Lyn Fuchs's Blog

There is awidespread perception that Eastern and Western spirituality are as distant anddivergent as a Japanese Buddhist temple and an Anglican Christian church. Thisis a myth. Rudyard Kipling said “East is East and West is West and never thetwain shall meet,” but the adjacent river valleys where Abraham and yoga wereborn met constantly for commercial and cultural exchange at the time theseancient ancestors of Judaism, Jesus, Hinduism, and Buddha arrived on earth.That is a fact. The authe...

Yoga scholars often differ in characterizing the exact relationshipbetween Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras and Buddhism. Karen O’Brien finds thetext weaving Buddhist strands into a Sankhya textile with the Buddhistterminology paralleling the Sankhya metaphysics. Pradeep Gokhale believesSankhya and Buddhism to be the text’s primary influences with the YogaSutras fitting Buddhist psychology into a Sankhya framework. He seesPatañjali learning from Buddhists as Gautama learned from Brahmanists and hea...

Imagine yoga’shistory as India’s geography. You are flying over the Ganges River from itssource in the Himalayas to its mouth on the Bay of Bengal. You can’t see much.Most of the terrain is blanketed in clouds just as much of yoga’s past iscloaked in the mists of time. Occasionally, the vista opens up. You gazeintensely at each of these viewpoints to note the flow has grown in size andchanged in color from tributaries that fed the river at junctions you did notwitness but can reliably ass...

The Olmec city of La Venta has both warrior intimidation entrance and also a geek stimulation entrance, so dorks now rush in where savages once feared to even tread. There’s no pen holder bulging from my shirt or toilet paper dangling from my pants. Still, I proudly show my university professor ID for free admission and then bounce through the doorway into the tourist museum with unsightly glee.

During previous visits, I microanalized every exhibit. But this time I’ve persuaded an actual live gi...

Not all who wander are lost!” wrote J. R. R. Tolkien. Yet, society urges folks to settle down, stay put, and fit in. The gray clouds drifting across the Veracruz sky above me look truly majestic, but drifters are gazed upon less fondly down here. When did humanity’s shift from hunting to planting become a moral imperative? I often feel more compelled to hunt for meaning than plant myself on the turf. 

An old cowboy song entitled “Cool Water” insisted that fence-building farmers are diabolic, whi...

The tossed concrete-block salad that is today’s Acayucan recalls the crumbling stone-block ruins of yesterday’s Olmec settlements without the justification of the passing time. Mexicans lack the gringo compulsion to order the world. Still, they often derive greater happiness from that world they feel less need to control, which may partly explain this American’s pursuit of happiness in this disorganized place.

For the ragged shoeless Hondurans who beg in the food market before climbing atop a no...

A crocodile thrashes beneath me. Squawking and dripping of the rainforest where Mel Gibson filmed Apocalypto and Sean Connery filmed Medicine Man surround three sides of my cozy wood cabin that overhangs a lily-choked shore and overlooks a mist-shrouded isle broadcasting monkey chatter across the glassy lake. It’s Christmas in the jungle. The lush fertility extends to a curvaceous young form peacefully dozing under the blanket beside me and deeply inhaling from the cool oxygenated air. I recall ...

Between the Bhagavad Gita’s spiritual yoga and the Hatha Pradipika’s physical yoga lies the Yoga Sutras text. The wisdom of the Yoga Sutras was passed down by sages from early times then later written down by Patañjali. There’s a myth that Patañjali was a serpent, who overheard the secrets of yoga while being worn as God's necklace. Here's my translation:

Chapter I – Deep Meditation

1. Now are presented instructions on yoga.

2. Yoga is mastery of the mind’s wandering and cessation of its modificati...

As detailed in our last post, the Bhagavad Gita expounded classical yoga with an epic drama. Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras then expanded classical yoga with a how-to manual of mystic proverbs. However, this inward spiritual quest for the eternal soul and ultimate reality left much confusion regarding outward physical reality. Was the body a prison of the spirit as Greek philosophy mused or a temple of the spirit as Jewish scripture held? Is the world a garden of delight, a hellhole of suffering, or ju...

“Why haven't you published anything in the last year?” a friend recently asked me. The truth is that I’ve used this homebound year as a personal yoga retreat – reading sacred texts, breathing, exercising, and meditating. As a university professor, I believe being a good teacher means being a good learner and a lifetime student. I’m now ready to share some of the insight gained during this reflective year.

Let’s begin a series on sacred yoga texts with the first yoga manual: the Bhagavad Gita. The...