Pop star Aviv Geffen is a force for peace in Israel
Aviv Geffen, an Israeli pop artist, has been advocating peace through his music for fifteen years. He has received death threats for his open criticism of government policy. "Cry for You," originally written for a friend killed in a car crash, was sung by Geffen in honor of the assassinated minister Yitzhak Rabin. It became the anthem of the Israeli anti-war movement. Today, he’s still speaking up for peace.
Watch the video HERE!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Follow along with the Jiva TTers !!
All of May, we have 6 students from our DC satsang in Jivamukti Teacher Training. They are undergoing intensive and long days, so keep them in your thoughts and send them blessings and support!
If you want to follow along on their journey, our dear Ximena Savitch is keeping a blog of her experiences; check it out here: http://jivatales09.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
What is love?
I went to mass this morning and the priest gave a beautiful sermon on the nature of love. He challenged us to compare what we often mean when we say "i love you" to the love showed by Christ on the cross, comparing the sometimes shallow recitation by our lips to his very real act of selfless love. It really made me think.
How much do I really "love?" Fully, from the bottom of my heart? To the point of denying my self? Because love truly matters when it isn't convenient. When there is a cost to pay. That is when true love is tested.
And so I return to the cross. It seems that in most, if not all, profoundly human circumstances, I return here to the foot of the cross. I look up at the outstretched arms of Christ, and am reminded of what true love is:
***********
1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (New International Version)
4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8Love never fails.
***********
And so like my priest said this morning, we are called as disciples of Christ to imitate his love. And it is a crazy love, a love that bears absolutely no consideration for self but is wholly selfless. A love that "humbles the soul to the dust."
How much do I really "love?" Fully, from the bottom of my heart? To the point of denying my self? Because love truly matters when it isn't convenient. When there is a cost to pay. That is when true love is tested.
And so I return to the cross. It seems that in most, if not all, profoundly human circumstances, I return here to the foot of the cross. I look up at the outstretched arms of Christ, and am reminded of what true love is:
***********
1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (New International Version)
4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8Love never fails.
Interpretation
13:4 The love of God, and of our neighbour for God's sake, is patient toward, all men. It, suffers all the weakness, ignorance, errors, and infirmities of the children of God; all the malice and wickedness of the children of the world: and all this, not only for a time, but to the end. And in every step toward overcoming evil with good, it is kind, soft, mild, benign. It inspires the sufferer at once with the most amiable sweetness, and the most fervent and tender affection. Love acteth not rashly - Does not hastily condemn any one; never passes a severe sentence on a slight or sudden view of things. Nor does it ever act or behave in a violent, headstrong, or precipitate manner. Is not puffed up - Yea, humbles the soul to the dust.***********
And so like my priest said this morning, we are called as disciples of Christ to imitate his love. And it is a crazy love, a love that bears absolutely no consideration for self but is wholly selfless. A love that "humbles the soul to the dust."
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
A message from Sri Brahmananda Saraswati
I was doing some "spring cleaning" and came across a saying by one of the Jivamukti gurus, Sri Brahmananda Saraswati. I wanted to share it:
You can do anything by these powers:
1. Power of cooperation
2. Power of love
3. Power of friendliness
4. Power of meditation
5. power of silence and fearlessness.
Misunderstanding is the cause of all problem. No understanding is far better than misunderstanding.
You can do anything by these powers:
1. Power of cooperation
2. Power of love
3. Power of friendliness
4. Power of meditation
5. power of silence and fearlessness.
Misunderstanding is the cause of all problem. No understanding is far better than misunderstanding.
Monday, April 20, 2009
It's 2009: Do you know where your soul is?
In this weekend's paper, the singer BONO talked about his mystical experience of transcendence, reminding us that this is what we most yearn for.....
Op-ed by BONO:
It's 2009: Do you know where your soul is?
Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.
It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.
Read his entire article HERE.
Op-ed by BONO:
It's 2009: Do you know where your soul is?
Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.
It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.
Read his entire article HERE.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The Hip & the Holy: Quotes
I just did a workshop on Sunday at Flow Yoga Center (Easter Sunday no less!) called "The Hip & the Holy." It went great and focused on releasing our negative emotions from our hips, and opening our hearts through inspiration from holy teachers throughout the ages. Through the workshop, I quotes many of these sages, mystics, and prophets and wanted to share some of their "vision" here:
Christian mystic Julian of Norwich said, knowing that “all will be well. All matter of things will be well.”
Physicist-turned-metaphysician Peter Russell says, “God is Light. God is said to be absolute—and in physics, so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form, beyond both space and time—so does light. God cannot be known directly—nor (as photons) can light.”
