth yama in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and Patanjali says something striking about it: “aparigraha-sthairye janma-kathamta sambodhah,” ‘when non-possessiveness becomes steady, understanding of the how and why of one’s existence arises.’ Letting go of the grasping isn’t a loss but how we finally get to see clearly. At least this is yet another one of my curiosities.

Are we listening deeply?

The classical Vedanta path to knowledge has three stages: shravana, hearing the teaching from a qualified source; manana, reflecting on it until doubt clears; and nididhyasana, sitting with it until it becomes lived experience. I don’t think the modern yoga industry has done stage one. We have not really listened. We got a translation of a translation, extracted the asana, kept the branding, and called it received wisdom. Amara made almost this exact point in the episode when she said the industry stripped the practice into parts, took the asana, left the philosophy behind, and sold the fragments back to us. That’s not transmission because transmission requires the ear before it requires the mouth.

Stewards, not owners

If we actually acknowledged that we are stewards of something larger than us, not owners, not innovators, not disruptors, I think the entire conversation changes. Stewardship doesn’t ask “how do I regulate this industry” first. It asks “what was I given?” “Who let me hold it?” and “Am I tending it honestly and faithfully?” The Gita’s teaching on kriya yoga names three disciplines: tapas, the discipline that burns away what’s false; svadhyaya, study, specifically study of sacred teaching, not self-help content; and Ishvara pranidhana, surrender to something greater than the self. That third one is the piece almost entirely missing from how we talk about the yoga profession. We talk about burnout, marketing, certification, regulation. We rarely talk about surrender.

Practically, stewardship might look like teachers being formally, humbly connected to the actual living lineages and teachers of this tradition rather than to a certifying body. It might look like treating a teacher training as an act of custodianship, something we’re allowed to hold only because someone trusted us with it. It might mean far more of us being really clear about how we are temporary caretakers of a few threads of an enormous inheritance and the not founders of anything.

Was this ever meant to be a full livelihood?

This is the question I keep returning to. Amara talked in the episode about how nearly every path in this industry funnels back to teacher trainings because there’s no other structural way to go deeper. But historically, teachers of real depth in this tradition were few, and most practitioners were exactly that: practitioners, embedded in ordinary life, supported by community, family, or a monastic or temple structure that was never built around one person’s paid livelihood in the way a Western small business is. The Gita’s line on svadharma is relevant in this part of the conversation: “shreyan sva-dharmo vigunah para-dharmat sv-anushthitat,”. This means, “better is one’s own duty imperfectly done than another’s duty well performed.” That verse is usually applied to Arjuna’s personal calling, but it also says something about not forcing every calling into the same shape. Not everyone’s dharma is to be a full-time yoga teacher building a brand.

That tracks with what I actually see. The overwhelming majority of students who come through our institute are not trying to replace their income with a yoga business. They’re social workers, therapists, educators inside school systems, people in human resources, practitioners of other kinds, people who are folding these teachings into work they were already doing in the world. That isn’t a lesser use of the training but it might be closer to how this was actually meant to move through a life and a community all along, integrated rather than solely about monetization, one thread among many rather than the whole cloth. The teachings, the prana, get to stay with us no matter what we do because our direct experience and relationship with them are everything. This is how the prana flows and the teachings get to move in their dynamic and intelligent way. As the director of an institute, I feel responsible to ensure that what I do honors the roots so the prana is expressed. This isn’t a plug for me or my work but a point to be made, is that it’s possible.

None of this erases the real economic and safety concerns Amara raises in the episode. Teachers do need to eat and students need protection from bad actors. But maybe the deeper repair isn’t a better business model for the yoga industry. It’s remembering that we were never in charge of this to begin with, and that the wisest thing available to us right now is to stop trying to fix it and start trying to listen to it.

I hope you will give this podcast a listen. It’s rich with depth and thoughtfulness. My commentary isn’t to take away from the important points Rebecca and Amara were making. Quite the opposite. They are catalysts for important conversations…so much so, I’ve been sitting with my thoughts for over a week and have been working on this article for days as I continue to ponder their points.

Thank you Rebecca and Amara for a truly thought provoking and important conversation. With all respect.

Working in Yoga with Rebecca Sebastian ~ Have a listen!

This is the entire job description, and it contains within it the full ethical weight of the role:

A guru exists to eliminate confusion, and every action, teaching, and transmission either serves that function or it does not.

In several Indian spiritual traditions, particularly within Tantra, Vedānta, Bhakti, and certain yoga lineages, the guru is understood to be more than the personality of a human teacher. The outer guru may serve as a vessel of guru-tattva, the principle of wisdom, revelation, and grace that helps the seeker perceive what they can’t yet recognize alone. The relationship isn’t meant to create psychological dependence, but to guide the disciple toward direct realization, mature discernment, and the discovery of the guru principle within. This doesn’t necessarily make the human guru irrelevant or bring the relationship to an end. Rather, the relationship may be transformed from dependence into recognition, gratitude, reverence, and a more conscious participation in the teaching or lineage.

The Kularnava Tantra, one of the foundational texts of the Kaula tradition, addresses this directly. It speaks of the gradual internalization of the guru principle, the movement from relying on the outer teacher to recognizing the antaratma as the true seat of guidance. The text is unambiguous: the outer form is provisional, a scaffold, and a scaffold exists to be removed once the structure can stand on its own. Any teacher who reinforces the scaffold indefinitely, who cultivates ongoing dependence as a feature of the relationship rather than an early-stage necessity to be transcended, has fundamentally misunderstood or deliberately distorted the function they claim to hold.

This is an essential understanding because the entire foundation of tantric epistemology rests on the premise that the light being sought is already present in the student. The Shaiva concept of svaprakasha, self-luminosity, holds that consciousness is not something to be acquired from outside but rather recognized from within. The guru’s role in this framework is not to supply something the student lacks but to remove the conceptual and karmic obstructions that prevent the student from recognizing what has always been there. Shaktipat, the transmission of awakening energy, is not the guru pouring something into an empty vessel; it is more accurately a removal of the stopper from a vessel that was already full.

The Alchemy of Corruption

Understanding what the guru is makes it possible to understand precisely what goes wrong when the function is distorted, and the distortion follows a recognizable alchemical process.

The conditions for corruption are not mysterious. Take a person with genuine spiritual attainment, or even the appearance of it, and surround them with followers whose devotion is real but whose discernment has been suspended in the name of surrender. Add institutional money, the kind that accumulates when thousands of students pay for retreats and trainings and initiations. Layer over this the Western psychological inheritance of the charismatic authority figure, the authority we were taught from childhood to locate outside ourselves, in parents, teachers, priests, experts. Introduce the social reinforcement loop where disagreeing with the teacher becomes coded as spiritual failure, as the ego’s resistance to truth. The result is a pressure vessel with no relief valve, and what happens inside that vessel is not difficult to predict.

When a teacher begins to position themselves as the irreplaceable conduit, as the being through whom the student’s liberation must flow, the mechanics of control become spiritual rather than mundane, and spiritual control is more difficult to perceive and disengage from than ordinary coercion precisely because it works through the student’s highest aspirations. The longing for truth is weaponized.

The Psychology of Complicity

The conversation about abuse in spiritual communities tends to focus on the teacher, but the psycho-spiritual analysis is incomplete without a rigorous examination of what occurs in the community around a distorted authority figure, in the students and devotees who observe, who know, and who continue to uphold the structure. This is not a comfortable inquiry. It implicates not just the abuser but the entire field of relationship in which the abuse becomes possible and sustainable.

The first thing to understand is that complicity is almost never a conscious choice made by fundamentally dishonest people. It is, much more often, a layered process of cognitive and spiritual compromise that unfolds gradually enough that no single step seems decisive. A devotee who has organized their life around a teacher, who has left careers, relationships, and previous identities behind in service to the community, has enormous psychological and existential investment in the validity of what they have surrendered to. To perceive clearly that the teacher is corrupt would require not just a revision of their view of the teacher but a comprehensive reassessment of every choice they have made for years or decades. The mind, with remarkable ingenuity, finds ways to avoid this.

In Tantric psychology, the faculty of discernment is viveka, and it is understood to be one of the highest capacities of consciousness. The Yoga Vasistha describes it as the capacity to perceive things as they actually are rather than as we need them to be. What happens in a corrupted community is that viveka is systematically undermined through a process that is sometimes deliberately engineered by the teacher and sometimes arises organically from the community’s own collective psychological needs. Doubt becomes coded as ego, as fear, and as spiritual immaturity. The student who raises a concern is gently, or not so gently, redirected: “Look at what is arising in you. This is your work.”

Tantra’s understanding of maya, the principle of appearance and concealment, offers a framework for understanding how this works at a subtle level. Maya is not simply illusion in the popular sense; it is the capacity of consciousness to appear as something other than what it is, to wear a particular form so convincingly that the form is mistaken for the underlying reality. In a corrupted spiritual community, the teacher’s maya is operating not as cosmic play but as interpersonal deception, and the devotees’ avidya makes them susceptible to it precisely because the role of the teacher is, traditionally, to be the one who helps pierce the veil. The very trust that the relationship asks for becomes the vector through which the deception travels.

There is also the dimension of what might be called collective ego. Individual ego is relatively familiar territory in spiritual psychology. But communities develop their own ego structures, their own identities, their own defensive patterns and strategies. The community identity is often deeply bound up with the teacher’s specialness and with the community’s own specialness as bearers of the teacher’s transmission. To acknowledge corruption at the center is to threaten not just the teacher’s position but the entire community’s sense of meaning, belonging, and identity.

What this means is that complicity is not simply cowardice. It is the operation of very ordinary, very human psychological mechanisms under conditions of extraordinary pressure, and understanding it clearly requires extending to the bystanders and enablers a kind of clear-eyed compassion that is different from excusing what they do. Because the harm that flows from maintained silence is real and ongoing. Students who might otherwise have left are encouraged to stay. New students enter without the information that would let them make an informed choice. The teacher, receiving no consequence for transgression, has every environmental signal telling them that they may continue.

Ego, Power, and the Distorted Mirror

The Tantric tradition was unusually sophisticated about the relationship between spiritual power and egoic inflation, perhaps because it engaged so directly with the question of shakti, power, as a spiritual reality. The texts don’t pretend that power isn’t real or that its accumulation in a person does not create specific dangers.

The Kularnava Tantra speaks of pashubhava, the animal state of consciousness, and virabhaava, the heroic or vira state, and divyabhava, the divine state, as three orientations toward practice and life. What is notable is that genuine realization is understood to move a person through these states in a way that reduces rather than increases their need for domination, recognition, and control. The divya practitioner is not someone who has acquired vast power over others; they are someone for whom the fixation on self and others as fundamentally separate entities has loosened.

When we encounter a spiritual teacher whose realization appears to move in the opposite direction, whose accumulation of students, money, and status seems to have increased rather than reduced their need for control and recognition, the tradition gives us a diagnostic: this is pashubhava wearing the costume of divyabhava. The shakti may be real; attainments may be genuine; experiences may have occurred that are outside ordinary states of consciousness. None of this is incompatible with profound egoic distortion. Awakening is not a single event that resolves all human psychology. It can exist in a highly fractured relationship with unprocessed personal history, with unhealed wounds around worth and belonging and power, and those fractures become fissures when they are never named, when the community around the teacher treats them as further evidence of the teacher’s mystery and transcendence rather than as vulnerabilities that require honest engagement.

The ego that takes hold inside spiritual authority is distinct from ordinary ego in one important way: it has access to a legitimizing framework that ordinary ego does not have. When the teacher’s demands, transgressive behaviors, or violations of trust are framed as crazy wisdom, as working beyond conventional morality to cut through the student’s conditioning, or as an expression of non-dual perspective that the student simply cannot yet understand, the egoic structure becomes self-insulating. It preemptively discredits every instrument of accountability. The tradition itself, weaponized, becomes the wall around the abuser.

The Hijacking of Sacred Forms

The guru is not the only traditional form that has been co-opted and distorted in the translation to modern Western contexts. The pattern is larger and it is worth speaking about. Every structure that the tradition developed to protect the transmission of awakening has the potential, under specific cultural and economic conditions, to be inverted and used to protect the teacher’s position instead.

This is where we see lineages becoming brands. The pointing to one’s own teacher and their teacher and back through generations of transmission, originally meant to demonstrate the practitioner’s accountability to something larger than themselves, becomes in the distorted version a credential, a claim to exclusive access, a wall around the community.

Seva, service, which in genuine communities is understood as a practice that dissolves the sense of separate self through action, becomes in distorted settings a system of free labor that serves the institution’s bottom line and the teacher’s lifestyle while being explained to the practitioner as their spiritual growth. Satsang, the gathering in the company of truth, which is meant to create a field in which awakening is supported and recognized, becomes a performance, a loyalty demonstration, a setting in which peer pressure enforces the community’s agreed-upon reality.

What the Student Is Owed

The tradition offers the concept of adhikara, which is often translated as qualification or readiness, as the student’s capacity to receive a particular teaching. Adhikara is a relational term; it describes what the teacher can responsibly offer as much as it describes what the student can receive. But it contains within it something the contemporary spiritual marketplace rarely articulates: the student who comes in genuine readiness is owed genuine transmission. They are not owed what they want, which may be confirmation and comfort and a sense of specialness. But they are owed the teacher’s actual attention to what they need for their liberation, the teacher’s honest perception, the teacher’s willingness to offer clarity even when it is unwelcome.

A teacher who uses the student’s readiness and longing for their own gratification, whether financial, psychological, or sexual, has committed what the tradition would recognize as a fundamental violation of the relational contract. It is not simply an ethical failure in the ordinary sense. It is a reversal of the transmission itself. Instead of removing the student’s darkness, the teacher uses the student’s openness to that removal to install something that serves the teacher’s own avidya.

The Inner Guru and the Question of Authority

The resolution available here is what the tradition points toward without romanticizing, and it requires holding two things simultaneously.

The tradition is consistent and clear: the inner guru is the primary guru, and the outer is always pointing toward the inner. The Shaiva concept of shiva as the innermost Self, the witness-consciousness that is already and always free, means that the outer teacher’s ultimate success is measured by the degree to which they awaken in the student a relationship with their own shiva nature. Outer authority is always provisional, always in service of something that is not outside.

This doesn’t resolve the danger of distortion, because the inner-outer dynamic can itself be manipulated. Premature internalization, collapsing the outer too quickly before the student has tools or stability, leaves people isolated without the support of lineage and community. The tradition understood this, which is why it insisted on the acharya as a necessary alongside the guru: the acharya gives you the map and teaches you how to read it; the guru removes the one who is reading. Both matter. The student who arrives at the inner purely through bypassing the outer has often simply privatized their own confusion and called it realization.

The distinction that is ultimately called for is between surrender and submission. Surrender, in the Tantric understanding, is a movement toward one’s own deepest nature, an opening of the defended self to the recognition of what has always been present. It has nothing to do with suspending discernment or ceding judgment to another person. Submission is what distorted authority structures ask for instead: the abdication of viveka, of one’s own perceptive capacity, in favor of the teacher’s version of reality. These two things can appear similar from the outside, particularly in the early stages of a relationship with a teacher, and this similarity is the specific vulnerability that corrupted systems exploit.

