Richard Rohr’s reflection met me where I am.
Before reading, I found myself wishing for “a page that does not ask me to be clever… words arriving barefoot, still carrying dew.” It felt like an invitation to set down the loyal soldier before I even knew I was carrying one.
There have been seasons when discipline, knowledge, and determination were exactly what life required. I am grateful for them. Yet the older I become, the more I find that the deepest movements come not through striving, rather through listening.
This morning, in the garden beneath an old female ginkgo tree, I sensed that my work now is less about mastering life than embodying what is already quietly emerging. In practice, we often say that the body knows before the mind can explain. Perhaps that is another way God comes disguised as our life.
May we have the courage to begin before we know, to trust the first breath, the first image, the first turning toward light. May we thank our loyal soldier for carrying us this far—and then gently invite it to rest, so something more spacious, more loving, and more deeply alive can lead the way.
💜
Dear Ones —
On Noble Friendship, in this time of the pause
Grief and gratitude are twins born of the same labor, and this week has asked us to hold both at once. Noble friendship — kalyana mitta — was never meant as sentiment. It is a discipline, practiced in the body, renewed breath by breath, moment by moment, one birdsong after another.
A pause is not an absence. It is the interval where the real work happens — conscious composting of what has passed, so that what comes next can be collectively constellated. In this pause, connection finds more substantial forms: movement, drawing, gathering, food. Nourishment becoming visible again as a shared practice rather than a private need.
One foot, then the other, on the earth. One baby’s cry answered. One root noticed at the base of a tree, the eye then following upward — trunk to branch to the particular way light finds each leaf, each vein, each edge — and wondering, simply wondering, how it is that light reaches every one of them differently and still reaches all.
This is what is coming alive on the planet now, if we let it.
So: spine turning in every direction it was built to turn. A smile arriving not just at the mouth but at the collarbones, at the pelvic bowl — the vertical awareness of something larger moving down and through, grounded by arms rising, fingers lifting, wrists turning us into our own five-pointed stars, ankles remembering their part in the whole figure.
Again and again, we are given back the same task. Breathe again. Live again. Compost what has ended so it can feed what is beginning. Constellate, together, what has always been true and what will go on standing, long after we are only light reaching someone else’s leaves.
In practice and spirit, remaining — Allie
Reading this in the wake of Robert Thurman’s passing, I find myself especially grateful for his phrase, “Four Friendly Facts.”
My own practice has become less about trying to avoid suffering and more about learning to live love as a response to whatever arises—an untoward event, a difficult feeling, or an unexpected turn in life.
What helps me loosen the grip of “if only” thinking is simplification. As I let go of some of the complexity I once carried, I find more room for appreciation, presence, and even cheerfulness.
Cheerfulness has not always come easily to me. It has become a practice—not denying suffering, but meeting life with warmth anyway.
Perhaps that is one way wisdom expresses itself: responding to what is with a little more love and a little less resistance.
As a digital immigrant, I sometimes feel the sting of not being able to follow directions that others seem to navigate with ease. In those moments, it is easy to feel left behind.
Yet I am learning to see this with greater gentleness. I come from a different landscape of learning, one shaped by books, conversations, handwritten notes, and lived experience. The digital world asks for new forms of attention and fluency.
Rather than a deficit, I am beginning to see this as an invitation—to remain humble, curious, and willing to learn. It has also deepened my appreciation for patience and for the kindness of those who help bridge the gap between different generations of ways of knowing.
What catches my attention is the idea that creation is the earliest sacred text.
During the COVID lockdown, I found myself immersed in conversations with thirty-six long-term yoga practitioners for my book, Yoga Radicals. I invited artist Geisa Paganini de Mio to listen to each interview and create a generative scribing image in response. What surprised me was how often the same elemental patterns emerged across very different lives.
Again and again, the images revealed earth, water, fire, air, and space. They revealed cycles of loss and renewal, grounding and expansion, discipline and surrender. The drawings seemed to be reading something deeper than the individual stories. They were pointing toward the larger patterns of life itself.
What stopped me in my tracks was realizing that these practitioners had spent decades learning from the same teachers available to all of us: breath, gravity, seasons, aging, relationship, and the natural world. The elemental forces were not metaphors. They were living companions.
