Buddhism

I spent four months in a yogic immersion course in India. We chanted mantras for an hour every evening and then twice per month we chanted the entire Bhagavad Gita—which took 6 hours to complete. There were well over 100 people chanting together at any given time, and during the final month of the course we had the entire village assembled, chanting together for 8+ hours per day. I’ll tell you: the result of all this chanting was transformative to say the least.

This world is full of things that trigger us: those things that get under our skin, those moments where we lose all the cool we have been cultivating and fly off the handle, those unspoken rules of etiquette that we know and are shocked that others do not abide by. Each one of us has our own unique set of triggers and the people who match them. We may try to ignore them, we may want to avoid them, but we cannot escape what we avoid.

Basmati.com talks with Jack Elias from Finding True Magic on how he began his journey to pursue his passion in Hypnotherapy.

A dear friend gifted me the book How Yoga Works by Geshe Michael Roach. After tearing away the wrapping paper to expose a yellow cover displaying the chin mudra and the title How Yoga Works, my initial thought was, Okay, an instructional book about yoga…nice.

Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

by Jack Kornfield

Bringing Home the Dharma is a compelling historical and personal exploration of the nature of the mind, and it contains teachings and perspectives that are important for our times. You don’t need to move to an ashram or monastery to find inner peace and wisdom. “Your life, just as it is, is the perfect place to be,” Jack Kornfield shares.

Hindu and Buddhist thought are based on a different set of assumptions than the Semitic religions. One major difference has to do with the meaning of rituals. A ritual in the Vedic traditions (Hindu and Buddhism) is spiritual because it demands mindfulness. In the developed world especially, rituals often lose their spiritual meaning and decay into meaningless routines.

Just like many other daily activities, eating can be approached from a mindful perspective that enhances the experience. Here are 5 ways to eat more mindfully:

1. Tune in  

Often when meditation is mentioned people harbor some vague, albeit extraordinary, notion of hocus pocus incantation or yogis in India miraculously levitating a few inches off the ground by the sheer force of their consciousness.

While I cannot vouch for aberrations from the law of gravity, consistent meditation offers extraordinary benefits that might amount to practical magic in your life. The practice is helpful for anyone controlling errant thoughts that otherwise might swarm with chaos. Meditation clears clutter that might overwhelm a person in the alternative.