What It Actually Looks Like Now

For most practitioners today, the guru relationship as the tradition formally understood it is not the most relevant frame. The tradition itself offered a more expansive understanding: anything that removes the veil is guru. Life circumstances, illness, loss, the dissolution of an identity we thought was permanent, these are the guru. A practice held consistently enough to show you everything you do not want to see about yourself is guru. A text that continues to open new dimensions of meaning each time you encounter it is guru.

This is not a consolation prize for those who cannot find an authentic teacher; it is the logical extension of the teaching that the guru is a function of consciousness, not a title. A person can embody and transmit that function beautifully. They can also corrupt it catastrophically. The function itself is not contingent on any person’s integrity.

What the tradition asks of the student, in any configuration of the outer relationship, is genuine commitment to the actual work: the willingness to be seen, to be changed, and to remain with what is uncomfortable rather than seeking the comfort of a teacher’s reassurance or a community’s confirmation. This is not heroic individualism. It is the recognition that the darkness the guru removes is always your darkness, always inside the precincts of your own awareness, and that ultimately no one outside you can do that work for you, however much they can illuminate the territory and point toward the path.

I sat with my deep love of Black skin. In the Cosmic Mother…in my friends… in people around the world. The millions of people who are dehumanized for something that I can only see as holy. This poem arouse within.

This is my love poem to Black Skin.

Photo from

https://srisaktipeetham.org/

Black Skin Divine

Before the first light opened its eyes,
there was darkness.

Before the sun learned its name,
before the moon silvered the waters,
before the stars pierced the great unseen,
there was blackness,
vast and fertile,
holding every color
before color was born.

Black has never been the absence of God.

Black is the chamber of becoming,
the womb where creation gathered itself,
the endless body of the night,
the rain cloud swollen with mercy,
the sacred mystery too immense
for the human eye to contain.

Kālī came black
because time dissolves into her.

Kṛṣṇa came dark
like the monsoon arriving
over a thirsty earth.

Mahākāla came black
because no terror can survive
inside the one who consumes terror.

The Divine wore black skin
long before humanity made a wound of it.

Long before kingdoms built ladders
from one shade of flesh to another,
long before conquest called pale revered
and dark unworthy,
the gods had already spoken.

They said:

This color is infinity.
protection.
beauty without bounds.

This color is the soil, the storm,
the fertile night, the unseen beginning.

This color carries worlds.

And still,
human hands reached toward black skin
with fear.

Mocking what the heavens exalted.
Diminishing what the temples adored.
Rejecting the very darkness
they knelt before in stone.

What is colorism
but a forgetting of God?

What is the hatred of blackness
but the refusal of the cosmic womb,
the denial of night,
the insult of earth,
the rejection of the deep mystery
from which every living thing emerges?

You can’t worship Kālī
and despise black women.

You can’t sing to Kṛṣṇa
and teach a dark child
that beauty lives somewhere else.

You can’t bow before a black stone
while turning away
from the sacred body beside you.

You can’t praise the darkness of the Absolute
and fear it when it takes human form.

Black skin is not a shadow
waiting to be redeemed by light.

It is the place
where light becomes visible.

It is the deep field
that lets the stars be seen…the night sky
wearing breath.

It is earth remembering heaven
through bone, blood, and living flesh.

Black skin carries mothers
who held generations through fire,
fathers whose dignity survived the whip,
children whose laughter rose
inside a world that tried to silence them,
saints, seers, artists, warriors,
lovers, healers, prophets,
whole civilizations carried
beneath the gaze of those
who refused to see.

But the Divine saw.

The Divine always saw.

The Divine looked upon black skin
and recognized itself.

It recognized itself as flesh worthy of
dignity, protection, desire, reverence,
and every human freedom
that has ever been withheld.

To reject black skin
is to reject the night that shelters.

To reject black skin
Is to reject the soil that feeds you.

To reject black skin
is to reject the womb that formed you.

To reject black skin
is to reject the face of God
because God didn’t arrive
in the color so many were taught to trust.

Let every temple door open and every false hierarchy burn.

Let every child with dark skin
be told what the gods have always known:

You are not less light.

You are the vastness
from which light comes.

You are not a stain upon creation.

You are creation
in one of its most ancient robes.

Your skin is not waiting
to be altered, corrected, lightened,
or made acceptable.

Your skin is sacred.

Black skin divine.

Black skin beautiful.

Black skin immeasurable.

Black skin carrying the night,
the rain, the earth,
the ancestors,
the future,
and the unbroken face
of God.

The word comes from the Sanskrit root dhri, meaning to hold or to sustain. Dharma isn’t destiny in the fortune-cookie sense, nor is it a role assigned to you by someone else. And despite popular belief, it’s not related to “finding your purpose” which often puts a gap between the seeker who is looking externally to find something that makes you feel acceptable and no longer lost. Instead, dharma is the unique configuration of being that only you can inhabit, your right place in the larger whole, and the natural consequence of being fully and authentically yourself.

This is where things get complicated for many of us in modern times.

A significant number of people coming to Yogic, Tantric and Vedic practices today have grown up in environments where authority meant compliance. Often where someone in charge told you how things were, who you were to be and that your job was to fall in line. Most of us met this in either our families, schools, religions, cultural customs or institutions.

Unfortunately, that kind of conditioning creates a reflex. The moment something is presented as a traditional teaching, a prescribed practice, or a correct way of doing things, the nervous system registers it as a threat to autonomy. The response in the mind and body can be immediate. And it can feel exactly like authenticity speaking out against a forceful external power.

But is it? This is the honest question I believe we all have to sit with.

Questioning is not just allowed in the Yogic, Vedic and Tantric traditions; it is required. The Upanishads, from the Vedas, themselves are structured as dialogues, as challenges, and as the relentless pressing of the student past the comfortable answer. Compliance is not what is being asked of us here. Passive acceptance of tradition because someone “told you to” is not wisdom. It is just a different flavor of the same unconscious obedience. Rebellion, too, can be part of the path. But an automatic reflex of rebellion, one that fires from conditioning rather than from genuine inquiry, is no freer than compliance. It is just the ego in a different costume.

And the ego has many,many costumes.

The ego is remarkably good at speaking the language of wherever it finds itself. It will learn Sanskrit terms, cite lineages, adopt a tone of spiritual sophistication, and still be doing exactly what it has always done: asserting itself, protecting its story, and performing an identity. Modern wellness culture, for all its genuine offerings, carries a real risk here. Many contemporary practices are expertly designed to make you feel better, more empowered, and more you. And feeling better is not nothing, it can even be an important first step for some. However, feeling better isn’t the same as transformation. The ego can get very comfortable in a yoga studio or a cacao ceremony where the “feel good” flows. It can become fluent in the vocabulary of awakening without ever being threatened by it.

This is precisely why the traditional practices remain as potent as they have ever been, and why they serve as such a necessary anchor. The mind is restless and creative; the ego, tireless. Left to its own devices, it will optimize for comfort and confirmation, and it will dress that optimization in whatever spiritual language is currently fashionable. The traditions are not impressed by this. They aren’t new, and they aren’t trying to flatter you. They have held their ground across thousands of years of human cleverness, and continue to do so because they work below, and above, the level where the ego operates.

When you sit in meditation consistently, something happens that no amount of self-improvement content can replicate. The conditioning begins to surface as a felt experience. Old reactions reveal themselves as patterns instead of truths and the stories that seemed like your identity start to look like furniture you have been rearranging for decades. The same is true of chanting. When mantra practice is done correctly and consistently, it works beneath the thinking mind. It is not the ego becoming more refined but instead, something beneath the ego beginning to speak.

And what speaks from that place is your actual nature: not the curated self, or the rebellious self, it’s not the compliant self either. It’s the one who was there before any of those characters showed up. From this place, rta is not an abstract cosmic principle. It is felt. It is the natural order of things that becomes less like a doctrine and more like a conversation you are having with the universe in real time. You don’t have to perform your authenticity because you are living from it.

Your dharma, your right place in the world, reveals itself through the falling away of everything that was never actually you. That process isn’t always comfortable, and it can’t be a shortcut. It requires neither blind compliance nor reflexive rebellion, but something considerably rarer: the willingness to be genuinely changed by what you encounter when you go deep enough.

That willingness is, in itself, a form of courage.

Keep in mind that following a tradition well is an act of self-knowledge, not submission. It asks you to show up, to practice, and to let the practice do what it has always been designed to do: reveal you to yourself. When that process has done its work, even partially, your relationship to the teachings begins to shift. You are no longer afraid of them and are no longer fighting them. The rebellion reaction loses its charge because the fear that fed it has been met directly, in the body, in the mind, and in the accumulated stillness of a consistent practice. What remains is something simpler: a person who can receive what has been handed down with open hands. Not because someone said to but because you went far enough in to know it for yourself.

I’m talking about what happens when I haven’t given enough sincere thought and care to my spiritual practices, to my self-care, and to the inner relationship that keeps me connected to the Supreme Consciousness, to truth, and to my own deepest knowing. When I haven’t truly tended that inner life, I become much easier to sway, and then all the grabby things of the world begin to feel more compelling, or confusing, than they actually are. And really, if I’m honest, more than they even need to be.

Being under the influence these days means I have made myself too available to forces that shouldn’t have so much power in my life. That I’m more persuadable than I want to be, more impressionable than is helpful, more likely to get pulled by the urgency of instant gratification. It can go as far as being pulled by other people’s emotions, mindless stimulation, praise, fear, pressure, longing, distraction, over-responsibility, or simply by the endless noise of a world that is always asking for attention. When my inner seat has not been cared for deeply enough, things that should remain peripheral begin moving toward my center, crowding out what is most essential to me: my connection to Supreme Consciousness.

I have come to recognize that when I’m under the influence, it’s not the time to be making big life decisions. I am starting to understand that this must be a sacred rule for me. When I can feel that I am emotionally stirred up, pulled in too many directions, overly affected by someone else’s energy, worn down, overexposed, internally scattered, or just too far from my own practices, I know that I am not in the right place to make choices that carry any weight. I have to wait until I have returned to myself and let things settle before deciding what belongs in my life. I have learned that the version of me who is full of static, vulnerability, urgency, and outer influence doesn’t need to be the one shaping my life, let alone my future.

I’m coming to understand how this kind of waiting is a form of spiritual intelligence whose tail I’m just now beginning to touch. It is an honoring of the fact that sacred decisions deserve sacred space, and that choices about relationships, money, vocation, direction, commitment, health, and the architecture of my life deserve to be made from a consciousness that is in living contact with what is true. In all of this, it reminds me that my life is sacred and that I move in much more of a state of flow when I treat it that way. But treating my life as sacred can’t stay theoretical. It has to be a way I actually show up. I prefer the part of me that is prayerful, deeply listening, and inwardly gathered to be the one making those decisions. I want the part of me that can feel the Divine moving, not the part of me that is reacting to the latest wave of stimulation or emotion.

Most of us know what it means to be intoxicated by something obvious, but we don’t always recognize when urgency, approval, being needed, the fantasy of rescue or arrival, outrage, someone else’s certainty, or the sheer speed of modern life itself are our primary intoxicants, ones we ingest nearly every moment of every day. We often don’t notice when the mind has become crowded enough that we are no longer perceiving from our own center. And that is one of the most common conditions of our time, one that keeps feeding itself like a ravenously hungry thing.

I see this especially clearly in how easily attention is captured now. So much of modern life is built around interruption, stimulation, seduction, speed, and emotional extraction. I’m not trying to make life wrong. But I do see how life is asking us to become more truly wise, and not just wise at the ego level.

That is one of the reasons stopping, stilling, and connecting have become so important for me. That time gathers me back and helps me hear myself before the world gets too loud. It helps me recognize what is actually mine, what belongs to someone else, what is a passing current, and what is a deeper directive. It gives me a way to digest experiences rather than endlessly accumulate them with no way to process or let them go, leaving them to crowd my psyche with little to no value.

This is where yogic teachings become so practical, because they offer both a language and a living method for reclaiming awareness from the forces that scatter it. Pratyahara is one of the most important of these for this conversation. Often described as withdrawal of the senses, pratyahara can sound austere or abstract when first introduced, but to me it feels incredibly compassionate and relevant. It is the practice of no longer letting the senses run my whole temple, turning awareness inward so that the outer world is no longer dictating the state of the inner world with such force. It invites discernment around what we let enter, what we keep attending to, and what kind of power we hand over through repeated engagement.

In a very real way, pratyahara is training in how not to be so easily influenced. It teaches us that we do not have to answer every pull, track every sound, follow every emotional current, absorb every projection, or bow to every invitation that arrives dressed as urgency. It restores choice where compulsion has been growing, and inner authorship where outer demands have become too dominant. When I think about what being under the influence means now, pratyahara is one of the antidotes, because it reminds me that I can gather my senses, my attention, and my life force back from all the places where they have been leaking.

This is also why sadhana can’t remain at the level of sentiment or identity. It’s not simply something we say we value while the structure of our attention remains surrendered to noise, pressure, stimulation, and the endless need to stay occupied. The deeper work of sadhana is to free us from unconscious influences so we are less easily captured or manipulated, less likely to worship what is loudest, or to confuse the momentum of the mind with the guidance of the Divine. Without that inner labor, even spiritual life can become another activity layered onto a crowded self, another thing we do while remaining fundamentally unchanged. The point is not merely to perform practice, but to let practice expose the places where we are still being driven by compulsion, avoidance, emotional reactivity, or by a subtle addiction to outward engagement.

Breath is one of the first merciful ways back. It very quickly tells me whether I am with myself or far from myself. It gives me a place to begin again without delay. Sometimes it is a longer exhale, or as simple as my hand on my heart. Sometimes it is a pause before answering, or simply declining to decide in the moment.

Mantra offers another kind of protection because it gives the mind something sacred to revolve around rather than leaving it exposed to every passing hook. Japa has always felt important to me for this reason. Repetition of a holy name or mantra changes the texture of the mental field. It reorders attention. It reminds me what I belong to. It gives the mind something luminous to keep company with rather than letting it be dragged from one fragment of anxiety, comparison, fantasy, or noise to the next. In that sense, mantra is an act of prayer, and also incredibly practical, because it helps remove the mind from its usual habits of fixation and places it in a different relationship to thought itself.

Ritual are invaluable too, and I think traditional paths understand this with a sophistication modern life often forgets. Ritual marks a threshold because it tells the psyche, body, and the subtle being that something sacred is taking place. A simple act like lighting a candle, touching the floor with awareness, sitting before an altar, chanting, praying, or beginning the morning with intention reminds the whole system that life does not begin with demand, with media, with urgency, or with whatever is clamoring most loudly. Life begins in relationship with the sacred, and that changes the atmosphere of everything that follows. It becomes much harder to be ruled by outer forces when the day has already been given back to God before the world makes its claims on you.

There is also tremendous power in silence, in reduced input, in not discussing everything while it is still forming, and in letting something ripen inwardly before exposing it to too much interpretation. Sometimes being under the influence has less to do with one dramatic force and more to do with cumulative saturation. Too much information, too many voices, too much witnessing, too much explaining, too much emotional reactivity, and too little digestion can create a state in which a person no longer knows what they actually feel or know. Silence restores the intelligence of the system. It lets the mud settle. It lets the water show its own depth again.

