Morning Light Yoga

09/06/2026

I am going to say something that might sound strange coming from someone about to recommend a book.

I spent the first thirty pages of this book disagreeing with Pema Chödrön.

I was desperately hoping that a Buddhist nun who has spent decades studying the human mind had somehow gotten it wrong. Because what she was saying, in the voice of someone who has clearly made peace with it, was something I was not ready to make peace with.

Here's the sentence that started the argument. She says the things falling apart in your life are not a malfunction. That the ground was never solid to begin with; you were never actually standing on anything, you'd just gotten remarkably good at not noticing.

She says the anxious, ungrounded feeling you're trying so hard to fix is not a problem to be solved. It's just what it feels like to be a person, accurately, for once, without the usual padding.

I did not want to hear that. I wanted solutions. I wanted five steps. I wanted someone to hand me the ground back. Pema, gently, yet infuriatingly, refuses. And it took me embarrassingly long to realize that refusal is the entire gift of this book.

Pema has this idea, unconditional friendship with yourself, and it sounds soft until you actually try to practise it, and then you realise it might be one of the hardest things a person can do. To meet your own fear, your own shame, your own spiralling 2 am thoughts, not with another wave of self-improvement, but with something closer to how you'd sit with a frightened child:

I see you. I'm not going anywhere.

She tells a story about a woman who kept having nightmares about monsters chasing her, invading her space. She tries everything to get rid of them: yelling at them, barricading the door, and trying to analyze them. Nothing works, until one night, exhausted, she turned around, looked the monsters in the eye, and said, I see you. You're not going away, so let's see what you have to teach me.

And the monsters froze. They had no idea what to do with someone who stopped running. I read that over and again because I knew exactly which monsters she was talking about. I have a few of my own that have been very comfortable chasing me for years, precisely because I never once turned around.

And then there's the line that I think about more than almost anything else I've read: nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. I didn't want that to be true either. I wanted things to just go away, old grief, old patterns, old fears, through sheer avoidance, if necessary.

But avoidance, it turns out, is just a very elaborate waiting room. The thing doesn't leave. It just keeps tapping you on the shoulder, in slightly different outfits, until you finally look at it.

I need to tell you about the Audiobook.

Recently, I listened to it late at night, read by Christy Meyer. And something about hearing the ideas arrive as sound rather than text undid me in a completely new way. I lay in the dark and listened and felt the particular quality of being very quiet inside, which is rare for me and which Pema Chödrön seems, somehow, to make possible from beyond the page.

This is the book I return to, not because I've mastered anything in it. I very much have not. I still resist. I still want the five steps. I still, on bad days, run from the monsters instead of turning around.

But every single time I come back to these pages, something in me recognises the voice, the way you recognise an old friend who never asked you to be anything other than exactly what you are in that moment.

What "When Things Fall Apart" does to me, every time, is remind me that falling apart was never the emergency I thought it was, and that there is a way to be here, inside the mess, without needing it to be anything other than what it already is.

I don't know if I'll ever stop disagreeing with parts of it. I also don't know if I'll ever stop coming back.

And right now, that is the only endorsement that matters. Not what I thought when I read the first 30 pages. What I do when things fall apart.

I reach for this book. Every time.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3SKwB1m

09/02/2026

08/28/2026

COMMUNITY YOGA with Sara tomorrow morning @ 9-10
Please join her!

08/28/2026

In the light of the tragedy which is currently unfolding in Nepal and Tibet, as well as the great sufferings in many other parts of the world, we share this teaching from Jetsunma on the practice of Tonglen:

Many of you, I'm sure, know the practice of Tonglen: the sending and receiving practice which is attached to the Lojong or mind-training teachings, where we absorb the sufferings of others, and we give out our own wellbeing to them in return.

Now, common sense tells us that we should expel all the darkness from ourselves and absorb all the goodness and light. I mean, a lot of Tibetan practices but also for example New Age practices are dealing with expelling darkness and invoking light. But of course, the Lojong teachings are not common sense; they are Enlightenment sense. So therefore we reverse the whole process. The purpose is to invoke compassion in ourselves towards the pain of others and at the same time overcome our inherent egoistic self-protection.

