by Geri Loizzo
One of my favorite stories found in the Jewish tradition was told to me by my dear teacher, Yogini Mary Reilly Nichols. It’s a story of a young man who goes to see a famous rabbi and is asked by a friend, “are you going to hear the rabbi speak?” “No,” replies the young man, “I am going to watch the rabbi tie his shoes.” He did not mean this as a joke, and he understood that the embodied qualities of enlightenment which the rabbi exuded in his very being, could offer powerful inspiration that he could intuit.
by Mary Reilly Nichols
I was speaking about non-dual awareness with a friend when she rightly pointed out that the phrase ‘non-dual’ itself is dualist. That is why i like the term samadhi to describe the non-dual state. The word samadhi derives from the Indo-European root, sam, which is also the source of the English word ‘same’. It connotes unity, evenness, equality. Samadhi, the perception of oneness, is the true bread of life. The visceral experience of union we get from yoga practices is a delicious recharge of the nervous system.