Boundaries belong here too, because boundaries are not only social tools, they are spiritual protections. They preserve the conditions in which truth can still be heard. When I am affected by too many outer forces, I usually need less access, less conversation, less urgency, less agreement-making, less explaining, less exposure to what agitates or drains, and more intimacy with what returns me to myself. There are seasons when the most spiritual act is to reduce the noise enough that the soul can come fully back into the room. Sensitivity is a beautiful capacity, but without guardianship it can become over-absorption, confusion, and entanglement. Maturity asks us to protect sensitivity without hardening it, and to remain open while staying deeply connected to the place within from which right response can arise.

So when I know I’m under the influence in this deeper sense, I don’t rush toward resolution. I come back to the body. I return to breath. I pray. I repeat mantra. I pare things down. I reduce input. I let stillness do its work. I allow pratyahara to gather my senses and my life force back from everywhere they have been leaking. I remember that not every state of mind is meant to lead, and that some states are asking not for decision but for care, restoration, containment, and a gentler environment. I do not make major commitments. I do not make big money decisions. I do not let temporary pressure define permanent direction. I do not let another person’s certainty become my compass. I allow return before action, and I allow relationship with the Divine to become stronger than the pull of whatever is most emotionally charged in the moment.

And maybe that is one of the deepest teachings in all of this: that we are not meant to live with our awareness scattered in a thousand directions and call that freedom. We are meant to learn how to gather. We are meant to learn how to listen. We are meant to become discerning about what gets access to our mind, our heart, our attention, our prayer, and our life force. We are meant to see clearly that anything can become an intoxicant when we have drifted far enough from the sacred center of our own being, including responsibility, identity, productivity, usefulness, and the endless compulsion to act. This is why spiritual practice is essential. It makes us less available to what should not be ruling us. It helps us fulfill what is truly ours without becoming possessed by role, by duty, by pressure, or by the mind’s need to remain endlessly occupied. It teaches us how to act without being defined by action, how to serve without disappearing into service, and how to let our lives be shaped not by the world’s constant persuasion but by the Divine presence that can still be felt when we become still enough within to hear it.

These days, that feels like one of the deepest forms of sacred practice I know. To wait until I can hear my own soul again. To care for the inner life with enough sincerity that what is loud does not automatically become what leads. To remember that attention is sacred, that influence is real, and that what I return to again and again will eventually shape the life I am living. Anything can become an intoxicant when I have drifted too far and my spiritual practice is the way I come back.

They are often designed, whether openly or subtley, to benefit the few while asking the many to adapt, endure, and call it normal. Power is present, but it’s the wrong kind of power. It’s power disconnected from wisdom, conscience, and sacred responsibility. Much can be normalized over time, but normalization doesn’t make something right. It doesn’t make it just, equitable, or honorable. Progress may move quickly, and intelligence may be abundant, yet both can still leave something essential behind. It’s in moments like these, when the surface may appear acceptable but when we are paying attention we can see that the deeper order has been betrayed.

I have been studying the story of the Mahishasuramardini Stotram and am seeing how well it speaks directly to this kind of moment in time. It tells of a time when imbalance became so great that the existing forces of “order” could no longer restore harmony on their own. The devas, each powerful in their own way, found themselves unable to overcome a force that had grown too strong, adaptive, and disconnected from the whole. What they faced more than anything was a distortion of power itself.

That force is embodied in Mahishasura, a being who is disciplined, capable, and formidable, yet driven by ambition without reverence. He represents a kind of intelligence that has lost its relationship to responsibility. His ability to change form throughout the battle is an important detail because it reflects the way imbalance operates in the world. It rarely appears in one fixed shape. It’s clever as it adapts to circumstances, takes on new languages, and often presents itself in ways that seem legitimate or even beneficial at first glance.

What makes this story so relevant isn’t just the presence of imbalance, but the response to it. The devas don’t succeed by becoming more aggressive or by trying to overpower Mahishasura individually. Instead, they recognize that their separation is part of the problem. Each holds a piece of power, but none holds the whole. In a bold act of surrender and cooperation, they offer their individual strengths into a unified field and it’s from that field, something entirely new emerges.

Durga isn’t born as a replacement for what existed before, but as an integration of it. She carries the essence of all the devas, yet she is not limited by any one of them. Her power isn’t fragmented which is what makes it so effective. She is precise, discerning, and unwavering and doesn’t act from reactivity or ego. She is intentional as she responds from alignment with what sustains all life.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t a story about the feminine replacing the masculine. It’s a story about what becomes possible when fragmented power becomes integrated with the whole and then into right relationship. The very forces that could not defeat Mahishasura on their own become the foundation of Durga’s strength. The masculine is not erased in this process. Instead, it is refined, aligned, and offered into a larger intelligence that includes but also transcends it.

This distinction is hugely important in our current world. There is a tendency to interpret the rise of the feminine as a corrective that requires the diminishment of men or masculine qualities. However, the story itself suggests something far more nuanced and far more necessary. What is being called forward isn’t the removal of strength, structure, or action, but their transformation.

The sacred masculine, when it’s functioning well, protects, clarifies, builds, and serves. The sacred feminine perceives, connects, nourishes, and transforms. When either operates in isolation, imbalance follows. When they are brought into harmonious relationship, something far more intelligent becomes probable.

The world today reflects many of the same patterns described in the story. We see leadership that is often driven by personal gain rather than collective well-being. We see systems that prioritize efficiency and greed over care and expansion over sustainability. We see spiritual spaces that sometimes confuse visibility with depth and influence with integrity. None of these patterns exist because power itself is flawed. They exist because power has become disconnected from the values that give it direction.

The figure of Mahishasura helps us understand that imbalance isn’t always obvious to all. It can appear as innovation, authority, or confidence or even be persuasive and inspiring for some. This is why the response can’t be too simplistic. It requires discernment, the ability to see beyond surface appearances and recognize whether something is aligned with all life or subtly working against it.

The rise of Durga in the story illuminates new solutions with real possibility that aren’t passive or avoidant. They are wholly engaged, clear, and grounded in a deep sense of responsibility. She doesn’t act to dominate, but to restore. Her strength isn’t separate from her intelligence or her care, it’s an expression of them.

This has both collective and personal implications. On a societal level, it invites a reexamination of how power is used and who is trusted to hold it. It calls for leadership that is capable of integrating strength with accountability and vision with humility while calling for systems that are designed to support, and elevate the well-being of the whole.

On an individual level, the forces it describes exist within each of us and aren’t just external. There are parts of the mind that resist truth, patterns that avoid accountability, and habits that prioritize control. At the same time, there is also the capacity for insightfulness, courage, and aligned action. The rising of the feminine can be understood as the moment when we choose to bring these capacities forward, not in opposition to power, but in partnership with it.

What makes this story enduring is that it doesn’t end with domination. Durga doesn’t take control of the world once the battle is won. She restores balance and then recedes. The goal isn’t to replace one form of imbalance with another, but to return the system to a state where harmony can be sustained.

If we take this seriously as a lens for our time, it suggests that the work ahead isn’t about choosing sides but about integration. It asks that we start recognizing where power has become fragmented and how we are participating in its reorientation. This requires that we allow strength to be guided by wisdom, ensuring that care isn’t separated from action.

The idea that the feminine rises when all other powers fail is not a statement of defeat or domination. In its purest view, it is the recognition that there are moments when a deeper intelligence must take the lead which requires the feminine to rise up to meet the overly, imbalanced masculine world to help balance things out.

Although the reference is historical, this isn’t actually a story about the past. It’s a description of a process that continues to unfold and it asks whether we are willing to be part of that unfolding in a way that restores rather than further divides.

I didn’t feel bliss, but I felt everything and nothing. This space held the Divine paradox. What struck me was the vastness and perfection of it all. The absence of labels was compelling. Alignment wasn’t about aligning from an intellectual place but aligning to the all which naturally made labels and all forms of measurement fall away.

I knew theoretically how much of ordinary life is held together by labeling, roles and all the quiet agreements that tell us who we are, where we stand, what matters, and how to move. In śūnya, none of that was present. There was no woman, teacher, seeker, no past, no next moment or action, no personal storyline gathering itself around me. And even writing this now, I can feel how drastically different this space is from the way my intellect understands it in this time space reality and what the experience actually was. There was only the utter simplicity of being without the structures that usually frame being.

That simplicity was so profound. I could see how much of the human system depends on reference points, even subtle ones. We lean on names, responsibilities, wounds, hopes, our interpretations of where we have been and where we are going. We rarely notice how much these become the architecture of self. When that architecture is gone, something in us meets a vastness that is honest beyond words. There is nothing to grasp and no way to arrange yourself because there is only presence, unadorned.

The absence of time, which is still one of the hardest parts to speak about because people understand the language of the present moment, and many of us have tasted moments of deep presence, but this was of an entirely different order. This wasn’t a beautiful moment inside time but the disappearance of time as a structure altogether. There was no sense of sequence, or movement from one instant to the next, and no feeling of duration accumulating. There was only now, but even the word now feels too small, because it still sounds like part of a timeline. This had no timeline. There was only an unbroken field of being.

That was a total trip. There is no other way to say it. To be aware, fully aware, and yet to have no sense of before or after is unlike anything the ordinary mind can prepare for. The mind wants continuity and orientation. These reference points give us a relational sense of being. The mind wants to know where this is happening in relation to everything else. In śūnya, that whole mechanism has nothing to work with. There is no clock and no progression. There is no waiting for the next thing to arrive. The entire movement of psychological time is absent, and what remains is so immediate and so complete that it leaves the mind with nowhere to stand.

And when everything is complete, longing disappears. I don’t mean longing was soothed or fulfilled by getting what it wanted. I mean longing itself had no place there. The subtle reach toward something more, something else, something later, something better, was simply absent. There was no internal scale of more or less. No gain. No lack. No comparing this moment to another moment. No asking whether something had been attained. There was only is-ness, if I can call it that, a total fact of being that didn’t need confirmation.

This kind of completeness reveals something startling about ordinary identity. After spending several hours in this state, I understood in a visceral way why the ahamkara, the I-maker, scrambles around it in avoidance. I don’t mean this through judgment but with compassion toward the human condition. The egoic structure is built to organize, distinguish, maintain continuity, and to preserve what it believes is you, me, us.

In śūnya, there is nothing to manage in that way. There is nothing to control, defend or protect. There’s not even anything to fear. And while part of us might hear that and think it sounds beautiful, another part of us has no idea how to function without how this familiar activity shapes and secures identity.

That was one of the most revealing aspects of the experience for me. I could feel how wound together we are with all of it, not only with obvious labels but with subtle ones, with our roles in relationships, with our private ideas of who we have to be, with our sense of purpose, with our hurt, with our strength, with the ways we quietly locate ourselves in every room and every conversation. We take these things to be natural, even to be life itself. And then there comes a moment when none of that is there, and what remains is so vast and so intimate that it leaves us face to face with something that existed before every description.

There is an innocence in this space but not a sense of naivety. In other words, an untouched quality, a condition of being that had never been shaped by the social self. It didn’t need to introduce itself or justify its existence and it wasn’t asking to be meaningful. It was already whole. To encounter that after a lifetime of moving within the world as a person with a name and a history and a function was almost unbearable in its purity, and yet there was also something deeply relieving in it, as though I was meeting the most intimate truth without the usual coverings.

What has stayed with me is not some grand conclusion, but a changed relationship to identity itself. I still live a human life and have roles, responsibilities, relationships, preferences, and a name. But somewhere in me there is now the memory of what exists without taking any of those as the basis of being. There is a knowing that underneath the movement of personality and the necessary shapes of life, there is a field that remains untouched, silent, complete, and entirely free of the structures that usually define experience.

To speak of śūnya from the outside is one thing. To enter it, even once, is something else altogether. It changes the conversation and the weight of words like self, presence, time, and freedom. And it leaves behind a kind of holy disruption, because once you have known yourself apart from labels, apart from time, apart from longing and measure, you can’t completely go back to believing that the roles you play are the whole story.

As I work more with the mother archetype within myself, I notice how this programming reflects a much larger inheritance where time has increasingly been organized as something external, and measurable. It’s replaced the relationship between body, season, sky, hunger, sleep, and awareness. It’s not that calendars are inherently harmful, because human beings do need order and coordination, but that many of us now live inside systems of time that are excellent for administration and productivity while offering very little support for inner coherence.

The modern calendar helped strengthen a way of life shaped by commerce, institutions, and predictability, and those aims are not insignificant. Large societies require agreement at a certain level for basic functionality. Travel, work, education, and civic life all depend on shared measures. Unfortunately, what is equally true is that something vital is lost when time is treated only as a grid to be managed rather than as a living field to be entered. Once time becomes detached from direct observation of sun, moon, season, and bodily intelligence, people begin to look outward for permission in places where they once looked inward for discernment.

Older systems of timekeeping did much more than counting the days. They placed human life inside a larger cosmos and asked people to participate in that reality. Time was not just a sequence of numbered boxes on a page but an encounter with waxing and waning light, with seasonal shifts, with auspicious and inauspicious intervals, with planting and harvest, with fasting and feasting, with the felt experience that life unfolds through cycles rather than through endless forward pressure. In that kind of world, a person was invited to observe, respond, and develop sensitivity. Time was not simply imposed but a relationship to be interpreted, sensed, and lived.

It begs the question; what kind of consciousness is formed when human beings are trained to override internal signals in service of external timing?

A culture organized almost entirely around output begins to reward compliance with fixed demands more than attunement to changing conditions. We eat because the lunch break says it is lunchtime, not because hunger has arisen organically from within. We keep going because the workday isn’t done, not because energy is still available. We wake to alarms, push through depletion, and postpone recovery until it becomes unavoidable, and after enough years of this, many people no longer trust their own perceptions.

When that happens, time no longer feels like something one belongs to. It becomes something one is chasing, serving, or losing; a hidden sorrow of modern life. People are taught to master time while becoming less intimate with the signals that make us feel human. We become skilled at managing our calendars with precision, yet most don’t know when their mind is most open, when their digestion is strongest, when their spirit is asking for solitude, or when their exhaustion has crossed from ordinary tiredness into a deeper call for repair.

This estrangement doesn’t happen through calendars alone, but calendars do symbolize and reinforce it. They belong to a larger cultural movement that privileged standardization over participation, abstraction over observation, and institutional order over embodied intelligence. The result is often focused on stress but an even potential bigger offender is a subtler weakening of self-trust. When people spend enough time living by external command, they begin to doubt the legitimacy of what they feel. We second-guess appetite, dismiss intuition, override the need to pause and treat the body’s changing needs as inconvenient interruptions rather than as meaningful information.

A more life-giving approach to time doesn’t reject structure, because structure is not the enemy. Human beings need containers, patterns, and agreements if life is to function well. I think the bigger question is whether our structures support aliveness or mute it. The wisest forms of order don’t ask the body to become a machine. They make room for variation, receptivity, digestion, integration, and the different kinds of intelligence that don’t arrive on demand. There is a form of order that serves life, a maturity that invites the natural impulse of life to unfold over time. There is a form of order that asks life to serve the system and this is what we have normalized.

This is why reclaiming a relationship with living time can be so powerful, because it begins to return us to forms of knowing that are immediate and intimate. A person may start by noticing when hunger starts to rouse in the body rather than eating only by the clock. They may observe whether their clearest thinking comes at dawn, midday, or evening. They may begin to notice that some days are naturally more expressive while others are better suited for inwardness, repair, prayer, or listening. They may become more aware that creativity has seasons, grief has seasons, desire has seasons, and healing itself often asks for intervals of slowing down.