St. John from the New Testament refers to “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation refers to “the self-originated Clear Light of the Void, eternally unborn, shining forth within one’s own mind.”
The Islamic tradition refers to Light as well; Islamic scholar Abu’l-Hosain al-Nuri experienced light “gleaming in the Unseen. I gazed at it continuously, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.”
Einstein
Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, I am a deeply religious man.
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
Erwin Schrodinger (quantum physicist)
The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, what really matters to us. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.
Rabindranath Tagore (Gurudev)
Man must understand that when he cuts himself off from all stimulating and purifying contact with infinity, and no longer relies on it for his subsistence and his health, he risks madness; he tears himself asunder and divorces himself from his very substance.
Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.
Theresa of Avila
“Prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”
“Take God for your spouse and friend and walk with Him continually, and you will not sin, will learn to love, and the things you must do will work out prosperously for you.”
“Let nothing disturb you.
let nothing make you afraid.
All things pass
But God is unchangning
Patience
Is enough for everything
You who have God
Lack nothing
God along is sufficient.”
Richard Rohr
All religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally see; we have to be taught how to see.
Jeremiah 29.13-14
“When you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me.”
Meister Eckhardt (medieval Dominican mystic)
“God is closer to me than I am to myself.”
Swami Vivekananda
When you look at that unchanging Existence from the outside, you call it God; and when you look at it from the inside, you call it yourself. It is but one.
The very essence of the Hindu philosophy is that man is a spirit and has a body and not that man is a body and may have a spirit also.
The Hindu believes that is a spirit. He believes that the sword cannot pierce him, that fire cannot burn him, that water cannot dissolve him, that air cannot dry him out. He belives that the soul is a circle whose circumference has no limits but whose center is situated in the body. Death signifies the transference of this center of a body to another. We are the children of God. Matter is our servant.
Oh, if you only knew yourselves! You are souls, you are gods. If ever I felt that I am blaspheming, it is when I call you man.
The whole universe is to us a writing of the Infinite in the language of the finite.
Fr. Pedro Arrupe SJ
“Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.”
Krishna Das
"If we know anything about a path at all, it's only because of the Great ones that have gone before us. Out of their love and kindness, they have left some footprints for us to follow. So, in the same way that they wish for us, we wish that all beings everywhere, including ourselves, be safe, be happy, have good health, and enough to eat. And may we all live at ease of heart with whatever comes to us in life."
Richard Rohr
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still
Be
Rabi’a, a major female saint of Islam from the Sufi tradition, 717-800AD
How long will you keep pounding an open door
Begging for someone to open it?
May God steal from you
All that steals you from Him.
Christian mystic Julian of Norwich said, knowing that “all will be well. All matter of things will be well.”
Physicist-turned-metaphysician Peter Russell says, “God is Light. God is said to be absolute—and in physics, so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form, beyond both space and time—so does light. God cannot be known directly—nor (as photons) can light.”
St. John from the New Testament refers to “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation refers to “the self-originated Clear Light of the Void, eternally unborn, shining forth within one’s own mind.”
The Islamic tradition refers to Light as well; Islamic scholar Abu’l-Hosain al-Nuri experienced light “gleaming in the Unseen. I gazed at it continuously, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.”
Einstein
Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, I am a deeply religious man.
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
Erwin Schrodinger (quantum physicist)
The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, what really matters to us. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.
Rabindranath Tagore (Gurudev)
Man must understand that when he cuts himself off from all stimulating and purifying contact with infinity, and no longer relies on it for his subsistence and his health, he risks madness; he tears himself asunder and divorces himself from his very substance.
Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.
Theresa of Avila
“Prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”
“Take God for your spouse and friend and walk with Him continually, and you will not sin, will learn to love, and the things you must do will work out prosperously for you.”
“Let nothing disturb you.
let nothing make you afraid.
All things pass
But God is unchangning
Patience
Is enough for everything
You who have God
Lack nothing
God along is sufficient.”
Richard Rohr
All religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally see; we have to be taught how to see.
Jeremiah 29.13-14
“When you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me.”
Meister Eckhardt (medieval Dominican mystic)
“God is closer to me than I am to myself.”
Swami Vivekananda
When you look at that unchanging Existence from the outside, you call it God; and when you look at it from the inside, you call it yourself. It is but one.
The very essence of the Hindu philosophy is that man is a spirit and has a body and not that man is a body and may have a spirit also.
The Hindu believes that is a spirit. He believes that the sword cannot pierce him, that fire cannot burn him, that water cannot dissolve him, that air cannot dry him out. He belives that the soul is a circle whose circumference has no limits but whose center is situated in the body. Death signifies the transference of this center of a body to another. We are the children of God. Matter is our servant.
