Western Baul Podcast Series

A defended life is defined by survival, overreactivity, the drive to territorialize and control, to dominate and always be right, which has a cost in that we live in a narrow and confined range of experience and perception. When we relax our defenses, a sense of awe and reverence for life can arise. We are often defended not only from the outer world but also from the inner world of our own feelin...

A deeper yoga implies a surface to the experience of life, which can be beautiful, and a depth, a deeper reality. Regular immersion into practices and behaviors that move us into the depth of who we are is like jumping into the ocean. When we come out we bring some of the ocean with us into ordinary life so that the depth informs the surface. The stages of “clean up, grow up, wake up, show up,” di...

Many in the spiritual traditions have weighed in on the subject of faith. We are already deeply immersed in the world of belief and faith based on cultural assumptions that we take for granted.  What distinctions can be made between faith and belief? We can consider faith in terms of people who are faithful, having faith in something, or as a state of being. Do we have faith in practice, teachers,...

Because we are inseparable from truth we are always in resonance with it, and thus at some level we have certainty that truth exists. This is the basis for seeking, for path, for realization. We already are that which we aspire to become, so our practices on the spiritual path are to sweep away the grasping for “self” that keeps us from recognizing the true nature. Bodhicitta, the altruistic inten...

If we have a creative idea and let the steam out of it, perhaps by talking about it prematurely or by not respecting the sacredness of creative energy, it can dissipate. As in life, artists start down a path, get themselves in trouble, and need to creatively find their way. Our initial creative inspiration can seem perfect, but then there is resistance in manifesting the vision. We can make many e...

One of the formulas for practice on the spiritual path, which came from the Hindu Bengali master, Swami Prajnanpad, and which was part of the teaching of the French master, Arnaud Desjardins, is “not what should be but what is.” A distinction can be made between emotion (which is a reaction) and feeling (which arises when ego is not in control). Suffering occurs through identification with emotion...

Life is inherently a spiritual path, whether we know it or not. We can consider the degree we are participating, present, and committed to the Great Process of Divine Evolution that all of life is involved in. This has everything to do with resilience, which we are given at birth and begin to understand through instinct. Yet, resilience and inner strength needs to be cultivated. We don’t know that...

In 1970, at 19 years of age, Caylor went searching for spiritual help in India. What he found was a beggar (Yogi Ramsuratkumar, 1918-2001) who showered blessings and divine love on all who came upon him and who came to be recognized as one of the great masters of the last century. In this talk, Caylor describes some of the bewildering circumstances that he witnessed and teaching lessons that he re...

A discussion on teachings of Arnaud Desjardins. The spiritual path is the search for what is indestructible in us, but we seek comfort from that which is destructible. “What is the cause of my suffering?” is the most important question we can ask. Reactions and thoughts are imposed on us by interdependent forces. Ever present peace is not dependent on external circumstance and is always in us. Whe...

Fear is built into the organism, but by trying to eliminate fear we double it and cause more trouble for ourselves. Being with fear rather than trying to do something about it allows it to pass over us and not take root in us. The root of fear is incarnation. There is an assumption that is made that we are separate from what sustains us, which is the context of scarcity and survival that we are bo...

Grief strongly and powerfully undermines the illusory belief that life is permanent and solid. It purifies anything that stands in the way of reality. Grief takes us to the great mystery, to a place of not knowing, and it is possible to rest there. It can thaw any part of the heart that is frozen, allowing it to open and show its secrets. Sometimes the mind tells us that we understand something, b...

If our concept of order doesn’t match with nature’s higher concept of order, we may question nature rather than our concept. We seek power over chaos out of fear and denial to hide from the fact that mortality is real. In order for us to work with what we consider to be chaos, we have to cultivate a quality of restraint. The mind is meant to be part of a system under the control of our being, our...

Real spiritual traditions have power based on the influence of rare teachers who have undergone transformation and then taught what they realized about the nature of reality and who we are beyond identification. While traditions have different forms and practices, there are essential elements that they have in common. Traditions can provide an influence that can support us to deepen our highest sp...

Love is a present phenomenon only; it is only alive in the present. The deep imprints of those we have loved are accessible to us in the present. We can touch the timeless, expansive experience of love beyond the limitations of the physical body. There are different kinds of love such as the love of a mother, friend, brother or sister, agape love, erotic love. This plane of existence is a school o...

We all have an innate need to cultivate the sacred within ourselves. Contemplation creates the possibility of opening to the effortless flow of life and to our imagination and creativity. Self-knowledge is an ongoing process that we can nurture at each stage of our lives. We can build our capacity to be a vessel for awareness and an intention for transformation for the benefit of ourselves and oth...

We set up our lives through our speech, which reinforces existing thought patterns and makes our perspective seem more solid. It also expresses the confusion of our thoughts and the clarity of our attention. We can bring awareness to our speech and to the ways that we “leak” energy through it. Grounding our speech is about restraint, as opposed to suppression, so that we can build energy for the i...

Joy and gratitude are central elements of all spiritual traditions. We can feed that which survives death by building gratitude and finding divinity in ordinary life. It is risky to be vulnerable and to accept a gift since this puts us in touch with our interdependence. Over time, we may come to recognize the way that loss and struggle have brought us to be who we have become. Debbie is an advocat...

As children, we take in everything and are not generally introduced to the idea of thinking about what we are thinking about. Our thinking is constant and we tend to repetitively think about the same things. Thinking overlays reality. Mind creates identification, is wary of everything as a threat, and seeks to survive at all costs. Throughout our lives, it looks for something to make things better...

Feeling groundless is common when there is a great deal of instability in the world or in our personal lives. At such times, our attention may be heightened so that all suffering people are felt as our companions. We can bodily experience the need for the world to cherish feminine qualities of receptivity and compassion, and we may also discover within ourselves a greater capacity for letting go....

Part of the human condition is that there are parts of ourselves that we don’t see or want to see about ourselves. It may seem counterintuitive that real freedom, healing, and innocence is only possible in descent, and that the underworld (personal and archetypal) is a doorway that holds the key to real change and transformation. Whatever is buried carries creativity and life force and by learning...

The reality that we see around us shows us that everything changes. Death brings an end to everything relative. But the spiritual traditions indicate that it is possible to know, or perhaps to build, something that continues beyond the separate self that we identify as. If we are to come in contact with our true nature at death, we can prepare ourselves in life. We can practice being with and movi...

There is a human quality which allows us to be aware that there is a potential in us yet to be realized. Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s consideration that the goal of life is to live in wonder and radical amazement is explored in this talk. We can enliven this approach which nourishes the soul; without this, the experience of the Divine is diminished in the world. Regina is the author of Igniting the Inn...

We are attached and identified with everything we have experienced from the past. The present moment is defined by the past so that we react instead of respond, cling to the familiar, and fear the future that is unknown. But the past is not the enemy. The issue is that we become crystallized and fixated in believing that our accumulated identity from the past is who we are. Angelon is a workshop l...

This iconic lyric from a song by Leonard Cohen hints at the cracks in our self-image: the wounds, weaknesses, and apparent flaws which we usually want to ignore or cover up. Rather than trying to fix ourselves or perfect some image that we have, can we simply see the cracks for what they are, let the light in, and allow the light within us to shine out? Matthew has facilitated spiritual groups tha...

The body as a temple is a metaphor in many spiritual traditions. We can build a temple of the body dedicated to our heart's intention, inner freedom, and self-knowledge through a life of practice. But how can any practice we engage shift us from perfectionistic notions towards greater compassion for ourselves and others? True practice needs a solid foundation and to focus on the highest spiritual...