What is needed now isn’t retaliation against the calendar but a restoration of another layer of orientation. We can keep the shared systems that help society function while also cultivating a more participatory way of living. We can track dates and still learn to observe lunar changes. We can meet our commitments while still noticing whether the body is asking for warmth, movement, sleep, silence, touch, or nourishment. We can plan ahead and still remember that not everything meaningful can be scheduled into existence. Some forms of knowing arise only when there is enough inward space to feel them.

This restoration has implications far beyond personal wellness. People who return to embodied awareness become more discerning about consumption, labor, rest, and desire. They may begin to question systems that reward disconnection and ask whether efficiency alone is a worthy measure of human life.

In that sense, the deeper wound of modern timekeeping is that it has become totalizing for many people, replacing rather than accompanying older ways of orienting. Not only have we learned to organize time, we have been trained to obey it. Most of us know the date, the time, and what’s expected of us, but many of us have lost touch with the part that knows when something actually feels right.

Perhaps that is the real invitation is to remember that human beings were never meant to live by abstraction alone. We were made to notice and sense. We were made to participate in a world where time is a felt experience. When we begin to return to that, even in small ways, we begin to return to ourselves

.

Morality, in this sense, is often a structure laid over fragmentation. It’s a set of agreements meant to keep order in a world where people have lost touch with their own inner coherence. While this isn’t inherently wrong, and in many cases it’s served an important purpose, it’s also limited and limiting. Morality can produce restraint, yes. But restraint isn’t the same as wisdom. It can produce compliance, but being compliant isn’t being conscious, necessarily. Morality can teach people how to behave while doing very little to help them understand what’s driving them beneath the surface and can perpetuate the very fragmentation it is built upon.

This is part of what makes the conversation so relevant now. We live in a time when people are constantly signaling their goodness, declaring their values, performing outrage, and announcing where they stand. Again, not inherently “wrong”, especially if it’s coming from an informed and integrated place. However, morality has become deeply entangled with identity. It’s no longer just about how one lives, but about how one is seen. Being moral can become part performance, part tribal belonging, and part defense against uncertainty. It can become a way to avoid looking at one’s own shadow by locating evil entirely outside oneself.

That’s one of the great pitfalls of morality. It can create the illusion that if you hold the right views, use the right language, condemn the right people, or belong to the right side of an issue, then you’re inwardly clear. But many people who appear moral are still deeply unexamined. They may still be driven by aggression, fear, superiority, resentment, envy, or a need for control. Morality can give these forces a socially acceptable costume while making domination look righteous while simultaneously making contempt look like intelligence and punishment like a virtue.

This is where yoga offers something far deeper than a moral code. The yamas and niyamas are often spoken of as ethical principles or grouped under the broad heading of “yogic philosophy,” but that language diminishes what they actually are. Calling them philosophy can make them sound like ideas to admire or concepts to consider. What is often missed is that they aren’t commentary around yoga. They are yoga.

This is essential to understand because so much of modern yoga has been thinned out and rearranged. The yamas and niyamas get treated like background material, a quick nod at the beginning of a training, while the visible and marketable parts of yoga take center stage. Flexibility, aesthetics, sequencing, branding, and nervous system regulation become the things people most associate with yoga, while the deeper reordering of the human being is left largely untouched. But in the eight-limbed path, the yamas and niyamas come before asana, and that isn’t accidental. The order teaches us something essential.

Before the postures, there is a path for a much larger purpose; the purification of perception and the slow and humbling work of becoming inwardly trustworthy.

This order matters because yoga was never meant to begin with outer form. It begins with how we are in relationship to life, to others, to ourselves, to truth, to energy, to desire, to the movements of the mind. The tradition places the yamas and niyamas first because they establish the conditions that make deeper yoga possible. Without them, practice can still happen, but that practice can end up being in service of the ego, stimulation, or self-image. The body may become more capable, but the being may remain just as divided. This is one of the ways yoga has been hollowed out in modern culture. Once the foundational limbs are treated as optional, the path gets severed from its transformative depth.

If we approach the yamas and niyamas merely as rules to obey, then yoga becomes another external structure of self-management attempting to produce the “right” kind of person. But their real purpose has very little to do with helping us appear virtuous. They clear the field of perception by reducing the inner distortion that keeps us estranged from truth. And they help create the inner conditions through which deeper practice is no longer performative, but real.

The yamas, then, are not just social ethics dressed up in spiritual language. They point us toward the places where we’re still split within ourselves. Ahimsa begins to reveal how easily harm takes root, long before any outward act appears. It can live in the mind as hostility, in the voice as sharpness, in the body as a readiness to dominate, dismiss, or defend. Satya asks whether we’re willing to remain close to what is real, especially when illusion is more flattering, more convenient, or more rewarded. Asteya broadens the conversation beyond obvious theft and asks us to notice all the subtle ways we take what isn’t ours, whether that’s attention, credit, energy, time, space, or emotional labor. Brahmacharya turns our attention toward our relationship with life force itself, toward the ways we scatter ourselves, overstimulate ourselves, and spend our energy without reverence. Aparigraha exposes the grasping reflex, the endless tendency to hold, secure, possess, and accumulate in order to stabilize a self that hasn’t yet learned to rest in something deeper.

The niyamas offer us the same depth in a more inward direction. Saucha opens the space for us to clear away that which muddies perception, helping us to become more transparent to what is true. Santosha awakens a sufficiency within, a way of meeting life without so much grasping, reaching, or inner argument. Tapas brings the heat of transformation, the force that strengthens commitment, deepens sincerity, and supports the burning away of what is false or misaligned. Svadhyaya invites a sincere study of the self through sacred texts, through reflection, and through direct encounter with our own patterns, motives, wounds, and habits of mind. Ishvara pranidhana opens us to surrender, to humility, and to a living relationship with something wiser and greater than the small self that tries to manage everything alone.

Seen this way, the yamas and niyamas are not moral commandments or an abstract philosophy. They are living practices that help us keep our side of the street clean, not so we can congratulate ourselves for being good, but so the noise within us quiets enough for deeper truth to be felt and experienced.

This is incredibly relevant because it reminds us that there’s a part of the human being that isn’t governed by morality. It isn’t immoral, but post moral. It’s beyond this framework altogether. It doesn’t need codes imposed from the outside in order to avoid harming others, because it allows us to experience life from a place where separateness is thinner and less convincing. This isn’t spiritual bypassing or naïve idealism. It doesn’t deny trauma, pathology, cruelty, or the terrible things human beings are capable of. It simply says that beneath conditioning, beneath fragmentation, beneath the layers of fear and reactivity, there’s also a deeper intelligence in us that knows connection directly and we are blessed enough to have a map that guides home to that very connection.

When that dimension of self becomes more accessible, something important changes. We no longer need the same kind of outer policing because we aren’t being driven in the same way by unconscious compulsion. This isn’t to say that morality has no place. In certain stages of development, it provides a necessary container. It can prevent harm when inner awareness isn’t yet stable and it can serve kind of outer structure for those who haven’t yet developed the capacity to live from deeper inner truth.

But it isn’t the final destination. The deeper aim isn’t to remain forever confined by a system that must police our behavior from the outside. The deeper aim is to become so inwardly clear, so connected to the ground of being, that such policing becomes less necessary. When we’re grounded in that deeper dimension of self, we don’t need morality in the same way because right relationship begins to arise more naturally. Care and reverence are no longer performative virtuosity, they’re expressions of wholeness.

This is why the yamas and niyamas matter so much. They aren’t there to turn us into puritanical, well-behaved spiritual people. They are there to help undo the fragmentation that makes external policing necessary in the first place. They are there to make us more capable of truth, more capable of relationship, more capable of practicing in a way that isn’t just impressive from the outside.

If we cling to morality as identity, we can become rigid, self-righteous, or disconnected in a different way, hiding behind goodness rather than embodying truth. If we actually live the yamas and niyamas as yoga, then the point is not image management, it’s inner reordering.

This is a difficult idea for many people because morality has been so closely tied to safety, belonging, religion, social order, and personal identity. To question morality can sound dangerous, as though one’s opening the door to chaos. But perhaps what’s actually dangerous is a world full of people who’ve never gone beyond morality into real self-examination. A world where people know how to conform, but not how to be inwardly honest. A world where people can recite values, but can’t sit still with themselves. A world where people fear being seen as bad more than they fear being unconscious.

A major crisis of our time is that many people aren’t truly interested in truth but invested in staying comfortable. Beyond that, most want to be seen as the good one, the right one, the awakened one, or the caring one. But the need to preserve that image often keeps us from the very thing that would transform us. It keeps us from seeing our own aggressions or how quickly we dehumanize while claiming to stand for compassion. It keeps us from recognizing that the mind can use morality in the same way it uses anything else, as a tool of identity, separation, and power.

So the real question isn’t simply whether a person is moral. The real question is whether we’re awake enough to see what’s moving through us when we speak, choose, condemn, desire, react, and justify. Are we living from borrowed codes, inherited beliefs, social pressure, and fear of disapproval? Or are we becoming intimate with a deeper source of conscience that doesn’t need posturing in order to know what matters?

There’s a kind of sovereignty that emerges when a person begins to live from that deeper place. Not domination or self-protection. Nor the inflated language of personal freedom without responsibility, but true sovereignty. The capacity to be responsible for one’s own inner state and the willingness to stop making one’s wounds everyone else’s problem. The maturity to no longer require constant external management because one has cultivated an internal relationship to truth. And from that sovereignty comes the ability to honor the sovereignty of others. Not in some abstract spiritual way, but in the very real sense that we no longer need to diminish, control, belittle, exploit, or violate another person in order to secure our own position.

In this deeper state, harming others becomes less natural, not because we’re forcing ourselves to be good, but because our systems are no longer organized around separation in the same way. Violence, cruelty, and dehumanization may still be possible, because human beings remain human, but we no longer express in ways that feel misaligned with the deepest part of oneself. They register as distortions, not freedoms and feel like departures from truth, not assertions of power.

So perhaps the invitation isn’t to throw morality away, but to stop worshipping it as the highest good. Morality may be a beginning and a training ground for a mind not yet capable of stable inner clarity. But, if you ask me, the path doesn’t end there. The path asks for something more demanding and honest. It asks that we become inwardly refined enough that ethics are no longer merely imposed from the outside, but begin to flower from within.

That’s where the yamas and niyamas become a uniquely profound gift. They prepare the way for a consciousness in which one doesn’t have to remember to be decent, because decency is no longer separate from being.

That’s a far more demanding path than morality alone, and also a far more liberating one. It doesn’t let us hide behind goodness. It asks us to become true

.

The manuals that many students of yoga encounter first, texts associated with renunciant lineages and monastic settings, were composed within social worlds dominated by men. The communities that produced these works were often celibate, wandering, or monastic. Their practices were oriented toward liberation through discipline, austerity, and meditative absorption. The bodies described in these manuals were therefore usually assumed to be the bodies of male practitioners who had stepped away from ordinary domestic life.

This historical context does not mean that women were absent from yogic life, but it does mean that the written record often reflects the concerns of the institutions that preserved it. Women certainly pursued spiritual disciplines and historical evidence shows female ascetics, poets, devotees, and practitioners appearing across many centuries. Their voices, however, were less frequently the ones compiling the manuals that later generations would read as authoritative descriptions of yoga.

When we turn toward the Śākta and tantric traditions devoted to the goddess, there is a noticeable change. These traditions are not primarily interested in distancing themselves from the body. They are interested in understanding the body as a place where cosmic processes can be perceived. Within this view the feminine generative center becomes a particularly powerful point of reflection, because it visibly participates in the cycles of creation that these traditions see everywhere in nature.

In the language of these traditions the generative center is often referred to as the yoni, a word that carries meanings far beyond anatomy. It refers to the place of origin, the source from which forms arise, and the mysterious opening through which life appears in the world. When tantric practitioners contemplate the yoni they are not only contemplating reproduction. They are reflecting on the way existence itself emerges from an unseen ground of creative power.

One of the most striking expressions of this understanding appears in the temple of Kāmākhyā in Assam, where the goddess is represented through a natural rock formation that represents the generative opening of the divine feminine. Water rises continuously through the stone, and pilgrims approach the shrine by descending into the earth. The experience carries rich symbolism that says; creation emerges from a hidden source, and that source is honored through the imagery of the feminine body.

Texts connected with this temple speak openly about menstruation as an expression of divine potency. The annual Ambubachi festival marks the period during which the goddess is believed to undergo her menstrual cycle, and during these days the temple closes while the earth itself is said to enter a fertile state of transformation. When the shrine reopens, cloth believed to have absorbed the goddess’s menstrual essence is distributed as a blessing. The ritual communicates a vision that differs sharply from many social attitudes toward menstruation. Rather than treating menstrual flow as a problem to be concealed, it becomes a reminder that life continuously renews itself through processes of transformation.

These traditions don’t limit the feminine to nurturing imagery alone. The goddess of the Śākta traditions can appear luminous and maternal, but she can also appear fierce, unpredictable, and overwhelming because creation itself carries these qualities. The same power that gives birth to worlds also dissolves them. When the feminine body is contemplated within this cosmological framework, it becomes a symbol of emergence, transformation, return.

It is important to say that the classical tantric texts don’t present a detailed theory about menopause in the way contemporary discussions sometimes do. What they do suggest is that the sacred significance of the feminine generative center is not dependent solely on biological fertility. If the womb is understood as an image of the cosmic source, then its meaning does not disappear when menstruation ends. The outward expression of generative power changes, but the deeper symbolism remains.

Looking back across these traditions shows a complex picture. The written manuals of yoga were often shaped within male ascetic settings, while other streams within the same cultural world were contemplating the feminine body as a reflection of cosmic creativity, and not as an object. The tension between these perspectives invites reflection rather than quick conclusions, which is where I have been in my newly perimenopausal journey.

Modern yoga practice has shifted the landscape. The global spread of posture-based yoga during the twentieth century moved practice out of ascetic settings and into homes, studios, and public institutions. In many parts of the world today, women form the majority of practitioners and teachers. This transformation has opened space for women to explore yoga on their own terms, even as it has sometimes simplified or commercialized the philosophical frameworks that once surrounded the practices.

I believe the question for women today is how to engage yogic traditions thoughtfully while also recognizing the strands within Indian spiritual culture that honored the feminine as a manifestation of cosmic intelligence. My invitation is to seriously consider this. Rather than making impressive postures with the body, and focusing on aesthetics, how can we return to the magic the female body holds, beyond the physical? How can asana and yogic studies become a vehicle for this?

Returning to the older teachings can offer a different way of seeing the body and the creative impulses that move through it. The cycles of menstruation, fertility, and aging can be understood not only as biological events but as reflections of a larger pattern of emergence and transformation that operates throughout nature. The Śākta traditions suggest that the creative power of the universe is not distant from human life. It moves through every process of growth, change, and renewal.

Remembering this vision can be incredibly powerful if we are willing to let go of the strong conditions many of us have absorbed. It shifts attention away from the idea that the body must constantly be corrected or optimized. Instead it invites a recognition that the processes unfolding within the body participate in the same generative intelligence that shapes the natural world. When this understanding begins to take hold, spiritual practice becomes less about escaping the body or producing a result and more about learning to listen to the forms of life already moving within it.

