The Lazy Yogi

circledsun asked: Hi there Lazy Yogi, If you were to give the book, The Power of Now as a gift to someone who means a lot to you, what would you say your reason for giving them this book is? How will this book benefit them?

The only reason I ever came across The Power of Now was because someone put it into my hands as a heartfelt gift. 

During the summer that followed my sophomore year in college, one of my best friends killed himself. He was a brilliant academic and an incredibly talented musician. I’ve never met another being like him. 

After I graduated college, I had lunch with his parents. As a graduation gift, they gave me a copy of The Power of Now, the last book he had ever read. I had no idea how significantly that book would impact me. 

I have leant or given a copy of the book to several people since then. None of them bothered to read it. 

There is no way to know how someone will be benefitted. In my case, it was a very intimate revelation. In those other instances, it was like dropping seeds on bare rock. Nothing grew. 

In the end, I suppose it’s love that moves someone to genuinely wish to share these things. It’s like someone getting out of their car at a trafficked intersection and helping to guide traffic. They themselves are not benefitted with regard to the destination. They don’t go anywhere. Yet by helping the traffic to flow smoothly, everyone including that person will be safer. 

That is the motivation behind compassion. It is summed up well in both Indian and Tibetan spiritualities: May all the beings in all the worlds know peace and happiness. 

Sounds like a party to me. 

Namaste :)

riversfromroads asked: Lazy Yogi, recently I feel as if I have been detached from my emotions. I am no longer laughing or crying as much. I am currently happy with my life and don't believe that I am slipping into depression. I attempt to go to yoga once a week and use mantras and meditation when ever I can. I feel like I am being blocked spiritually. I can no longer open my heart and soul to the world. I feel like I am stuck in a box. What do you suggest I do?

We are all detached from our emotions. That is evident by the way emotions come and go. This is why we suffer when we become attached to certain emotions and avoid others. The emotions will come and will go, regardless of our preferences. 

Therefore to be detached from emotion simply means to allow them to be as they are. It’s getting with the program, so to speak. 

Do your emotions give you any thought? Does anger or sadness or fear say “oh this is a bad time, I’ll come back later”? Does happiness or love or joy say “you’re having so much fun with me! I’ll just stay forever”? Nope. Your emotions just do their thing. 

They are detached from you and you are detached from them. That is the reality of detachment. 

Others with no experiential understanding of detachment can only approach it through the mind. And, when they think of detachment, they think of another emotion. Usually it is cold, aloof, uncaring, closed off, and removed from the human condition. 

The truth is quite the opposite. So long as you are attached to your emotions, you cannot be fully human. You will be too fixated on your preferences regarding those emotions rather than the full scope of aliveness, including and transcending those transient feelings. 

There is no ‘my life’ with which to be happy. The objective idea of ‘my life’ is nothing but an arrangement of circumstances. Some people judge those arrangements as good, others as bad, and then say they are happy or discontent with life. All the while, they are entirely forgetting the aliveness in what we really mean by ‘life’. 

Everything is equally alive—no one thing is more alive than another. 

There is no world beyond the heart. Open the heart and the world opens. 

Only with detachment can the heart open. The detachment isn’t from the emotions or the heart but rather the preferences we have. Letting go of your preferences, you find yourself already dwelling in the temple of the endless moment. 

Laughter and tears are both expressions of the same thing, yet that thing itself is inexpressible. It lives within and as the heart itself; it is you. 

Focus less on the external appearances. Focus less on the idea of the world, the idea of your life, the idea of emotions. Go within to remember yourself as the living reality that we call the Heart. 

Practice sitting meditation daily, as well a continuous mindfulness. This will help to make your aliveness more obvious to you. I would also recommend the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. 

Namaste :) Much love

open-the-riff asked: In the book The Places That Scare You it talks about allowing every moment to soften you regardless of whether it's good or bad. I feel like the bad moments, the moments where I feel helpless don't soften me even though I'm accepting them and welcoming them. What is it about those moments should I do so that they soften me from here on out because I experience them often.

Being vulnerable means less doing, less controlling. Acceptance is not something you do. It is more like a total and heartfelt allowance. 

The problem now is that you think that there are two different things, one called a good moment and another called a bad moment. That isn’t acceptance; that is judgment. 

The teaching is to stay with the moment, regardless of how you feel about it. Only then can it soften you. And yet it is the quality of that staying that is also the softening. The more we stay, the more we soften. The softer we become, the more we stay. 

We are always helpless; to accept that truth from a place deeper and more immediate than the mind itself is to know the real meaning of surrender. 

Don’t look for the moment to be different in some way from what it already is. Success is not signaled by how the moment changes but by how thoroughly you become acquainted with this unending moment.

