The Souljerky Yoga Vine

Strange and wonderful, sweet and bitter, naughty and nice --qualities such as these can describe the polar stormclouds of the mind, or of culture. So too, it is said, are the fertile fruits which fall from the Souljerky Yoga Vine. • Perhaps it is only shade and solace that you seek. Or temporary relief from the sun and the concrete. Perhaps you'd like a spot of chai and some sweet fruit from our vine. • A journey along the yoga information superhighway reels with rat trap fantasies. An age-old carnival of egos drunk with ideas and euphoria, frantically caging life into pretty, digestible illusions of security, latching onto anything and selling it as knowledge. • As William Gibson famously penned, "The street finds its own uses for things." We at Souljerky worship the street as a Naga lord, Patanjali himself, the snake, that physical viaduct through which we all travel. You might call it the path. We call it the street. Its cavalcade of sights and sounds and smells are the symphony of life: beauty and squalor, shadows and sunshine. • Is that is a mirror that you hold with the hopes that you might recognize your Self? • Underneath all those yoga poses and all that fluffy, pungent posturing. Beyond that face and body you hold so dearly as you, separate from all the others. Far outside of all of that, legends say, perhaps hidden deep inside the black iron prison of your own new age heart, rests the Self. • Let me pour you a cup of chai to stimulate and nourish you with dark, sweet milk and spices. • You are not what you think, I & I. Neither am I but thou. • This realization and practice comes with no soundtrack or symphony. No real apocalypse. No bang. Not even a whimper. • The real wizards of this century, or of any other, are the cows. Practical, quiet. Grazing on the fields of consciousness, digesting them into nourishment along this peculiar, hypermediated path. • "What you see with your eyes, that is your own Self. What you hear with your ears, that is your own Self." --Shastra oft quoted by Sri K. Patthabi Jois.