Such a return does not require abandoning modern knowledge or attempting to recreate ancient societies. It simply asks that we read the traditions with care, recognizing both the limits of the surviving archive and the depth of the insights it preserves. When women approach these teachings with curiosity and discernment, they can begin to recover a conversation about the feminine body that is older, more spacious, and more cosmological than many modern discussions often allow.

In that sense, the teachings of Śakti are about remembering that creation continues to unfold through every living form. The body becomes one of the places where that mystery can be encountered directly, and the feminine generative center becomes a reminder that life itself is an ongoing act of emergence. When this understanding returns to our awareness, it carries implications not only for personal identity but for how we understand our relationship with the living world and the creative forces that sustain it.

NOTE: Although this is spoken in gender normative context, the womb and Shakti are far more complex than being about two genders. These teachings are beyond genitalia and the social conditioning of gender. Shakti resides in all beings.

.

Many people feel that something has shifted in the modern spiritual landscape. The word guru is used easily, teachers sometimes speak about themselves in elevated spiritual terms, and yet stories of manipulation, exploitation, or psychological harm appear with unsettling regularity. This has led many sincere practitioners to ask a simple but important question. What does the classical tradition actually say a guru is?

When the early texts are consulted, the description is far more precise and far more demanding than the way the word is often used today. In the traditional Indian understanding a guru is not simply an inspiring speaker, a healer, or someone who has gathered many followers. The Mundaka Upanishad provides one of the most widely cited descriptions. It states that a sincere seeker should approach a teacher who is both shrotriya and brahma-nishtha. These two qualities carry a great deal of meaning.

Shrotriya refers to a person who has deeply studied and absorbed the teachings of the tradition. It implies familiarity with scripture, philosophical understanding, and participation in a lineage that preserves and transmits knowledge across generations. Brahma-nishtha refers to someone established in direct realization of the Absolute. The teacher therefore represents both deep study and lived realization. The tradition does not separate these two qualities. The teacher must embody both.

The Bhagavad Gita presents a similar perspective when it describes approaching a teacher with humility, inquiry, and service. It explains that the teacher is a person who has seen truth directly and who can guide another person through that understanding. Later texts such as Vivekachudamani expand on the qualities associated with such a teacher. They describe a spiritual guide as someone deeply familiar with scripture, established in knowledge of reality, self restrained, compassionate toward seekers, and free from selfish motivation.

What stands out immediately in these descriptions is what is not included. A guru is not defined by charisma, emotional intensity, mystical stories, or the ability to attract followers. The tradition measures spiritual authority through realization, discipline, and freedom from personal ambition rather than public recognition or influence.

It is also important to recognize that classical texts were not naive about the possibility of spiritual authority being misused. The Mundaka Upanishad warns about those who believe themselves wise while remaining in ignorance and compares such figures to the blind leading the blind. The Bhagavad Gita describes psychological qualities that distort spiritual life, including hypocrisy, arrogance, vanity, and the hunger for recognition. Another passage criticizes religious practices performed for the sake of admiration or prestige, describing such behavior as unstable and motivated by ego rather than genuine insight.

The texts also speak directly about the emotional temperament of a person who has not yet matured spiritually. Chronic anger and harsh judgment are repeatedly described as signs that the mind is still governed by ego and aversion. The Bhagavad Gita describes a psychological sequence in which attachment gives rise to desire, desire becomes frustration when obstructed, and frustration turns into anger. That anger clouds perception, disturbs memory, weakens discernment, and eventually leads to self destructive behavior. A mind frequently ruled by anger therefore cannot see reality clearly.

In the same text, the qualities associated with a spiritually mature person include friendliness, compassion, patience, and freedom from hostility toward others. The Yoga Sutras present a similar insight in psychological language. Patanjali explains that the mind becomes more peaceful when it cultivates friendliness toward the happy, compassion toward those who suffer, appreciation toward those who live virtuously, and equanimity toward those who act in unwholesome ways. The teaching does not encourage blindness to harmful behavior, but it does caution against allowing hostility and judgment to dominate one’s own mind.

This distinction between discernment and judgment is important. Discernment allows a person to recognize harmful behavior and maintain appropriate boundaries. Judgment driven by anger often reflects projection, ego involvement, or unresolved inner conflict. In classical teachings a teacher who is frequently hostile, condemning, or emotionally reactive would not generally be seen as demonstrating the inner freedom associated with realization.

Hindu cosmology also describes different historical periods or ages of consciousness. The present age, known as Kali Yuga, is frequently portrayed as a time in which confusion increases and appearances become more difficult to evaluate. The Bhagavata Purana describes an era in which outward signs may be mistaken for inner attainment and where performance can easily be mistaken for depth.

This perspective does not claim that authentic teachers disappear in such an age. Instead it suggests that the cultural environment becomes crowded with imitation and display. When spiritual authority becomes visible, socially valued, or economically rewarding, it becomes easier for individuals to present themselves as spiritual leaders without embodying the depth traditionally associated with that role.

Modern psychology approaches similar concerns through a different vocabulary. Clinical psychology defines narcissistic personality disorder as a pattern that includes grandiosity, entitlement, exploitation of others, and a strong need for admiration. Research consistently shows that narcissistic traits are associated with lower levels of emotional empathy and greater difficulty maintaining balanced relationships.

At the same time psychologists have studied traits related to deep sensitivity and emotional awareness. One example is sensory processing sensitivity, a trait observed in individuals who process emotional and environmental information very deeply and who respond strongly to relational signals. These individuals often show high levels of empathy and emotional responsiveness.

When someone with strong empathic tendencies encounters a person who seeks admiration and validation, a difficult relational pattern can sometimes develop. One person continually offers understanding, emotional support, and patience, while the other person absorbs attention and admiration without the same level of reciprocity. Popular culture often describes this pattern through the language of empaths and narcissists. Although the word empath is not a formal clinical category, the relational dynamic it describes is recognizable in many situations.

Within spiritual environments this pattern can become amplified. Spiritual language that emphasizes surrender, reverence for teachers, or obedience to authority can blur the boundaries that normally help maintain healthy relationships. In such circumstances a teacher who seeks admiration may unconsciously or intentionally draw energy from students who are highly sensitive and inclined toward reverence. They also do their best to draw you away from others in service of their own agendas.

Classical spiritual texts and modern psychology are describing related aspects of human behavior using different terminology. Classical literature refers to qualities such as dambha, meaning spiritual pretension, darpa meaning arrogant pride, and ahamkara referring to ego centered identity. Modern psychology describes grandiosity, entitlement, and narcissistic patterns of relating. Both perspectives point to the same underlying danger, which is the use of spiritual authority as a means of feeding personal ego.

At the same time both perspectives acknowledge the vulnerability of sincere seekers. A person who is compassionate, emotionally perceptive, and deeply interested in truth may also be more willing to trust, forgive, and give others the benefit of the doubt. These are valuable qualities in spiritual life, yet without discernment they can lead to situations where admiration and emotional openness are taken advantage of.

When classical descriptions of a genuine teacher are taken seriously, the signs are surprisingly simple. A true teacher does not need to repeatedly assert spiritual status or demand recognition. Authority is not maintained through pressure, emotional manipulation, or identity control. The relationship tends to encourage independence of understanding rather than psychological dependence.

The teacher’s relationship to money, praise, influence, and personal desire usually reflects restraint and transparency. The teachings consistently direct attention toward truth itself rather than toward the personality of the teacher.

The classical guru is therefore not someone who constantly asks to be recognized as a guru. The teacher becomes known through the depth of realization and the effect the teachings have on those who study with them.

The solution to the challenges of modern spiritual culture is not cynicism or the rejection of teachers. Many traditions emphasize the importance of guidance and learning from those who have walked the path before. At the same time the tradition consistently encourages discernment.

A seeker is advised to observe carefully. Does the teacher demonstrate humility in ordinary life? Does the teaching support greater independence of understanding? Does the relationship promote maturity and responsibility, or does it increase emotional dependence? Does the teacher behave with integrity around power, praise, intimacy, and resources?

These questions are part of the intelligence that protects spiritual practice from confusion.

The search for a genuine teacher therefore involves more than simply finding the right person. It also involves developing the maturity required to recognize depth when it appears. Spiritual charisma can be imitated, emotional intensity can be staged, and public recognition can be manufactured.

Real insight eventually reveals itself through the way a person lives, teaches, and relates to others over time. In an age where spiritual authority can easily become performance, the responsibility of the seeker grows deeper. Sensitivity must be accompanied by discernment, openness must be balanced with healthy boundaries, and reverence must remain guided by intelligence.

When these qualities develop together, the possibility of authentic guidance remains exactly where it has always been. Genuine teachers are uncommon, but they have never disappeared. They simply require a seeker capable of recognizing them

.

The wisdom that has been unfolding through my own life and through the teachings of Shakti are slowly dismantled those assumptions, revealing that the intelligence guiding our lives does not require perfection, constant control or effort, and that much of what we were taught to suppress in ourselves is actually where our deepest knowing lives.

Many of us, including my own “default mode self”, are carrying an exhaustion that does not only come from working hard or managing too many responsibilities, but from the deeper belief that life itself must be constantly managed in order for us to remain safe, stable and loved. This belief often becomes so normal that it slips into every part of life, including spirituality, relationships, and the way we relate to ourselves.

We frequently approach healing and spiritual life with the same pattern that shaped us in the world. If we try harder, show up more consistently, follow the correct steps, and maintain discipline, we assume that love, grace, and stability will follow. In this framework, life becomes a continuous attempt to earn belonging.

The wisdom of Shakti introduces a very different relationship with life.

In the tantric traditions, Shakti refers to the living force of consciousness that moves through creation, destruction, pleasure, grief, creativity, sexuality, and transformation. Shakti is not simply a goddess that exists somewhere outside the human world; she is the intelligence that moves through the body, the instincts, the emotions, and the deep knowing that many of us have been trained to silence.

When we begin to explore Shakti wisdom, one of the first discoveries is unsettling and liberating at the same time: the sacred does not require effort in order to meet us.

Grace does not arrive after we become “perfect”

Many of us who enter spiritual life assume, consciously or unconsciously, that grace appears after discipline. We believe our sincerity must be proven through rituals, chanting, daily practices, or strict commitment to spiritual routines. Yet the tantric and goddess traditions offer a different understanding.

The divine feminine does not require offerings or proof of worthiness before responding to someone who turns toward her. We can arrive with confusion, hesitation, mixed motives, and even resistance, and the relationship can still begin.

For those of us who have been conditioned to measure our worth through productivity and reliability, this insight can feel almost uncomfortable. I know for me it was. The mind quickly asks a familiar question: if I am not doing enough, why would grace meet me?

Within Shakti traditions the answer is simple. The sacred does not operate according to the same transactional logic that shaped many social systems. We can begin by simply turning our attention toward the presence of life itself, by acknowledging the intelligence that moves through our experience.

Over time that relationship begins to deepen, and practices such as chanting, prayer, or meditation may arise naturally, not because they are required but because the relationship itself becomes meaningful.

The feminine is not meant to fit into one acceptable form

Another insight that shows up again and again in these traditions is that the feminine cannot be reduced to a single personality or a single emotional tone. Within the traditions of Shakti there are many forms of the goddess, and each one reflects a different dimension of life.

Kali represents fierce transformation and the courage to dismantle illusions. Lalita represents beauty, sensuality, and the intelligence of pleasure. Bhuvaneshwari reflects spaciousness and the vastness of consciousness. Many other forms exist, each offering a different doorway into her sacredness.

The presence of these different archetypes carries an important teaching for us today. Spiritual life does not require us to reshape our nature into something more socially acceptable or spiritually polite. Instead, the traditions acknowledge that we can express the full spectrum from rage, sensuality, devotion, creativity, to intensity, sometimes all within the same day.

When we begin to recognize these different expressions as aspects of life rather than flaws to be corrected, we start to experience the deeper intelligence that moves through our instincts and emotions. It’s not uncommon for people to call the spectrum of Shakti out as being “dysregulated” but what if that’s just our social conditioning talking? What if we are shutting down Shakti herself who is wanting to be expressed through us while we make her wrong?

Awakening often begins when control begins to loosen

Many of us move through our days with routines that feel predictable and efficient while leaving very little space for reflection or direct contact with our inner life.

In tantric philosophy this state is sometimes described through the concept of Mahamaya, the veil that keeps human beings occupied with surface activities while the deeper dimensions of life remain unnoticed.

Shakti is described as the force that both creates this veil and removes it. When the veil begins to lift, we often experience disruptions in the patterns that previously felt stable. Plans may fall apart, identities may shift, and the sense of personal control may weaken.

Experiences like financial difficulty, the loss of a familiar role, or the collapse of a long-held expectation can feel deeply unsettling, yet these moments frequently open the space for a different relationship with life. Many of us who have spent years trying to control every outcome eventually begin to ask a new question about what life itself is inviting us to learn.

This shift marks the beginning of a more intimate relationship with the intelligence that moves through experience.

Presence becomes a form of worship

One of the most accessible insights offered in these teachings is the idea that presence itself can become a form of devotion. Many of us assume that spiritual life requires extensive knowledge of scriptures, perfect pronunciation of mantras, or complex ritual structures.

The deeper teaching suggests that the relationship with the sacred begins much more simply.

When we pause during our day and acknowledge the life moving through our breath, our bodies, and our emotions, we begin to step out of the constant momentum of productivity and into direct contact with ourselves. That contact becomes the doorway through which spiritual awareness develops.

Presence might look like noticing the sensations in the body before reacting to a stressful moment, speaking honestly in a conversation rather than automatically adjusting to keep others comfortable, or allowing grief, anger, or joy to move through without immediate judgment.

Each of these moments allows us to reconnect with the intelligence that lives inside us rather than constantly seeking direction from external expectations. For a long time, I was afraid to feel intense emotions because it felt as though they might swallow me. I finally began to understand that my resistance made them much more powerful and sticky. When I allowed emotions, no matter how intense, to flow, they didn’t need to make so much noise.

The longing for love often hides a deeper longing

Another theme explored in these teachings involves the way human relationships mirror spiritual longing. Many of us search for deep connection through romantic partnerships, hoping to experience complete union with another person.

Tantric philosophy suggests that the deepest longing in the human heart is not simply for another individual but for union with consciousness itself. When that longing is projected entirely onto relationships, disappointment often follows because human partners cannot embody the infinite qualities that the soul seeks.

Relationships can still hold immense value and beauty, yet they begin to function differently when they are seen as companions on the path rather than the ultimate destination of love.

Returning to innate intelligence

When we begin to release the “pressure to perform”, to earn belonging, and to reshape ourselves in order to remain acceptable, we begin to experience life outside of the prison we have inadvertently placed ourselves in. The body becomes easier to listen to and intuition is easier to recognize while creativity and emotional truth are able to flow freely.

This process asks us to learn how to live in conversation with the intelligence that already moves through life without the need to abandon our daily lives. We can hold both. We can hold it all without feeling strain.

When deep listening becomes familiar, the wisdom of Shakti stops being an abstract idea and begins to function as a living relationship.

The intelligence of life has always been present

Shakti traditions often describe the divine feminine as an ever-present force that continues to move through creation whether we recognize her or not. None of us have to do anything to prove that we deserve it.

The work of deconditioning involves remembering what has always been there.

As we learn to trust the instincts, sensations, and insights that arise from within, we begin to experience the intelligence that the traditions describe as Shakti. This intelligence expresses itself through courage, creativity, emotional depth, and the willingness to live honestly even when that honesty disrupts familiar expectations.

