Dear Ones, We’re heading into the holidays—Hanukkah first this year and then Christmas and Kwanzaa. This season can be a time of great joy and also great loneliness, especially amplified in 2020. Like everything in life, the upsides and the downsides. Can we extend our arms to embrace it all, without feeling overwhelmed or numbing out? That’s where a practice can help us stay balanced. Click >> the image for a simple practice to ride the waves of emotion and thought that I hope will help you navigate the ups and downs of the holidays. On Facebook, I see the amazing faces of the babies born and growing up in a Pandemic. I imagine the stresses and strains on their [...]

Surviving uncertainty. Dear ones, these times are confusing for all of us. We now know that we have a POTUS and a LOTUS. (Kamala in Sanskrit means lotus). Even so, with the concerns about the transition and the fears about the growing numbers of COVID cases, uncertainty seems to be a steady state of being. Even as we pledge (and hope our leaders do too) to find ways to reach across the barriers that have divided us for the last four years, uncertainty persists. This is our time to cultivate our compassion and understanding of our neighbors’ and our own emotional dysregulation. Uncertainty is an obstacle that we need to address because it makes everything feel worse than it actually [...]

After my return from India, I researched devadasi ritual and culture and discovered a league of auspicious, empowered women. For over 1,200 years, temple dancers, or devadasis, were educated and revered. Their sacred temple duties brought them honor and status. Devadasis maintained community life cycle rituals: they tied the sacred gold thread, the tali, around the bride’s neck; they led religious processions. Within the temple, they cared for the statues of the deities, and as devotees they often lived on the temple grounds. They studied for many years, learning the intricate dances, the sacred mudras and the accompanying Sanskrit songs. Later, they were disgraced and legally outlawed. Honored? Unchaste? Devadasi were honored yet unchaste. When they reached puberty they were [...]

Sacred Sexuality in Temple Dancer "I got an email from your publisher... your name was on the top, and I was like, wait a minute, Amy Weintraub. And I look at the book. It's a fiction book, a connection between sexuality and spirituality, and I was like, wow! Isn't she the Yoga for Depression lady I used to know way back when...??" J. Brown and I cover a lot of ground. Take a trail ride through where yoga is today and how we got here. From yoga as healing what separates us, to yoga as "treatment", and back to the deepest understanding of yoga as union with the divine. We explore that portal into Self through yoga, through the making [...]