More recently, I have encountered similar teachings while working with Indigenous entrepreneurs and land stewards. In these conversations, the land itself is often present as a stakeholder and teacher. Forests, waterways, animals, and ancestral territories are not resources to be managed but relationships to be honored. This way of seeing invites me to slow down and listen differently.
What helps me read the natural world with an attentive heart is remembering that I am not separate from it. Whether through a drawing, a conversation, a stone, a tree, or a landscape, I am continually invited into relationship with something larger than myself.
The older I become, the more I sense that creation is indeed an ancient sacred text. We do not read it once and master it. We spend a lifetime learning its language. And if we pay attention, it continues to open doors we did not know were there.
As I sit with this question, I notice I would like to live more like the woods and waters I love — grounded, aware, and quietly alive.
I would like to meet life with curiosity more than certainty.
To trust emergence.
To love with courage.
To help create conditions where people feel more themselves, more connected, and more able to offer their gifts.
In my work, I am learning that wisdom is often relational — something we grow together through listening, attention, and care.
And perhaps most of all, I would like to remember, again and again, that what is needed is often already here, quietly waiting for our willingness to notice.
What stays with me is the pointer dog.
That moment when Sara freezes—
spine long, alert, whole body tuned to something just beyond sight.
It’s not effort.
It’s alignment.
Watching her, I begin to feel my own spine differently—
as a kind of instrument,
a living axis between earth and sky.
When I’m scattered, I miss the moment.
But when something in me “points”—
when I become still enough, receptive enough—
something shifts.
A note is struck.
Light enters.
The ordinary opens—just slightly—into reverence.
The dog points, and the quail rise.
The spine aligns, and awareness opens.
And in that opening,
kindness appears.
Not as something I try to do,
but as something that moves through
when I’m in right relationship.
Maybe this is part of Ishq—
not reaching for love,
but being tuned enough
to let it play.
What lands for me here is not a new practice, but a remembering.
I was raised in a Quakerism context, where the language of “Friends” wasn’t metaphor—it was grammar.
A way of speaking that assumes the heart is already present.
That there is that of God in each of us, even when it feels obscured.
Alongside that, I was shaped by the teachings of George Gurdjieff—where attention itself is a practice.
Where remembering is not sentimental, but disciplined.
A returning again and again to presence, through the body, through awareness, through the friction of being human.
So this line—“even in the apparent absence of peace, there is peace”—
doesn’t feel like something to achieve.
It feels like something that requires participation.
A softening, yes—
and also a conscious remembering.
In my own life, this has taken form in what my partner and I call making peacetime—
a living practice between us as two wandering wayfinders.
Not an idea, but a daily orientation.
How we listen.
How we pause.
How we return when we lose the thread.
Because we do lose it.
And still—something remains.
So when I read this reflection, I don’t feel asked to go find peace somewhere else.
I feel invited to refine my attention
until I can sense what has not left.
And then—quietly, imperfectly—
to live from there.
Reflection: The Ladder and the Palm
Yesterday, a photograph stopped me.
An old wooden ladder leaned gently against a palm tree in Jamaica.
No one climbing.
No visible task.
No urgency.
Just… there.
It brought back another image I kept in my New York office years ago—
a yellow ladder floating in a wide blue sky from the Santa Fe Opera.
Two ladders.
Both unclaimed by purpose.
And something in me softened.
Because I know this other ladder too—
the one we climb without questioning:
achievement, recognition, progress, getting somewhere.
The one that quietly turns presence into performance.
In yoga, we’re given a simple invitation:
nowhere to go, nothing to do.
I’ve said those words countless times guiding others.
But lately, I’m feeling them differently.
Not as instruction—
but as orientation.
What if the ladder is still here…
but we’re not required to climb it?
What if it can simply lean—
part of the landscape, not a demand?
In a world of constant becoming,
there is something quietly radical
about remembering:
to be here
right here
right now.
This reflection feels very real to me—the quiet way we can exchange an “absolute” orientation for a “relative” one without noticing.
In my case, it didn’t show up in physics, but in a much more intimate terrain.