Through this process we begin to realize that the guidance we have been searching for in so many external places has been speaking through our own lives all along.

The healing arts draw in sincere people because they promise something precious: relief, meaning, and a way back home to ourselves. They also draw in a deep desire that lives beneath the surface of many “holistic” spaces, which is to decode life into clean answers and then use those answers to regain certainty. This is one of the great ironies of the modern wellness world, that practices meant to widen us can become narrow when we cling to them as guarantees. In other words, when the map becomes more trusted than the living body that is holding it.

I have watched this happen across modalities, traditions, and communities, including the ones I love. A framework that begins as a doorway becomes a hallway with one exit sign. A correlation becomes the verdict and a teaching meant to offer language becomes a template people use to manage themselves, or others. Many of us have witnessed how quickly a person’s care can turn into a project. You know, where every symptom becomes a clue to solve and every flare becomes evidence that something is still “wrong” inside. It is not hard to understand why this happens, because we as people naturally crave predictability, and a neat explanation can feel like safety.

This is also why certain books and models, even when they were groundbreaking in their time and served as introductions for countless people, can be used in ways that create a 2D reality. The issue is rarely the existence of a pattern or a correspondence, because patterns are real, and the psyche and physiology do speak to one another. The issue is what happens when a correlation list becomes a standard of care and the individual gets lost. Or when it is treated as a diagnostic key instead of listening deeply to what is unspoken yet loud enough to hear. Correlation is not causation, and “often associated with” is not the same as “this is what it means for you.” Bodies are not single-variable equations. They are ecosystems shaped by sleep, food, hormones, life stories, relationships, grief, climate, aging, medications, spiritual practice, and timing, and the same symptom can arise in two people for entirely different reasons.

When we forget this, mind-body frameworks can turn coercive, even when no one intends harm. A person begins to scan themselves for errors, tracking symptoms as if they were proof of spiritual failure, hunting for the “one belief” that will finally release them from discomfort. Sometimes this becomes a kind of moral accounting system, where illness is treated as an indictment of someone’s unprocessed emotions, insufficient boundaries, or inability to “speak their truth.” This can create a double burden, because now the person is holding the symptom and the insinuation that they caused it by being insufficiently evolved. This is not wholeness. It is shame wearing a costume of wisdom.

Underneath the fixation on fixing is something very human: an attempt to control what feels uncertain and to secure a promise that if we do everything “right”, we will not suffer. The modern wellness marketplace rewards that impulse, because it rewards speed and dramatic “before and after” stories. Yet the body is older than the marketplace, and it does not exist to satisfy our timeline. The body is not a problem to solve, and healing is often not a straight line toward symptom elimination, even when symptoms improve and even when real change is happening. Sometimes what is healing is not simply that something goes away, but that something returns, such as capacity, self-trust, resilience, or the ability to stay present with sensation without panic. Sometimes a person is learning safety again, and that kind of learning tends to be rhythmic and cyclical, not linear.

This is where the Shakti path offers a special kind of medicine, because it exposes what the fixation on instant gratification is really doing. The demand to fix is a denial of Shakti, and so is the insistence that life behave like a machine that will deliver predictable outcomes if we input the correct protocol. Shakti is not a self-improvement project. Shakti is living intelligence, unfolding through the body, through seasons, through relationships, through loss and love, through the strange timing of transformation. She is not opposed to our desire to feel better, and she is not asking us to accept suffering as a spiritual virtue. What she refuses is domination. The attempt to control the process so tightly that the deeper intelligence cannot move, cannot reorganize, and cannot reveal what it is actually doing.

The denial of Shakti often looks like spiritual efficiency. It looks like constantly asking for the one cause so it can be removed, the one practice so it can be completed, the one insight so the discomfort will finally stop. It can even look like commitment, especially in communities where discipline is prized, but underneath it usually carries fear of uncertainty and fear of being in the wild terrain of a human life. Shakti’s intelligence does not always move in ways the mind can predict. What looks like a setback can be integration and what looks like delay can be preparation. Sometimes a flare can be the surface layer of something deeper finally ready to move, and the body may need time to reorganize around a release that is genuine.

None of this means we throw away systems but it does ask that we relate to them properly. A good model is a lantern, not a courtroom. It can illuminate possibilities without professing to explain everything. It can help you ask better questions without forcing the answer ahead of time. In Shakti-conscious healing, a correspondence is held the way mythology is held; as symbolic language that might reveal something, without being used as a prison. Instead of “this symptom means that,” the inquiry becomes “what might this be asking for right now, in this body, in this season, in this life?” Instead of using meaning-making to control the body, we use meaning-making to deepen relationship with the body.

Practicing this way requires a particular kind of humility that stays curious longer than the mind wants to, and that is willing to widen the lens when certainty starts to feel seductive. It also requires that we keep multiple levels of reality in the room at the same time, because the body is both biology and biography, both subtle and gross, both chemistry and consciousness. A person can need lab work and rest, nervous system repair and grief support, strength training and prayer, clearer boundaries and warmer meals, and the order matters, the timing matters, and the person matters more than the model.

The invitation is to stop treating healing as a project and then we can begin to participate in it rather than being led around by the mirage of it. Participation is fluid, engaged, and consistent, but it is not controlling. It takes the next step without demanding the final result. It works in rhythms and cycles rather than punishing the body into compliance. It respects the difference between supportive action and anxious grasping, and it learns to feel the moment when a practice is being used as a relationship with intelligence versus being used as a lever to force an outcome.

Shakti-based healing deepens discernment and it asks us to make choices and seek support. We still apply what you know but do it from a different inner seat, one that trusts the unfolding as much as it values the tools. When a system starts to narrow us, when it reduces our experience to a single story, when it makes us feel blamed, shamed, or pressured to exhibit performative wellness, that is often the moment to step back and let Shakti widen the field. The system or tools aren’t necessarily wrong, but reality is always larger than any one lens.

The heart of this, for me, is a simple truth: the impulse to fix is often an attempt to earn safety, to earn love, or to earn relief by being perfect. Many of us learned, in subtle ways, that rest must be deserved, that ease must be justified, that pain is a failure of effort. Shakti does not require earning. She requires willingness. The willingness to listen, to relax, to take the next right step, and to let intelligence unfold at the speed of integration. A modality becomes truly holistic when it stays porous, when it can hold both pattern and mystery, when it honors the individual more than it worships the model, and when it remembers that the deepest medicine is not certainty, but relationship with the living intelligence that is already moving within you.

When someone like Rob Reiner comes to mind, there is a sweetness that follows. Qualities of sincerity, earnest storytelling, of a certain innocence that believed in the possibility of decency and humor living side by side, creating narratives that felt grounded in human goodness. When a figure associated with that feeling leaves the world, it can feel as though a layer of innocence is slipping from the collective field. Although innocence is not gone, the familiar symbol that carried it for many is no longer available, and that absence can feel like a personal and inner loss.

Katherine O’Hara has long embodied another thread within this spectrum. Through her comedic presence she gave permission for the awkward, the quirky, the slightly absurd parts of being human to breathe and take their place without apology. She reminded us that life need not always be performed with heaviness, that laughter can be a form of wisdom, and that not taking ourselves too seriously can open a space of genuine freedom. When we recognize that quality in her, we are also recognizing a possibility within ourselves to relax our grip on self-judgment and meet life with a wider perspective.

Rev. Jesse Jackson stands as a different thread altogether. A life shaped by tireless engagement with human rights and social justice reflects a deep refusal to turn away from what is difficult or uncomfortable, even when the cost was high. Courage, moral conviction, and the willingness to remain present with suffering are qualities that many witnessed through his work over decades of advocacy. Yet the deeper question emerges: did his dedication absolve the rest of us from participating? Or was it an invitation to awaken those same capacities within our own lives and communities?

Then there is Deepak Chopra, who for many symbolized a doorway into spirituality, into questions of consciousness, healing, and the unseen dimensions of life that invite ongoing exploration. For some, he was a guiding light whose teachings opened meaningful inquiry. For others, the relationship was more complex and layered with personal discernment. I remember beginning training at the Chopra Center in the early 2000s and sensing, even without clear understanding, that it was not where I was meant to root myself or build my professional identity. Yet for countless people, his presence opened meaningful pathways that shaped their understanding of spirituality. What matters is recognizing that figures like him can function as catalysts that stir deeper questioning, whether we feel drawn toward them or away. The lesson being understanding what people activate in us without outsourcing our own power onto them.

Across these different lives we can see a pattern. Each person seems to embody or reflect a facet of the collective psyche: innocence, playfulness, courage, spiritual curiosity, and the willingness to explore what it means to be human in different ways. When we notice our reactions to them, we are noticing movements within our own inner landscape that are seeking expression or understanding.

This is where we have to talk about death and the pedestals we tend to put people on. Physical death is one kind of ending. A fall from a pedestal is another, and sometimes it hits just as hard. Both can be experienced as deaths in our inner world because both involve letting go of something we consciously or unconsciously counted on being there. Sometimes we counted on their presence to reassure us that innocence exists, that humor can survive, that someone will fight for justice, and that spirituality is accessible. When that symbol disappears, or when that person becomes complicated in a way we can no longer idealize, the inner reliance gets exposed. Grief shows up, disillusionment shows up, anger shows up, and underneath it all there is often a deeper invitation: reclaim what you handed away.

In Vedic thought there is a teaching that speaks directly to this dynamic. The idea of darshan suggests that seeing and being seen is a reciprocal encounter in which something meaningful unfolds. When we behold a teacher, a deity, or even a compelling human figure, we are not merely observing from a distance. Something in us is being revealed back to ourselves through that encounter. The outer form becomes a mirror through which the inner reality can be met more consciously. The Upanishadic insight Tat Tvam Asi, “That thou art,” points to a simple truth: what moves you outside is touching something that already lives inside.

Yet there is a danger that can arise here if we aren’t paying attention. The mind can turn mirrors into pedestals, creating a hierarchy that distances us from our own capacity. We elevate certain individuals into superhuman positions and hand them our agency and our sense of possibility. Or we swing the other way and vilify, projecting shadow outward so we do not have to meet it within ourselves. Both movements are forms of outsourcing power and avoiding the work of becoming integrated human beings.

Consider the question of activism again. If someone like Rev. Jesse Jackson dedicated his life to justice, does that mean the rest of us can step back and assume the work is being handled? Or does his life illuminate a responsibility that belongs to all of us in ways that are appropriate to our circumstances? When we place the burden of conscience entirely on another, we diminish our own capacity to respond in meaningful ways, and we risk turning justice into something we consume rather than something we participate in.

The same applies in spiritual life. No teacher, however visible, was ever meant to replace our own inner inquiry or personal responsibility for growth. Guides can point, inspire, and challenge, but the work of awakening cannot be delegated. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of svadharma, one’s own path or inner duty, as a principle that invites each person to participate fully in their own unfolding. It reminds us that walking our own path, even imperfectly, is more aligned than perfectly imitating another’s journey.

We are living in a time that asks for deep listening. Not listening only to voices we already agree with, but listening to the movements of truth within and around us with patience and humility. It asks us to question assumptions, to resist the impulse to declare certainty too quickly, and to remain open to learning even when perspectives challenge us. The collective field feels more polarized and reactive, and yet beneath that turbulence there is an invitation toward maturity.

Maturity means recognizing the humanity of those we admire and those we struggle with, without reducing them to symbols alone. It means refusing to place anyone beyond critique or beyond compassion, allowing for nuance and complexity. It means seeing that every public figure carries a mixture of light and shadow, just as we do in our own lives.

When archetypal figures age, change, fall, or pass away, it can feel destabilizing because they have held meanings for us over time. But these moments can also be messages that call us back to ourselves with renewed attention. They ask us to stop projecting innocence, humor, courage, or spiritual authority outward as though they belong elsewhere. They invite us to cultivate those qualities internally in ways that are grounded and embodied.

Nothing can be activated within us that does not already exist as potential waiting to be expressed. This is a core insight echoed across yogic and Vedantic traditions that view life as a field of unfolding awareness. The world reveals latent tendencies, aspirations, and fears that shape our experience. What we admire points to capacities waiting to be lived. What disturbs us reveals areas calling for awareness and integration.

To watch public figures through this lens is to shift from fascination to introspection and personal responsibility. Instead of asking who they are, we begin to ask what is being stirred in us through our encounter with them. Instead of glorifying or condemning, we become curious about the inner movements that arise in response.

We cannot afford to give away our discernment or our capacity to think deeply. Nor can we afford to dehumanize others in the pursuit of certainty or advantage that ultimately divides us. Developing our own intelligence, our capacity to think, feel, and perceive with depth and discernment, is an essential form of empowerment that strengthens both individuals and communities.

Perhaps the invitation of this moment is simple. Let those who have embodied certain qualities remind us of what is possible in the human experience. Let their lives be teachings, not substitutes for our own engagement. Let admiration become inspiration rather than dependency.

And as we witness the changing landscape of public figures, we might remember that the true work is always inward, unfolding through our daily choices and reflections. The innocence we mourn, the humor we cherish, the courage we respect, and the spirituality we seek are not disappearing. They are asking to be lived, here, in the ordinary sacredness of our own lives with intention and participation

.

Once identification with the persona is in place, asmita, or rigid selfhood, emerges. This sense of “I” begins to defend itself and seeks ways to ensure its survival in a world it perceives as separate. From here raga and dvesha shape behavior through craving and avoidance. The individual gravitates toward anything that promises enhancement of the “I,” and rejects anything that threatens its stability or image. Finally abhinivesha, the fear of dissolution, anchors the entire psychological structure. The combined effect is a nervous system that operates in a state of subtle vigilance, constantly looking for ways to affirm identity and avoid diminishment.

In modern culture one of the most pervasive expressions of this dynamic is addiction to power. This does not always appear as political authority or wealth, though it includes these forms. It often shows up as more subtle and socially acceptable behaviors such as the need to control outcomes, the desire to influence narratives, the pursuit of status, the habit of dominating conversations, the need to be right, or the compulsion to manage the perceptions of others. Power becomes a means of regulating the insecurity created by avidya. It temporarily soothes the nervous system by offering a sense of agency, significance, and safety. The individual who feels separate from their own essence seeks substitutes for sovereignty, and power offers that substitute, though only for a moment.

When power becomes an addictive substance, it is pursued not for the sake of contribution or stewardship, but for the temporary relief it provides. Domination offers the illusion of control. Influence offers the illusion of worth. Superiority offers the illusion of security. Yet these illusions do not resolve the original wound, which is the forgetting of the Self. The individual remains spiritually homeless even while accumulating prestige, followers, titles, wealth, or authority. The ego becomes locked in a cycle that requires constant reinforcement. Just as some addictions require increasing amounts of a substance to achieve the same effect, addiction to power often escalates toward greater degrees of control or recognition in order to maintain psychological stability.

The consequences extend far beyond the personal realm. When avidya takes collective form, institutions begin to behave as egos behave. Nations compete for dominance, corporations optimize for extraction, religious movements seek influence over belief and behavior, and political systems reward manipulation rather than wisdom. This is not because humanity is inherently cruel, but because many human systems are organized around the misperception that power over others creates safety. The result is a world shaped by hierarchical competition, social inequality, environmental harm, and cultural conflict, all driven by the mistaken belief that control is the foundation of survival.