Oh, if you only knew yourselves! You are souls, you are gods. If ever I felt that I am blaspheming, it is when I call you man.
The whole universe is to us a writing of the Infinite in the language of the finite.
Fr. Pedro Arrupe SJ
“Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.”
Krishna Das
"If we know anything about a path at all, it's only because of the Great ones that have gone before us. Out of their love and kindness, they have left some footprints for us to follow. So, in the same way that they wish for us, we wish that all beings everywhere, including ourselves, be safe, be happy, have good health, and enough to eat. And may we all live at ease of heart with whatever comes to us in life."
Richard Rohr
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still
Be
Rabi’a, a major female saint of Islam from the Sufi tradition, 717-800AD
How long will you keep pounding an open door
Begging for someone to open it?
May God steal from you
All that steals you from Him.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
President Obama - Come to Yoga!
An article in the Washington Post outlines how President Obama is seeking “a bit of refuge from the business of Washington, a space where he can reflect on his own life and his relationship with God,” said Joshua Dubois, the president’s chief adviser on faith. He is trying out different churches throughout DC to find one that fits.......
I saw, we should entice our new president to YOGA! Anyone have connections or ideas?! ;)
I saw, we should entice our new president to YOGA! Anyone have connections or ideas?! ;)
******
Read the full article, "Washington Churches Eye the Obamas" HERE.******
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
I'm back!
Hello everyone!
It has been a while since I have blogged but I want to re-invigorate my efforts and reign in our DC satsang, which is growing strong. There are a lot of great events coming up, and we are sending an amazing group of six to Jivamukti Teacher Training at theend of the month. Nothing but a great outlook for our DC community!
Special birthday wishes to Cory, who just celebrated his birthday. Congratulations and prayers goes out to our newest member, Joel Mehr's new son Matthew Mehr. Lastly, our lovely Jill Abelson is returning to visit DC next weekend so stay tuned for her re-emergence!
| 1) New Classes!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ New Jivamukti classes at Flow Yoga Center and other studios! See full schedule: Flow Yoga Center - 1450 P St. NW DC (AGI) Tues - 6:15-7:30pm (CORY) Wed - 6:30-8pm (AGI) Fri - 7-8am (starting April 7th), 4-5:15pm (starting April 17th) (CORY) Sat - 11:35am-1:05pm (AGI) Sun - 5-6:15pm Pure Prana - 100 S. Patrick St. Alexandria, VA (AGI) Sun -10:00-11:30am Evolve - 2024 P St. NW DC (GRAND OPENING April 11th) (AGI) Mon - 7:45-9pm (AGI) Thurs - 6:30-7:30am (AGI) Fri - 12-1pm (AGI) Sat - 9:30-10:45am Yoga Chai - 1744 Columbia Rd. NW DC (XIMENA) Thursday - 7:30-9:00pm |
| 2) Great Workshops coming up!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Hip and the Holy, A Jivamukti Bhakti Workshop with Agi Flow Yoga Center this upcoming Sunday!!! April 12th, 1-3pm Ahimsa Prateshtayam, with Senior NYC Jivamukti teacher Estelle Eichenberger (Yogeswari) Flow Yoga Center Backbends Saturday, April 18th, 1:30-4:30pm Arm Balances Sunday, April 19th, 11:30-2:30pm |
| 3) FREE Class for Opening Celebration of new studio EVOLVE ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ DC's newest studio is having their grand opening party on Saturday, April 11th. The celebration will start off with a FREE Jivamukti Class from 3:30-5pm (first come). It will be followed by an evening of kirtan, belly dancing and hooping demos, delicious food, special class discounts, and much more. Check out the full schedule HERE! Come join in the festivities! |
| 4) Class of 2009 Jivamukti Teacher Training ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Send your prayers and thoughts to our group of 6 as they leave for Teacher Training at the end of April. They are: 1) Ximena Savitch 2) Hari Kirtana Das 3) Kathy Judd 4) Danae 5) Heidi Sohng 6) Jennifer Rak Curious what it is all about? Check out the details HERE! |
5) APRIL Focus of the Month
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The month of April brings a focus onto the Seat of Isis--the Egyptian Goddess personified. Join us in classes celebrating the Mother Divine all month as we take you through the story of Isis, her creation, significance, and magical healing powers that allowed her to save her brother/husband, the God Osiris, from death. Read more HERE.
"sarva mangala mangalye shive sarvartha sadhike sharanye tryambake gauri narayani namo'stu te / I salute the three-eyed goddess, who fulfills the desire for liberation. Realization arises with Her blessing. She is the world itself. Only through the experiences of life can the soul be perfected. Honor this gift, your life."
(from Durga Saptashati, Chapter 11)
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