In 1996—the year I graduated from high school—Pema Chödron published When Things Fall Apart. At some point in the next decade or two, the book somehow made its way onto my shelf, and while I thumbed through it here and there, I only came to really appreciate it about halfway through 2020, when it was […]

Joy is Never Inappropriate

Upon hearing of my father’s recent death, one of my yoga students shared with me a video of Thich Nhat Hanh, entitled “A Cloud Never Dies.” The talk urges us to notice how everything around us continually changes form, and holds that the extent to which we avoid the black and white mindset that death […]

Learning from the Clouds

The last time I wrote, I asked us to buckle our seat belts, connect to those we love, and prepare for the deep dive inward. Little did I know just how tight my own seat belt would need to be, or just how inward I’d be plunging. Now that it’s March, those of us in […]

Winter Blossoms

I want to encourage us to shore up our connections… The Limits of Language It’s been a long time. While it’s true that I’m someone who prefers fewer, meatier blogposts over more frequent ones in the name of weekly or monthly communications, it’s been quite a stretch of time, even for me. I’ve come to […]

Words as Webs

I had heard that How Yoga Works teaches about the deeper philosophies of yoga, and in particular, The Yoga Sutras—perhaps the main “Bible” of yoga and the first codified yogic text we know of, composed by the Indian master Patanjali some 2,000 years ago. This hallowed text, made up of 210 brief, Sanskrit verses, can […]

Book Review: How Yoga Works by Gesne Michael Roach

Last November, I was blessed enough to co-officiate the wedding of my niece Aba and my new nephew Micah. Two tribes became one for a week, as loved ones gathered in Todos Santos, Mexico, to enjoy a week of kinship and ritual. We ate and surfed and laughed and pampered and practiced yoga and danced […]

Upon the Marriage of Aba y Micah