Understanding this dynamic through the lens of yoga and classical philosophy opens a different pathway. The solution to addiction to power is not the abandonment of influence or the rejection of leadership. It is the transformation of the very foundation from which power is understood. Avidya dissolves through remembrance, not repression. The individual learns to distinguish between the voice of the ego seeking reinforcement and the deeper presence of consciousness that does not require validation or control. This remembrance is supported by practices that unify mind, body, and awareness. Meditation cultivates clarity. Self-inquiry reveals the constructed nature of identity. Ethical discipline reduces harm. Pranayama and somatic awareness regulate the nervous system so that insecurity no longer drives behavior. Devotion opens the heart to a dimension of reality that cannot be dominated and cannot be consumed.

As remembrance unfolds, the meaning of power begins to change. Power is no longer experienced as the ability to dominate, manipulate, or control. It is experienced as the ability to be fully present, to act without compulsion, to influence without coercion, to hold responsibility without fear, and to create conditions where others can thrive. This form of power arises from coherence rather than hierarchy which is anchored in interdependence rather than separation.

In collective settings this shift is transformative. Workplaces become arenas for shared responsibility rather than competitive arenas for personal advancement. Families become ecosystems of mutual growth rather than battlegrounds for emotional control. Communities become containers for wisdom rather than stages for ideological conquest. Leadership becomes a practice of stewardship rather than domination. Influence becomes a tool for collective uplift rather than personal validation.

When viewed through this lens, the first klesha is not a philosophical artifact but a profound map of the human condition. It reveals how power-seeking arises, why domination persists, and how the forgetting of consciousness shapes our systems, our relationships, and our culture. It also reveals that the cure for this distortion is not shame or punishment, but illumination and maturation. Humanity does not heal addiction to power by abandoning power, but by remembering where true strength resides.

Through this remembering the journey comes full circle. Avidya marked the moment consciousness forgot itself. Healing begins at the point where consciousness recognizes the illusion of separation and reclaims its own center. This is the shift that ends the compulsive pursuit of domination and opens the door to forms of power that nourish rather than harm. The ancient teachings called this remembrance, and modern language might call it sovereignty or integrity. Whatever name is given, it represents the same truth. When the Self is remembered, power becomes service rather than addiction, clarity becomes leadership rather than control, and human evolution moves toward wholeness rather than fragmentation.

The Bhagavad Gita opens by refusing that kind of distance. Arjuna does not see an enemy. He sees faces of teachers, elders, friends, relatives, and the familiar texture of relationships. His body responds before his philosophies can keep up. He shakes, his mouth goes dry, his limbs weaken, and his certainty collapses, because proximity destroys the fantasy that violence is clean when it is “for the right reasons.”

Krishna does not resolve Arjuna’s crisis by asking him to become colder. He asks him to become clearer. You see, the Gita’s demand is consciousness, which means a mind that can hold complexity without forfeiting humanity, and a heart that can feel without becoming hijacked by impulse, fear, or tribal reflex.

What distance does to the human mind

Psychologists describe dehumanization as a loss of felt humanness in the way we perceive others, where people are processed as objects, threats, obstacles, or stereotypes rather than as full lives with inner worlds. That shift can be loud and explicit, but it is often ordinary, hiding inside the small mental moves of generalization, dismissal, and the quiet relief of not having to imagine what another person is carrying.

Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement names dehumanization as one pathway that makes harm psychologically tolerable, because the mind protects itself by reframing the target as less worthy, less real, or responsible for their own suffering. When that mechanism is active, people can participate in cruelty, or passively tolerate it, while still experiencing themselves as decent.

This is why proximity matters so much. Proximity makes it harder to use these mental escape hatches, not because proximity guarantees goodness, but because it forces us to register the “other” as a person rather than an abstraction.

“Our own,” and the perimeter of belonging

After certain deaths, especially those that feel close to a community’s identity, people say, “We lost one of our own.” It is a human sentence, and it can carry dignity and grief. It also reveals something we rarely examine: the way proximity shapes compassion, because the heart responds differently when the suffering feels near, familiar, and inside the circle of “us.” The phrase “our own” names that circle, and it shows the hidden architecture of belonging that decides whose pain we instinctively treat as valuable.

If we continue to contemplate a message in the Gita we can see how it does not ask us to erase relationships. It asks us to mature them and through them. It does not ask us to stop loving “our own,” but it insists that love grows into something wider when consciousness rises, because the soul’s vision does not need an enemy to organize itself.

The compassion problem, and why it is trainable

We are built to track what is near and familiar, and many researchers have argued that attention and empathy do not scale neatly to mass suffering, which is one reason a single vivid story can move us more than a mountain of statistics. This does not make us bad, but it does make us vulnerable, because systems that monetize outrage and fear know exactly how to exploit what the human mind can and cannot hold.

The key is disciplined awareness and opening our minds and listening to experiences that are unlike our own. This kind of awareness gives us choice, and choice is where this level of growth actually lives.

Krishna’s teaching consistently turns the practitioner toward inner steadiness, clear seeing, and right action without addiction to the emotional weather. In modern terms, you could say that the Gita is training the capacity to stay present, to resist reactive narratives, and to act from a deeper center which is naturally dialed into a larger framework of connection.

Proximity as a practice, not a mood

Research on intergroup contact, beginning with Gordon W. Allport and strengthened by later large reviews and meta-analyses, suggests that under supportive conditions, sustained contact between groups tends to reduce prejudice, often through lowered anxiety and increased empathy. This is not sentimental, and it is not automatic, because hostile or unequal contact can deepen division, but the overall finding points to something simple: relationship gives the mind better data than stereotype, and it gives the heart fewer places to hide.

The Gita would call this a move from distorted perception to clearer perception. When Krishna speaks about seeing the same Self in all beings, he is not offering a slogan for polite spirituality; he is describing a profound reorientation of perception, where we stop using difference as permission to withdraw our humanity.

What it means to “raise consciousness” here

Raising consciousness is a universal responsibility. It means noticing the instant the mind begins flattening people into caricatures, and then choosing to return to reality, which is always more poignant and pure than our stories.

It also means learning how to hold intensity without falling into reactivity, because proximity without a solid inner ground can become overwhelming, and overwhelm can turn into avoidance. Krishna’s path is both spiritual and psychological, because he trains Arjuna to stay present in the fire while acting from discernment rather than from panic, hatred, or the need to feel superior.

Proximity is not an adjective in this context. It’s a verb that asks us to stay consistently engaged in reaching beyond our current state of “normal”. Below are practical ways to train proximity with the teachings from the Gita.

Choose contact that is real enough to change you. This could be one sustained relationship across differences, one community you show up for consistently, or one place where you serve without needing to win an argument, because the point is not debate, it is rehumanization.

Watch your language like it is a sacred gate. Euphemisms and labels can make cruelty easier, and the Gita is meticulous about speech and mind as instruments of action, so practice naming people as people, and naming harm without turning anyone into a cartoon.

Work with the “my people” reflex without shaming it. When you feel care tighten around your familiar circle, do not moralize yourself into guilt, but do widen the circle deliberately, because your system can be trained, and training is what practice is for.

Practice steady attention before you consume more content. Outrage can feel like care, but it often functions like a stimulant, and a stimulated mind is easily manipulated. Even a few minutes of breath, prayer, mantra, or silent sitting before engaging the news can change what you amplify and what you feed.

Act without demanding emotional purity. Karma yoga is deeply pragmatic, because it insists that right action matters even when the heart is conflicted, tired, or imperfect, and it asks us to keep acting from conscience rather than from the craving to feel righteous

Proximity is not softness, and it is not naïveté. Proximity is courage, because it means allowing real lives to interrupt your abstractions, and it means letting the heart be educated by contact rather than trained by propaganda, fear, or convenience.

The Gita begins with a man who cannot proceed because he sees too clearly, and it continues with a teacher who refuses both numbness and sentimentality, insisting instead on awakened perception and disciplined action. When consciousness rises, the circle of “our own” expands our reality, because the soul does not need distance in order to remain intact.

Dear sweet soul named Sita,

I want you to know that you can trust me, and that no matter how uncertain things feel right now, you are going to be okay. You are going to make messes, and you are going to live as the tenacious, passionate, adventurous soul you came here to be, which means you will experience beauty and pain in equal measure, sometimes intertwined so closely you cannot tell them apart.

You will be betrayed, and there will be moments when you betray others as well. You will be let down, and you will let people down, often without meaning to and sometimes without fully understanding how it happened. You will give access to people who perhaps should not have had it, but this too is part of your learning. Discernment is not born fully formed and wisdom is shaped through experience. You will struggle with boundaries and you will lean toward compliance in the hope of keeping the peace, even when that peace costs you pieces of yourself. You will abandon yourself more times than you can count.

And yet, in all of this, you will find your courage. You will discover who you truly are, not because you avoid these experiences, but because you move through them and give yourself the space to enter into them in the first place.

You are none of these moments and all of them at once, and from this truth, you will learn how to make your life into art, shaped not despite the mess, but because of it.

You are brave, and you are beautiful, even when you cannot see it. I know you are scared right now, and I know that self trust feels distant and fragile, but it will grow slowly and steadily, shaped by each choice to stay, to listen, and to learn. There will be times when you feel like a victim, and sometimes you will be, but there will also be moments when you give permission, even if unconsciously, for the experiences that eventually guide you back to yourself. A part of you that you have narrowly touched deep within has given its blessing on some of your most painful moments. I know this might be hard to understand right now, but you will understand this one day.

You will even thank and bless those that have hurt you the most because you will so deeply understand what it means to be human and you will know that they were playing their perfect role in your unfolding. A job well done, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Your teachers will wear many costumes and many will surprise you.

.

Before you understand, you will learn about all the things you are not. You will explore deeply the people, places, and paths that do not truly resonate, and through that exploration you will learn how resonance itself works. You will recognize that you can align deeply with certain people and ways of being for a time, and that when you grow beyond how they serve you, and how you serve them, the resonance will naturally begin to dissipate. When that happens, let it go. It’s life natural movement.

Life is one long movement, one ongoing surrender, one deep breath unfolding into the next. It is one long laugh and one honest cry, sometimes arriving together in the same moment. Let yourself enjoy all of it. Love fully and deeply, without shrinking your heart to protect it. Invite your big feelings to sit at your table and speak, and listen to them without judgment. Learn about the inner worlds of others, not to lose yourself in them, but to remember the unifying field that connects all of humanity.

So, dear and brave soul, you have so much ahead of you, and I want you to know that I am watching over you. Trust that there is always an unfolding, a larger intelligence at work, even when you cannot see the pattern or name the plan. It is not your job to know everything. It is your job to show up with an open heart and an open mind, again and again.

You will be protected along the way. I have you. I love you.

Over the years I have learned that the Vedic and yogic traditions hold self-awareness in a wider frame than modern language usually does. Self-awareness is not simply knowing your personality, being able to describe your patterns, or watching your thoughts like a commentator in your own head. In its deeper meaning, self-awareness is recognizing the Seer within, the aware presence that knows thoughts, sensations, roles, and emotions, and is still not limited to any of them. When the mind becomes clear and steady, that presence is easier to recognize because the noise that normally covers it begins to thin and not because something new arrives to get our attention.

The Upanishads speak about why knowing ourselves in this way isn’t an easy task. The senses are designed to move outward which isn’t a mistake. The outward nature of the senses are how the human system interfaces with life. Yet there is a cost when attention only moves outward. We can spend our days tasting the world, interpreting it, reacting to it, shaping ourselves around it, and still miss the one who tastes.

The wise person, according to these teachings, turns the gaze inward and discovers the Self. This does not mean withdrawing from life or losing interest in relationships. It means learning to recognize the difference between the changing contents of experience and the awareness that knows those contents. In the most distilled language of Vedanta, the inner culmination is not self-improvement but Self-recognition, expressed in the teaching that the innermost Self is not small or separate. When you hold that possibility as real, the scale of the question shifts. It is no longer only about how well you understand your personality. It becomes about whether you have access to awareness itself, and whether you can remain connected to it as life moves through and around you.

This is the point where ahamkara becomes essential, and our way of naming it is exactly what protects the teaching from being reduced to pop psychology. Ahamkara is often translated as “ego,” and while that translation is not completely wrong, it can easily mislead us. In everyday English, ego tends to mean arrogance or inflated self-importance. Ahamkara points to something more fundamental and more continuous. It means the “I-maker.” That matters because it is an action word. It describes a process. It names the activity through which experience gets gathered, claimed, and organized into an “I,” and then into “me and mine.” It is the mind’s ongoing way of producing a sense of identity and a sense of relationship to the world, and then repeatedly confirming that identity and that relationship as if it were the ultimate reality.

Once you see ahamkara in this way, self-awareness becomes less of a personality trait and more of a training in perception. The I-maker does not only generate “I.” It generates “I am this kind of person,” and then it generates “this is what is happening,” and then it generates “this is what it means about me,” and then it generates “this is what I should do next.” It creates a lens and then looks through that lens so thoroughly that the lens becomes invisible while simultaneously being the only thing that is seen.

This is one reason projection is so common, even among people who care deeply about truth. We tend to think of projection as something that happens when we are immature or unconscious, but the I-maker is always attempting to keep the world coherent around itself. It is always shaping perception through preference, what is known and fear, through memory and expectation, through attraction and aversion. It is always trying to maintain continuity. Even when we are sincere, even when we have done years of inner work, the I-maker can remain persuasive because its job is to keep constructing a stable “me” who knows where it stands.

This is also why the number on the scale is so hard to assign with confidence. If I am asked, “How self-aware are you?” I can easily answer from self-image. I can answer from aspiration. I can answer from what I want to be true. I can answer from the parts of myself that are most articulate and educated. I can even answer from the parts of myself that are humbly self-critical, which can become its own strategy of control.

What I value so much about the Vedic lens is that it does not make this a moral problem. It simply describes how the inner instrument works. The mind can observe itself, and the mind can also rearrange what it sees in order to protect identity. That is what makes the inquiry honest. Not the number, but the recognition that the chooser of the number is inside the system being measured.

The yogic tradition is very practical about what gets in the way of self-awareness. One obstacle is the outward pull of the senses, because attention gets trained to chase what is loud, urgent, and shiny. That outward current is natural, but when it dominates, it keeps the inner field dim. Another obstacle is the mind’s constant motion which is a shared experience that levels the playing field for most of us. When the mind is rippling, we mistake ripples for reality, and we live inside interpretations that feel like facts. Clarity comes when the fluctuations settle, because when the water is moving, everything reflected in it looks distorted.

Yoga also names a set of afflictions that cloud self-awareness which are predictable patterns that hijack perception. There is ignorance in the specific sense of mis-seeing what we are, confusing awareness with the objects of awareness. There is ego-identification, the tightening of “I” around experience. There is attachment, the grasping toward what we want. There is aversion, the pushing away of what we fear or dislike. Then there is a deeper clinging, often experienced as fear, that can show up as control, urgency, perfectionism, or the need to be certain. When these forces are active, the I-maker becomes louder, faster, and more convincing. It produces a story quickly, and the story comes with a sense of righteousness that makes it difficult to pause.

