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  Message from Swami Ritavan 2025 IS-WAS-IS TODAY 2026, you wanted it, and now you have it. That personality you chose yesterday, and in each day of 2025, is your mask and role on this life-stage today. And today, you can change that habit and play the role as you are meant to be. You cannot continue to do something for long if you are not meant to do it. Your choice of emotions shapes your thinking, which in turn shapes your behavior. Yet, deeper than these character habits, stillness and silence can reveal your true nature. Your positive emotions, pleasant thoughts, kind and selfless actions all have arisen from that pure source of being.  This day Is Your Choice , thereby your destiny. Choose wisely, for as meditators, you have all the skills and tools to sculpt your personality, using it as your architect for joyful living. Practice-Practice-Practice. May the masks and roles you play throughout 2026 reflect your true nature: ever-wise, ever-pure, ever-free. May grace besto...
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  A Time to Do and a Time to Be by amrita mckinney    This summer, I participated in an 84-day intensive retreat at Swami Rama Sadhaka Gram. During the retreat, Rabindra encouraged us to make a habit of sitting for 10 minutes and do nothing. It is difficult to do nothing. Our DNA seems to expect us to always be doing something, anything. How many times as a child had I heard my mom say, “go do something”—as if doing was the cure and boredom one of the deadly sins.  How easily we choose distractions. Sometimes life seems to be one big distraction—so big we forget the purpose of life. My eldest sister is a doer, always on the go. On occasion, I have said, “sit, relax”, while I, myself was busy doing. I just wasn’t moving at warped speed. I was reading or writing and judged my busyness to be of higher worth. Yet, I was just as disconnected from my inner self. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “The mind has a terror of boredom” and that terror keeps us ever doing.  Swami ...
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  What i s Love by Jenny May “The most ancient traveler in the Universe, is Love." This quote from Swami Rama has always inspired me to contemplate, and so recently, in a 108-day practice with the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, I began asking, “What is Love?”   I began the journey focusing on the pinpoint of presence right before action. The spark of divinity just before the fruit falls off the vine, as the mantra’s vibration invites. I feel it as the space that Swami Veda has asked us to notice in meditation; the very moment just before the out-breath turns and becomes the in-breath. What I began to recognize is that this sacred space, this pinpoint of presence from which everything emerges, is Love.   As I focus on this space, I experience what I believe is the profound essence Swami Rama is referring to when he says, “The most ancient traveler in the Universe, is Love.” As I practice witnessing this space, I begin to recognize it by many names, including Silence, Tr...
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  THE YOGA IN HENRY DAVID THOREAU by Renée Silvus If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.  When we think of Thoreau, we might recall a brash misanthrope chronicling his two years at Walden Pond. This invitation to joy and blessing is also his voice. While at the pond, he read the Bhagavad Gita twice, finding it “unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us.” Thoreau continued to read more Vedantic texts and integrate Samkhya philosophy over the next six years while revising his Walden manuscript. He had been experiencing meditative states since his early twenties. “Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself….She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places.” This journal entry i...
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  What is the Yoga Secret Most People Don’t Know About PREPARATION by Randall Krause   It was in the early 1990s, and I was attending a workshop taught by Swami Rama. I walked into one of the public rooms in the Himalayan Institute and encountered the huge figure of Swami Rama, clothed in a maroon robe, surrounded by students. I gathered my courage, walked up to him, and said, “Will you teach me to meditate?” He turned his face to me and, in his forceful way, bellowed, “Yes!” I relaxed and felt a smile spread across my inner being. But then, with a look of concern, he added, “Are you prepared?” I didn’t know what he meant. So, I said, “I don’t know if I’m prepared, Swamiji.” A moment passed. “Get prepared, and I will teach you!” he said energetically. I backed away, turned, and began walking out of the room, with a feeling of confusion spreading through me. As I walked, another man in the room stopped me and said, “You should have told h...
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Looking for a Rope to the Sky ~ by Rob Diggins

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  Looking for a Rope to the Sky by Rob Diggins   When I was first approached about writing another article for the AHYMSIN-Americas newsletter, I reached out to my mentor for guidance, offering a few preliminary prompts I had been considering—many of them the result of gentle editorial nudging. As usual, my mentor responded quickly, if not instantly, with this advice: “Dearest, use your intuition and consider what is most needed.” And with that, I was off to the races. Or was I?   What is needed? A Rope to the Sky?! Allow me to approach this question—a kind of Zen koan—by offering a little of my backstory.   I’ll begin by describing an activity I know intimately, in the hopes that this description will allow us to draw out a particular, essential element: focused listening and cultivated awareness . These, in turn, give rise to what the Parampara refers to—alongside other attributes—as skill in action . In a word: enlightenment . ...
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  Exploring Silence: In or Out ... A Personal Reflection by Jenny May Living in a remote mountain location provides me with a space, beautifully conducive to Silence; natural trails that allow me to move my body freely, few neighbors and no hustle and bustle of the city. Blessed to live in this location, I have the opportunity to practice one to three days of Silence on my own a few times each year.   Most recently, during a three-day opportunity to practice alone, I found myself wondering, “What does it mean to be in Silence?”   I kept my twice daily hatha and meditation practice during these three days, and I also maintained my usual daily activities such as gardening, home and yard maintenance and writing. However, instead of engaging in phone calls or email conversations, I incorporated hour-long segments of subtle body practices, reading sacred texts, listening to Swami Veda lectures, and so on.   The days filled with sacred activity passed so ...
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