Years ago, after nearly two decades of deep healing, my husband suddenly became seriously ill again. In an instant, something old and visceral was activated in me—a root-level fear I recognized from my own near-death experiences in my twenties.
On the surface, I was doing what was needed—caring, organizing, holding things together. But underneath, I could feel a shift: from simply being present… to subtly measuring myself.
Am I doing this well enough?
Am I holding this together the “right” way?
That was the moment I recognized the ladder. And that it wasn’t leaning where my heart actually was.
What helped wasn’t leaving, but returning.
Returning to simple reference points:
• feeling my feet when fear surged
• allowing emotion without trying to resolve it
• sitting beside him, not as a role, but as a human being
I also leaned into practices that have shaped my life—dialogue, movement, and what I now call conscious composting. Letting what was arising move through, rather than organizing myself around it.
These became my way out of the quiet hierarchy of “doing it right.”
Nothing external immediately changed. But something in me softened.
I was no longer performing care—I was participating in it.
So I resonate deeply with the mimetic trap. We do inherit pace, values, even identity from the fields we inhabit.
And… there are quieter reference points available.
For me:
the body,
relational presence,
creative and contemplative practice—
places where I can sense what is actually alive.
When I lose that, I drift.
When I return, even briefly, something reorients.
And the question “Why does this matter?”
stops being something to answer—
and becomes somethi...
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This reflection feels very real to me—the quiet way we can exchange an “absolute” orientation for a “relative” one without noticing.
In my case, it didn’t show up in physics, but in a much more intimate terrain.
Years ago, after nearly two decades of deep healing, my husband suddenly became seriously ill again. In an instant, something old and visceral was activated in me—a root-level fear I recognized from my own near-death experiences in my twenties.
On the surface, I was doing what was needed—caring, organizing, holding things together. But underneath, I could feel a shift: from simply being present… to subtly measuring myself.
Am I doing this well enough?
Am I holding this together the “right” way?
That was the moment I recognized the ladder. And that it wasn’t leaning where my heart actually was.
What helped wasn’t leaving, but returning.
Returning to simple reference points:
• feeling my feet when fear surged
• allowing emotion without trying to resolve it
• sitting beside him, not as a role, but as a human being
I also leaned into practices that have shaped my life—dialogue, movement, and what I now call conscious composting. Letting what was arising move through, rather than organizing myself around it.
These became my way out of the quiet hierarchy of “doing it right.”
Nothing external immediately changed. But something in me softened.
I was no longer performing care—I was participating in it.
So I resonate deeply with the mimetic trap. We do inherit pace, values, even identity from the fields we inhabit.
And… there are quieter reference points available.
For me:
the body,
relational presence,
creative and contemplative practice—
places where I can sense what is actually alive.
When I lose that, I drift.
When I return, even briefly, something reorients.
And the question “Why does this matter?”
stops being something to answer—
and becomes something to live inside.
Like a tone I keep tuning toward,
again and again,
until the ladder dissolves
and I find myself
not climbing—
but standing
in the field that was here
all along.
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I’ve spent decades in practices that meet this directly—through body, breath, dialogue, and awareness.
What I’ve come to trust is not that difficult energy disappears, but that it knows how to move when I don’t grip it.
I’ve felt fear rise that was older than the moment. Heat, contraction, a kind of ancient remembering.
When I resisted, it stayed and shaped my thinking.
When I allowed it—without collapsing into it, without pushing it away—something shifted.
Not immediately into love, but into space.
And in that space, the energy reorganized.
What I might call now—not just transmutation—but integration.
These days, what helps me “keep my hands off” is simple, but not easy:
feeling my feet, softening my breath, and trusting that the body and heart are not problems to solve, but processes already underway.
And yes… like the seasons, something in me is always moving—
not pushing winter away, but letting spring arrive.
Reading this, I don’t meet it as an idea.
I meet it as a moment that opened me.
After nearly twenty years of my husband’s steady heart healing, there was a sudden turn. Serious. Uncertain. And what rose in me was not the calm of a seasoned practitioner—but a deep, sacred fear.
Ancient. Immediate.
It carried echoes of my own early near-death experiences in my twenties—those thresholds where the body knows something the mind cannot yet hold.