For example, if we are sitting with a loved one who is very sick, then of course we want them to get well but usually there is also something inside us which doesn't quite verbalise but is nonetheless thinking, “I am glad it's them and not me...“ One time, when we were going through Tonglen with a group, somebody voiced it very well, as she said: “Yes, it is a really good meditation but it doesn't really work, does it?“ So it’s this thing inside us, which says, “It's lovely to sit here doing this but let's hope it is not too effective.“

For the practice itself, you think of somebody who is sick or suffering. It helps if it's someone that you have a natural attachment or feeling of love towards, because then we can evoke more easily a compassionate feeling towards them. This person can be actual. You could be sitting there with them, or you can simply visualise or think about them very strongly.

In the centre of one's own heart one visualises something like a small black pearl, or a small black bead, which represents that dark core of one's self-cherishing mind. And then with the inbreath one visualises, like a vacuum cleaner, that we suck up the sickness and any suffering and the karma which created that suffering and sickness. One visualises sucking all that up with the inbreath and it comes to us in a form of dark light or smoke or some very dark kind of energy. And then that is absorbing into that little dark pearl of self-cherishing.

So as one is breathing, one has this very strong desire to take that suffering. It's not just a visualisation, but really from one's heart, one is thinking how joyful one would feel if one could take in all this misery and pain of the other into oneself and then they will be released. Because unless one is really thinking that, it doesn't really hit the self-cherishing, right? If you're just automatically thinking of dark smoke and light, dark and light, but not really emotionally engaging in the fact that you wanted to take all the pain and suffering in yourself, then you won’t meet this little Me inside going, “Uhhh, are you sure?” And that’s what we’re working at. It's about breaking through this very hard crust of our self-protecting mind, which is sorry someone else is suffering but nonetheless at least it's them, not me.

So then this dark light is sucked up with the ingoing breath, goes down, hits this little knot of egoistic self-cherishing, and then that immediately transforms into like a pure crystal or a pearl of light which represents our inner Buddha-nature. The Buddha-nature, no matter how much darkness is absorbed, is never polluted. And so from our Buddha-nature radiates forth with the outgoing breath, this brilliant light of health, happiness, endless positive energy which then radiates out and merges and completely encompasses the person we are visualising or sitting in front of.

And so then one sits alternately absorbing the darkness and giving out one's light. But as I say, the effectiveness of this ultimately depends on the genuineness of one's aspiration.

So this practice is considered to be very very precious in the Tibetan tradition. It's something which is cultivated in older traditions from the lowest to the highest practitioner. Everybody knows about it and they use it, they use it a lot.

Because, as I say, not only might it bring benefit to the person one is trying to help, but it also very much directly faces our own egoistic concerns.

Many people find it a very useful practice, for example when they go to visit people who are sick or people who are dying, and you know, you sit there and you don't quite know what to do, then it's very nice just to sit there quietly and practise Tonglen. It might not necessarily on a physical level remove their sickness, but usually people remark that somehow inwardly they are feeling so much better and they don't know why.

I mean, our thoughts have a tremendous power as has been now proven scientifically. They have a great influence outside of our little brains and so this practice of Tonglen, if one does it really from the heart, can be very powerful.

08/23/2026

WHERE DOES THE TURN BEGIN?

In daily life —

reversing the car,
reaching for something behind you,
turning to speak to someone beside you —
notice what happens.

Does the head immediately pull the rest of the body around?

Or can the trunk organise first,
the spine remain long,
and the neck simply complete the movement?

Chair Bharadvājāsana I teaches this.

Sit sideways on a chair.
Place a block between the knees.

Squeeze it gently and steadily.
Both feet grounded.
Hands to the chair back.

Inhale — lift the spine tall.
Exhale — turn.

Keep the pelvis steady.
Let the ribs rotate.
The head follows, not leads.

The practice teaches us to create length before rotation.

The next time you turn to look behind you, notice:
Where does the turn begin?

💬 What do you notice first when you turn — your head, your ribs or your whole trunk?

We read every one.