Wholly allow the moment yet also meet it head on. You are always more real than the qualities you perceive in the past, present, and future. You are that grounded emptiness upon which everything depends and yet it depends on nothing. 

Compassion practices rely on what the Tibetan Buddhists call Absolute Bodhicitta. It is a kind of roodtness—or rootlessness—in that untouchable “empty” stainless quality of your nature. 

Then where is the reason to avoid or control our experience of this moment? Instead, you can be entirely intimate with the living phenomenon of consciousness. 

Namaste my friend

I am excited today to share with you the work of one of my best friends, a fellow treader-of-paths and spiritual seeker. Her name is Lucy Arnell and she has been living just outside of San Francisco, California, writing, playing, and learning everything she can about music. Lucy is about to embark on her first tour spanning from Los Angeles all the way up north to Seattle, and I thought this would be the perfect time to introduce her to all of you in light of what appears to be the beginnings of a wonderful journey.

LY: Finally, we meet again! I miss you while you’re all the way in California, but I always feel connected to you.

LA: I couldn’t agree more, sometimes I just close my eyes and we’re sitting together in the woods, burning nag champa and playing with Tarot. Takes me right there! 

LY: So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about yourself so we can all get acquainted.

LA: Cool! Well first off, I’m Lucy, and it’s very nice to meet everyone! I’ve watched the Lazy Yogi blossom from a little seed into this amazing flower. I feel very close to this blog. And thanks everyone for taking the time to check out this interview. Well, I don’t want to bore everyone! I grew up in New York City, spent the latter part of my years in the suburbs, went to school in New York, and then, I just had no idea what to do. 

After a kind of bizarre medical incident, I decided to stop waiting on my dreams of playing music and started pursuing them and grounding them in reality. I practiced a lot—a lot, psychotically. For the nine months I healed on my couch and promised myself that when I was healed enough, I’d move to San Francisco and do this. And that’s what I did. Now I’m about to go out on the road for my first national tour ever with two other bands, Dizzy Bats and Rob Coonrod, and I can’t wait.

LY: Yes, you are certainly making some moves. That was a crazy time when you were healing. I remember how often you played. Your sister and I would be talking to you, then we’d realize you were on another planet and we might as well have been talking to a tree. That’s a good thing though, to be able to get so immersed in something.

LA: Music is just something that’s constantly grabbing me. I’ll never be able to explain it. It’s what got me incessantly attending concerts when I was a kid, it’s what got me to pick up the bass, and eventually the guitar, and it’s what finally convinced me that there’s nothing else I want to do with my time.

A note or a phrase or a hook or a person, it can literally be anything, it’ll just grab me, and I’ll just be moved. Other musicians or lovers of music I’m sure will tell you the same thing. Sometimes, something vibrates on the sacred vibration or something, there’s something about it that rings so true. That’s what I do when I play, I’m constantly trying to achieve that, not that I do often, but it’s a skill that’s achievable through patience and practice, so the only way to do that is by completely immersing yourself in it, all the time. Ali Akbar wasn’t Ali Akbar because he was born Ali Akbar; he’s Ali Akbar because his father gave him 12-15 hour Citar and music lessons a day. It’s a type of familiarity you have to earn. When you’re worthy, you get the key.

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transcendlabels asked: What are your thoughts about romantic love? Do you think there are misconceptions about it in our society?

I think the biggest misconceptions about romantic love in our society isn’t about the love itself but the path. 

There’s this fixation on the idea of finding love, of being worthy or finding someone worthy. There’s an idea of giving, getting, needing, rejecting. Love has been commoditized.

In addition to this, there are also hangups regarding what is normal and expected. Job, marry, family, retirement, and so on. Romance is relegated to a compartment of lifestyle or romance is relied on for hope and a sense of self. 

I’m not confused by the people who have casual sex or one night stands. I’m confused by the people who jump from one relationship to the next, yet who seem to be unhappy with every partner. Those are the people looking for a boyfriend or a girlfriend, just a body and mind in a role to be filled. 

In my opinion, there needn’t be a thought of “I want a [boy/girl]friend” before actually meeting someone to whom you feel genuine attraction. Otherwise you wont actually see people, you’ll just see candidates. 

The mind cannot find love for you, but the heart will always be able to recognize it. We use our eyes and nose to inspect food but we wont know the reality of it until we taste it. Similarly, we can use the mind all we want to make responsible decisions, yet we will not be able to know the reality of love until we use the instrument of the heart. 

Personally, I really don’t know if I will be in a passionately loving lifelong relationship or if I will be alone the rest of my life. All I can do is remain open and see what’s what as life unfolds. 

In the end, love is never found or handed to you. It is a way of life in which there is continual intimacy with the aliveness in the present moment.

Namaste :)