For a moment, everything in me wanted to organize it, to be the steady one, to move quickly into action.
Yet something quieter whispered:
stay.
So alongside caring for him, I practiced a different kind of devotion.
Hand on heart.
Breath meeting the surge.
Letting the fear rise without pushing it back down.
Not collapsing into it.
Not transcending it.
But allowing.
I’ve seen this terrain before—in the 36 voices of Yoga Radicals, where what begins as rupture becomes, over time, a doorway into service… into social impact… into lives re-authored from the inside out.
And I’ve written through it myself—in those wandering lines that came during my own healing:
almost breaking
almost opening
the same door
What I felt beneath the fear, when I stopped interrupting it, was not relief—not at first.
It was heat.
Then space.
Then a fierce, steady aliveness.
A love that was not soft, but elemental.
Not sentimental, but structuring.
Over years of dialogue, movement, and meditation, I’ve come to trust this:
what rises is not the enemy.
It is the body, the heart, the field—
pushing toward coherence.
What helps me “keep my hands off” is relationship—
to breath,
to ground,
to the wider web holding us when we cannot hold ourselves.
And slowly, what felt like fear
begins to reorganize…
not because I fixed it,
but because I allowed it
to complete its arc.
For me, this is the path of embodying emergence:
awareness…
opening into a creativ...
View full comment
Reading this, I don’t meet it as an idea.
I meet it as a moment that opened me.
After nearly twenty years of my husband’s steady heart healing, there was a sudden turn. Serious. Uncertain. And what rose in me was not the calm of a seasoned practitioner—but a deep, sacred fear.
Ancient. Immediate.
It carried echoes of my own early near-death experiences in my twenties—those thresholds where the body knows something the mind cannot yet hold.
For a moment, everything in me wanted to organize it, to be the steady one, to move quickly into action.
Yet something quieter whispered:
stay.
So alongside caring for him, I practiced a different kind of devotion.
Hand on heart.
Breath meeting the surge.
Letting the fear rise without pushing it back down.
Not collapsing into it.
Not transcending it.
But allowing.
I’ve seen this terrain before—in the 36 voices of Yoga Radicals, where what begins as rupture becomes, over time, a doorway into service… into social impact… into lives re-authored from the inside out.
And I’ve written through it myself—in those wandering lines that came during my own healing:
almost breaking
almost opening
the same door
What I felt beneath the fear, when I stopped interrupting it, was not relief—not at first.
It was heat.
Then space.
Then a fierce, steady aliveness.
A love that was not soft, but elemental.
Not sentimental, but structuring.
Over years of dialogue, movement, and meditation, I’ve come to trust this:
what rises is not the enemy.
It is the body, the heart, the field—
pushing toward coherence.
What helps me “keep my hands off” is relationship—
to breath,
to ground,
to the wider web holding us when we cannot hold ourselves.
And slowly, what felt like fear
begins to reorganize…
not because I fixed it,
but because I allowed it
to complete its arc.
For me, this is the path of embodying emergence:
awareness…
opening into a creative field…
and, in its own time,
into action.
Not forced.
Not avoided.
But lived.
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find myself reflecting on a long thread in my life.
Years ago, I was introduced to Bohm Dialogue—not as a method, but as a way of being together. Later, my husband and I began hosting small gatherings in our home. We shared food, and then, with the sound of a singing bowl, entered into what we called conscious conversation.
What we noticed was simple:
people didn’t always know what to say.
Not because there was nothing there,
but because something deeper was being asked.
Over time, the “food” began to change.
From meals
to attention.
From conversation
to listening that could hold what is real.
Now, in our Friends Practicing Together gatherings, I sense we are tending what I’ve come to call Sacred Roots—those quiet, unseen threads of connection that grow beneath our words.
Reading Priya Basil’s reflection, I feel how easily “authenticity” can become something we try to claim or defend. And yet, the moments that stay with me are the ones where something softer happens—where a story is offered, received, and somehow becomes shared ground.
A small bridge forms.
What helps me extend those circles of hospitality is remembering that I don’t have to generate it alone. When I arrive, listen, and allow myself to be touched by what is here, something opens that feels larger than any one of us.
