Greetings folks! 

 

I hope this finds you all well. Here is some news for the coming weeks; the first is for the temple: 

 

1. The temple will now be open in the afternoons from 4:30pm-6:30pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays starting this week! You are welcome to come for darshan, to meditate, do mantra japa, read a book, or work from home at the temple. We plan to have a weekly work-from-home at the temple once per week starting in July, with tea and snacks available. Stay tuned...

 

2. The New Beginnings Puja from June was really super—this is the puja we do on the first Monday of each month to intention set for the month ahead. It actually helped me quite a lot with my goals for the month, and I am looking forward to the next one, which will be on Monday, July 4th. You can join in-person or virtually, and can sign up here. 

 

And now for the yoga classes: 

 

1. We will be closed for classes on June 23rd, 24th, 25th and 26th while I am at the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin 40th annual conference in San Antonio

2. Tuesday, June 28th is a New Moon

3. There will be no classes on July 3rd and 4th 

4. July schedule will go up next weekend, same schedule as June

5. The Pranayama Teacher Training course is finishing our first month this coming week, and it has been a great so far! We will do our next in January, and will also be adding new course in July. You can sign up for the waiting list for the next course and check out our other offerings at Yoga Education Collective

 

That's all for now! 

 

And also, here's a snippet of a conversation I had with Deepak Chopra about Yoga and consciousness last year that I am currently transcribing... more to follow! 

 

 

Eddie: When you say you experience your body as consciousness, what does that mean? Most of us struggle to understand—or even figure out—what consciousness is. If it is a something at all, that is... 

 

Deepak: So, if I ask anyone including yourself and myself to close your eyes and do nothing, just close your eyes and do nothing, you'll become aware sooner or later of what can be called the internal dialogue. Somebody is having a conversation with themselves right now. And if you actually look at that conversation, it has two components. It's mostly about yourself in relationship to another, either a person, situation, circumstance, event, or whatever. But that internal dialogue is me having a conversation with me about me as it relates to what I think the other is. Now, if that conversation is not a happy one, if I’m upset about something, then there's a certain sensation that accompanies that dialogue; if we're angry, there's a certain sensation that accompanies it. If you are fearful, another sensation, and you know we localize these sensations as chakras and this, that, and the other, but forget that for the moment. As soon as you experience fear or anger or distress or hostility or grievances or resentments or separation, there's a certain kind of conglomeration of sensations that you experience in your body, and they're not pleasant. They're localized and they are constricted, and you feel them in your sphincters, muscles, and viscera.

 

On the other hand, if that conversation is about something that is seemingly happy or pleasurable for you, you’ll also feel sensations, but they're different. If I ask you to think of somebody you love, you will feel a sensation; if I ask you to think of something you are passionate about, you will feel a sensation. So, every conversation, internal or external, localizes in the body as a sensation, some unpleasant and some which are pleasant. In Buddhism, this is also called the pain body, which is also the pleasure body because the two go together. In some aspects of Vedanta that I have been privy to through the great Masters, the non-dualists, it’s also called the karmic body. At every moment your body is reflecting karma, because all that conversation is all about yourself, memories, impressions, desires, imagination, recycling of experiences that projects the internal dialogue—and that includes internal dialogue of the mind which is emotions, intellect, thoughts, ideas, and discernment. All of this is projecting itself as the karmic body and the karmic body is projecting itself as the experience of what we call the universe. It's all one process. In yoga, with these eight limbs of yoga—Ashtanga Yoga—you get to a place of deep stillness called samadhi, but even before deep samadhis you can get glimpses of that the stillness in between every sensation, the stillness in between every thought, the stillness in between every emotion between, every image. All these arisings of thoughts and the like are vrittis, and in between the vrittis is silence. So, sensations perceptions images, feelings, and thoughts are vrittis in consciousness, which are experienced and interpreted by human beings as mind, body, and universe, but it's one process. You would never actually experience an entity called the material Universe. Never.

 

Please stay in touch, email with questions or requests, and we look forward to seeing you in class! 

 

With love,

Eddie and Jocelyne