The Bhagavad Gita describes another layer in a way that feels painfully familiar. It shows us how reactivity can cascade while anger can slide into confusion. Confusion can lead to a kind of inner forgetfulness and what can follow is loss of inner intelligence, the part of us that knows how to choose wisely. This is the moment people describe as, “I do not even know who I was in there.” Many of us recognize that moment. We have watched ourselves become someone narrower, someone more reactive, someone less capable of discernment, and we have felt the grief of it afterward. Again, the tradition is not condemning us for being human. It is describing the chain so we can interrupt it earlier.

Then there is misidentification, which is the deepest obstacle and the most subtle. We confuse the Self with body, status, story, trauma, achievement, or spiritual persona. We build an identity out of roles, wounds, victories, and affiliations. We do it because it gives us a sense of coherence, and coherence is calming. Yet when we mistake that constructed identity for what we are, self-awareness becomes a loop inside the I-maker’s world. Vedanta offers a practice of discernment that is often described through negation, “not this, not this,” meaning you learn to recognize that whatever can be observed, including thoughts, emotions, sensations, and identities, is not the Seer. This practice is meant to restore the simple distinction between awareness and what awareness knows.

All of this brings me back to an essential point. If ahamkara is active, if it is continually making an “I” and continually recreating its relationship to reality, then self-awareness cannot be a concept we hold or anything that is solid. It has to be something we practice in real time with intention and consistency. It has to include the capacity to notice the I-maker while it is working, and that requires space and quiet. It asks us to step outside the relational 3D world regularly, not because relationships are the problem, but because relationships are often where the I-maker finds the most fuel. Social life presses on belonging, approval, fear, pride, and control while the senses are fed constantly. The nervous system is asked to process too much. In that environment, the mind tends to default to familiar grooves, and familiar grooves will look like truth.

This is why practices matter, and why it is not necessary to argue over which practice is best as long as it follows the traditional logic of turning attention inward and steadying the mind, even if that is finding an activity where you find flow. We need ways to bring the seeing power back home. Pratyahara, simply put is withdrawing the senses, can be extremely simple. Three times a day, pause for thirty seconds, soften the eyes, feel the breath in the ribs, notice sound without chasing it. Small pauses like this are not trivial. They interrupt the outward drift and remind the system that attention can return and therefore is a way of training the mind.

Another practice is naming what is present. Thinking. Heat. Fear. Wanting. This creates a gap between awareness and the contents of awareness, and in that gap the I-maker has less authority.

We also work with causes rather than symptoms. Study and contemplation are not for collecting ideas but for strengthening discernment, and discernment becomes real when it is tested in direct experience. If ignorance is mis-seeing, we reduce it by repeatedly returning to the distinction between awareness and the objects of awareness. If asmita is the tightening of “I,” we practice witnessing “I, me, mine” without being compelled to obey it. If attachment and aversion are active, we learn to ask a question that changes everything: what sensation am I trying to avoid or capture right now. If you stay with the sensation for three breaths, without turning it into a story, you begin to loosen the reflex that turns sensation into identity.

Meditation supports all of this because it makes the inner instrument steadier. Even ten minutes daily is meaningful when it is consistent. Truthfulness, non-harming, simplicity, and clean relationships reduce inner fragmentation, because fragmentation creates fog. When our actions and values are more aligned, the mind spends less energy justifying itself and more energy seeing clearly.

Consistent self care matters as well. Enough sleep, warm steady meals, fewer stimulants, and less compulsive media consumption support clarity because agitation and dullness are the two states in which the I-maker either hijacks everything or remains unseen.

A simple practice can hold all of this without making it complicated. Sit and feel the weight of your body. Ask quietly, “What in me is aware of this moment?” Notice whatever arises, and then return to the fact of being aware. End with one small vow, choosing one act today that you will do with full awareness. This is how self-awareness stops being a theory and becomes a lived capacity.

So if I return to the original question now, I see it differently than I did at first. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how self-aware do you think you are” can be answered, and it can also be held. It can be used as a doorway rather than a verdict. A person might score themselves based on insight, and that might be honest at one level. Yet the deeper measure is something like this: how often do I recognize the Seer? How quickly do I notice the I-maker assembling its story? How willing am I to pause when certainty surges? How consistently do I create quiet spaces where I can meet myself without an audience, without performance, without the immediate demands of the world? Then, when I re-engage with life, how often do I see beyond my usual lens? This question is not because I have become special, but because I am training the mind to be a clearer instrument.

If self-awareness is real, it is not because we declared ourselves to be self-aware. It is because we keep returning to the place in us that can see, and we keep learning to notice what tries to take over the seeing. The I-maker will continue to make its case. The practice is learning to recognize when it is speaking, and to remember that it is not the only voice in the room

.

Through the Vedic and yogic lens, the causal body is not a mythic abstraction but a way of understanding our direct relationship to the deeper currents shaping experience. It can be described as the womb of experience itself. If the physical body is what we touch, and the subtle body is what we feel and think, then the causal body is the level where the seeds are held that later become thoughts, emotions, choices, relationships, circumstances, and turning points. In Sanskrit this is called kāraṇa śarīra. Kāraṇa means cause, seed, or origin, and śarīra means body.

This body is not personal in the way we usually mean personal. It is not limited to what we remember or what we can easily name. It is composed of latent impressions, traditionally called saṃskāras and vāsanās. Saṃskāras are the deep grooves formed through repeated experience and repeated response. Vāsanās are the subtle tendencies that arise from those grooves, the inclinations of mind and heart that quietly pull us in certain directions. These impressions are carried through time and, in many traditional accounts, across lifetimes, which is why the causal body is described as older than our current story.

An essential teaching often missed when karma is reduced to a self-help idea is that the causal body is where individual karma and collective karma meet. At this level there is no clean boundary between “me” and “us.” The same field that carries personal grief, inherited family patterns, and habitual reactions also carries unresolved collective movements. This is why cultures repeat themes even after vowing never to repeat them. This is why trauma echoes through generations even when it is never spoken aloud. Certain periods of history feel volatile not only because of social or economic strain, but because karmic momentum is ripening into shared experience.

The Upanishadic and yogic worldview understands reality as layered without treating it as divided. The causal body sits close to what is called avidyā, misperception. Avidyā is the fundamental misunderstanding that produces suffering, and at its core is the misperception of separation.

Life is experienced as if we are isolated units competing for safety, love, and control. From this misunderstanding arise desire that cannot be satisfied, fear that cannot be reasoned away, grasping that hardens the heart, and domination that becomes a social pattern. Repeated over vast stretches of time, these forces crystallize into history, systems, economies, wars, and cultural myths that feel larger than any individual because they are.

This is why yoga was never meant to remain at the level of personal improvement. Sādhanā, or your personal practice, was designed to work at the causal level, where seeds are formed and dissolved. When practice quiets reactivity, loosens rigid identity, and allows insight to arise without force, it begins to change what is stored beneath conscious thought.

Practice, in this context, does not simply mean exercise or stress reduction. It refers to intentional, repeated actions that shape consciousness over time. Meditation, mantra, ethical behaviors, self inquiry, breath regulation, and ritual, are all forms of practice when they are engaged with sincerity and continuity.

Practice serves the causal body by interrupting unconscious repetition. It creates space between impulse and action, between inherited pattern and conscious choice. When practiced consistently, it alters the impressions that drive how a person meets life. Because the causal body is shared, this inner work is never private.

Each person who becomes less reactive, less fear-driven, and more grounded in clarity subtly shifts the collective field. This is how practice serves not only individual karma but the collective mind itself.

Yogic texts describe the wearing away of deep impressions as saṃskāra kṣaya. Kṣaya means erosion or dissolution. As impressions loosen, compulsions loosen. As compulsions loosen, participation in collective harm becomes less automatic. This is not dramatic or immediate, but it is cumulative and real.

The Bhagavad Gītā gestures toward this when it speaks of action without attachment. This is often misunderstood as detachment from life, but it actually refers to freedom from the binding force of cravings and fears. Attachment binds action back into the causal web because it carries a demand that life must deliver a specific outcome in order for the self to feel secure or significant. When action arises from clear perception and responsibility rather than demand, it still has consequences, but it does not tighten the knot in the same way.

At this point it becomes important to speak directly and plainly about karma, because karma is the mechanism through which the causal body becomes the world we experience. Simply put, karma means action and consequence. It describes an exacting balance inherent in all of nature itself. Every action sets something in motion, and what is set in motion returns in some form. This is the natural accountability built into reality and traditionally is not viewed as punishment. The universe does not operate randomly when it comes to cause and effect. Instead, each experience participates in the ongoing balancing of what has been acted upon and what remains unresolved.

Some aspects of karma are difficult for modern minds to accept. Certain karmic patterns are not optional in the sense that they will be encountered in some form because they belong to the learning of this lifetime. This does not mean life is fixed in every detail. It means that some causes have already been set in motion, and their effects will ripen because the seeds exist. This is why identical practices and behaviors can produce very different outcomes for different people. One person may encounter ease in a certain area of life, while another meets resistance there. This difference is not about worthiness or failure. It reflects the momentum already present.

This understanding reshapes how we relate to difficulty when starting or during a spiritual practice. One’s spiritual practice can look like many things. For some it is related to a God or deity, for others it’s deep self-inquiry or meditation. Many people interpret obstacles as a signal to stop. In reality, when practice begins to work at the causal level, it often brings buried material to the surface. In some cases, a person is meeting consequences that were already due and are now becoming visible. In other cases, practice accelerates the processing of karmic material, which can feel intense, disruptive, or uncomfortable. Intensity does not necessarily mean something has gone wrong. It often indicates that something real is being addressed.

If collective karma is ripening, turbulence is not a mistake. Patterns sown over generations do not dissolve through intention alone. Consequences are moving through institutions, economies, ecosystems, and relationships because long-standing misperceptions are meeting their return. When the world feels unstable, it may be because the collective is encountering the results of believing that separation is real and dominance is necessary.

From this perspective, collective suffering is the unresolved learning playing out at scale. Healing is clarity moving through form and action. The same awareness that can awaken within an individual can awaken within communities and systems, because those systems are made of human choices repeated over time which is why it takes each individual to contribute in any way they can, even if it feels futile. Remember, we are working with patterns or grooves that give rise to behaviors. When we address those patterns by doing our own work, we start to release the collective from the bondage we find ourselves in.

Personal responsibility is therefore not small. It is where “cause” is being planted right now. It begins with how one relates to the mind, with the willingness to see patterns without defensiveness. It includes restraint in speech and action, patience with process, and the humility to accept that some consequences must be lived through even while choosing the wisest response available.

When difficulty arises, consistency becomes the medicine. Repeated, committed practice gradually wears away karmic mass, like striking a mountain again and again until a passage opens. Each effort may seem small, but change happens through repetition, and repetition reshapes what is stored in the causal body.

Living this way, conscious practice becomes a law of life. Each day either reinforces an old impression or weakens it. A less reactive person adds less chaos while a more truthful person adds less distortion. A steadier person adds less fear in the self and others. None of this is glamorous, but it is real, and it accumulates.

To touch the causal body is to stand at the root of personal destiny and collective becoming. At that root, liberation and responsibility are not separate. Clarity changes what you plant, and what you plant shapes the world we share. The yogic path insists on humility because humility keeps us aligned with reality, and reality includes consequence. We are not here to force the world into a shape that satisfies preference. We are here to see clearly enough to stop feeding what no longer needs to exist, and to practice in a way that plants a different future in the field we all inhabit.

At the time, I believed I had been abandoned. I felt alone and angry at God, which I now recognize as a strange mercy, because anger still requires relationship. Even then, something in me believed there was something greater than myself, even if I could not name it or trust it. If I knew anything at all, it was that I did not have the answers, and in hindsight, that humility may have been the first opening. The Vedas remind us that ignorance is not a moral failing but a veil, avidyā, something that obscures rather than destroys truth. What I could not see then was that I was being looked after the entire time, even when my conscious mind could not feel it.

On January 3, 1998, after an unusual night spent at my parents’ home and with longtime family friends, I returned to bed, which had been my safest place since childhood. As I lay there, a voice came into my ear, loud and unmistakably clear, and it said, “You got yourself into this, you get yourself out.” On the surface, these words do not sound compassionate, especially spoken to a young woman who was barely functioning, who had been surviving rather than living, and who was profoundly medicated and dissociated. And yet, what came through that voice was not cruelty but grace, not condemnation but courage. There was a steadiness in it, an insightfulness that had been completely out of reach for me until that moment, and it carried an implicit faith that I was capable of responding.

That day was the last day I ever drank alcohol. To this day, I do not touch it, not out of fear but out of my own sense of peace and self love. I have learned that I do not enjoy feeling outside of or separate from myself. Something fundamental shifted in that moment, something the Bhagavad Gītā points to when it teaches that the Self is never destroyed, only forgotten, and that remembrance can arise in an instant when the conditions are ripe. That voice woke me up enough to begin the work of saving myself, which in Sanātana Dharma is never separate from being held by something larger than the individual will.

The years that followed were not quick or easy. I put myself back together slowly with the support of the Twelve Steps, a truly gifted therapist, and what I can only call a deep and relentless spiritual life. I was given a promise the first day I walked into an AA meeting that life could become beyond my wildest dreams, and I held onto that promise even when I could not yet imagine what it might mean. Although I moved away from the Twelve Steps after about twelve years, I never moved away from what they taught me about humility, service, accountability, and the necessity of tending to my inner world. I have always treated my spiritual life as essential, not optional, and I have always understood that service is not something added onto life but something that gives my life its shape.

This time of year is hard for many people, and for me it has become a time of reflection rather than celebration. I am a committed Sanātani, which many would call Hindu, a description I humbly accept while knowing that Sanātana Dharma points to something far older and wider than any single label. When I found this path, I recognized it immediately, as something remembered and something I had deeply and long held within myself. The things I knew in my soul as a child, the nature of the universe, the experience of devotion, the intelligence of consciousness itself, finally had language and form. I knew I was home.

Over the last years, I have lost many of the trappings that are typically called success, and I say that without bitterness and so much joy. The simplification of my life has created a depth of peace I could not have imagined when I was younger and striving. I live in a tiny space with my husband, who is my best friend, with our animals, with the love and steady support of my mother, and with the relationship I share with my birth daughter, Mya and her life partner. I am content in a way that feels cellular rather than circumstantial. I do not need much. In fact, I have learned that the more I have, the more psychic weight I carry, and I am no longer interested in that burden.

I have work that I love with people I genuinely enjoy working with. I have meaningful ways to express my dharma, not as an abstract concept but as lived responsibility. I have a spiritual community that I do not think could possibly know how deeply I love them, and I have endless opportunities to serve, which the Upaniṣads remind us is a natural expression on the path of liberation. This is a life that feels aligned, not perfect, but real and true.

For me, this season is a place of measurement not because of holidays, but because I remember where I was in late 1997 and early 1998, when I genuinely wondered if my young life was already over. I did not yet have the life wisdom to understand that every death carries the seed of rebirth, that dissolution is often a necessary precursor to reorganization, and that grace does not always arrive in gentle forms. Sanātana Dharma teaches that the universe moves in cycles of creation, preservation, and dissolution, and that nothing is wasted, not even our suffering.

Looking back now, I can see that what felt like an ending was actually an initiation, one that set me on a path of remembrance, service, and aligned living that continues to unfold. I am profoundly grateful that I stayed, that I listened, that I held onto the promise when I could not yet see its fulfillment, and that I trusted, even in my anger and despair, that life had not finished with me yet.