Perhaps that is the practice.
Not to get it right,
but to stay.
And to let something grow between us.
When my husband and I married twenty-five years ago, a small book quietly shaped our vows: On Love by A. R. Orage.
What struck me then was the idea of conscious love—a form of relationship where partners are not only companions, but stewards of one another’s development. Love, in this sense, is not possession or projection. It is a shared commitment to awakening.
At the time, those words felt aspirational. Beautiful, but somewhat mysterious.
Life, of course, provided the curriculum.
Across the years we navigated the very human passages many couples encounter: health challenges, career transitions, aging parents, and the subtle developmental shifts that come with later life. Alongside those outer changes, we both maintained a steady commitment to contemplative practice.
Something slowly changed in the field between us.
What began as two individuals learning how to love each other gradually matured into something quieter and more spacious—a sense of “new we-ness.” Not the loss of individuality, but the emergence of a shared center of gravity.
Today we even find ourselves building work together, helping others navigate complexity and change. In that process I sometimes recognize what Orage hinted at long ago: when partners support each other’s conscious development, the relationship itself becomes creative.
The polarity of me and you softens.
A living we appears.
And from that shared ground, something larger than either partner alone can begin to ripple outward into the world. 💗
a long-term meditator, yet at last December’s annual Embodying the Heart of Wisdom retreat at IMS, struggle was present; a difficult silent retreat than before. Normally I spend time outdoors to help regulate my body during long periods of silence, yet this time I couldn’t even bring myself to go outside. It was cold, yes—but something deeper asked me to stay.
One morning in the large meditation hall, I dropped into a very absorbed state. Suddenly I experienced a lotus rising through my body—pink and white petals with a thick stem emerging from a muddy source deep below awareness.
It felt ancient and familiar.
Months earlier I had bought lotus seeds and shared them with friends beginning new projects. I’m in the midst of one myself.
In that moment the small “I, me, mine” relaxed into a long, quiet recognition:
Ahhh… we are already blooming something new together.
The Sacred is in all of us and we learn about it when we have a moment of intimacy. For me, it’s not only with a person, actually, I first learned about the Sacred when I was very very young, and felt the embrace of the universal life force surrounding me as if it could replace or at least enhance something that I was yearning for and not receiving in my human contact. It has stayed with me since and now I have learned that it also exists in other people and that when we deepen our connections with each other, just like in long-term contemplative practice that something lights up a new space of awareness and capacity for something more to be felt. It’s that profound connection, across time in space that creates the impression of something continuing that wants my attention and love. That’s why I write poetry and dance as a way to mirror what is in this extraordinary emergent space that we all are serving, consciously or unconsciously together or separately. I love to call it embodying emergence, and we are reaching toward something that we are collectively constellating for the sake of something not yet known, or maybe we have always known… That’s the fun part
What cultivates spaciousness in my life is creating time for practices that inspire harmony and happiness in mind heart and body … it’s how the yoga radicals book project was born … I needed to seed my gratitude for what I had been given … 🌠🎶🐝🌱🙏🏽
The ways in which thoughts from the past or qualities of engagement from current moment, awareness are able to combine and transform at a collective level, feels very much like the call to an expanded consciousness at a collective level. As we constellation the future through contemplative and continuous moments Resting and being, the quality of connection increases. It’s in this expanded space in place that I feel we all might feel truly held by the potential of conscious awareness, sharing where and how we are wandering Wayfinders… Together
Totally agree about the habit of self-referential thinking that seems to “compete” with the restful state that arises after long-term meditation and contemplative movement practices
My dear friend and colleague Izzy Gesell died last month, and we celebrated him in a memorial which was filled with laughter and like minded creatives. He was a long-term master of improv, and all of its applications to increase nervous system regulation as well as for personal development. He didn’t talk about the need for more laughter, per se, yet it was clear that the gentle switching toward a “yes and” approach would create a much more fluid relational field, as people told their stories from the perspective of other and the incredible capacity building that that laughter comes from the deep part of our being. Nothing like connecting with others in a humorous applied improv session, such that Izzy did for so many over so many years. We miss him greatly.. Izzy Gesell, rest in peace