The Delicate Business of Being Human

Yoga, Trust, and Reverence with Surinder Singh

Episode 9 – Yoga, Trust, and Reverence. This week we travel to Rishikesh, India to speak with Surinder Singh, possibly the most beloved Yoga teacher in the Yoga Capital of the world. Surinder’s warmth, humility, and heart, coupled with his engineering precision in asana has kept Laura (and thousands of other students) deepening their practice for years. We speak about Yoga’s capacity to transform our lives, and make us into better human beings. Surinder shares about the need for trust and reverence so that spirituality may reveal itself, and about the physiogenic and psychogenic benefits of the practice. Surinder Singh is the founder of Swasti Yoga Center and teaches hatha yoga– a combination of yogasana, pranayama and meditation– in the atmosphere of cordiality and support. Being a mechanical engineer by education, Surinder integrates principles of mechanical physics into his teaching practice thus turning them into bio mechanics of asana alignment and adjustment as well as of yoga practice as a whole. Surinder Singh was initiated in the tradition of yoga by his teacher and guru Sri Swami Dharmananda, the then superior of Ved Niketan Asram in Rishikesh. In his classes at the Academy, Surinder Singh teaches general yoga practice, mass adjustment in a class setting, gives workshops on asana alignment and adjustment, and tunes his students into the “real yoga” – yoga of Compassion and Action. https://swastiyoga.com/ [https://swastiyoga.com/] https://www.instagram.com/swasti.yogashala/ [https://www.instagram.com/swasti.yogashala/]

Constellation as Ceremony; the Knowing Field, Belonging, and A Place For Our Ancestors with Francesca Mason-Boring

Francesca Mason Boring joins The Delicate Business of Being Human to share her depth of experience and unique vantage point on family and systemic constellations and the Indigenous Knowing Field. We explore constellation’s capacity to show us hidden dynamics, and to offer the belonging so necessary for those who have been excluded. What if rather than a healing modality the constellation itself were a ritual? Mason-Boring offers a perspective which animates land, nature, and our own instincts and broadens the way we can consider this work. Francesca Mason Boring is a bi-cultural author, international facilitator and trainer of Systems Constellation. A Western Shoshone, (an indigenous tribe in the United States), and member of the Sho-Pai Tribes, Francesca has authored several books including: The Nature Constellation Handbook: An invitation to connection and Connecting to Our Ancestral Past; Healing through Family Constellation, Ceremony & Ritual and Love in Family Systems Constellation: An Invitation to Life An advocate for the growth of family systems constellation, Francesca has contributed to the development of nature constellations, community constellations, and the incorporation of ritual and ceremony in the field of systems constellation. The Universal Indigenous Field is included in her approach when teaching and speaking about the knowing field and the phenomenological approach in constellation work. This international facilitator has presented at numerous conferences and has served as faculty for Intensives for Systemic Constellations in the United States, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Bali, Portugal and Germany and has collaborated with Resources for Embodied and Ancestral Learning (REAL Academy) [https://realacademy.net/courses/nature-constellations/] to provide video content for systemic practitioners. Mason Boring is also on faculty for the Online International Family Constellations Training. [https://constellationintensive.com/family-constellations-facilitator-training/] The 2027 In person 21-day facilitator training [https://allmyrelationsconstellations.com/2027-facilitator-training-portland-oregon/]with Francesca Mason Boring, All My Relations Constellations will be held in Portland, Oregon. www.allmyrelationsconstellations.com [http://www.allmyrelationsconstellations.com]

Death as An Agent of Awakening; Grief, Loss, and Facing Impermanence with Jennifer Muir

In Episode 7 Jennifer Muir joins us to speak about tending grief, navigating loss, and death as an agent of awakening. Jennifer shares about her work as a death doula and grief tender, and about the experience of the sudden death of her husband while their daughter was an infant. And how this passage both ungrounded her and deepened her experience of life. We’ll speak about approaching death as a portal to the sacred and the role of storytelling to move us through the experience of grief. We contemplate what it would bring to our lives to be able to ground them into the reality that death and ageing are inevitable. Jennifer Muir, founder of Spiraling Heart Sanctuary, is a death care worker, grief tender, sound practitioner, circle facilitator, mother, and devotee of the path of the heart. Attuned to compassion, she aspires that her work in the world soften the stories that bind us, soothe fear and bring us into a more trusting relationship with life and death thereby relieving suffering for all beings in the ten directions and three times.

Dissecting Our Defenses; Gluttony, Compulsions, and Addictions with Paramita Oliveira

Episode 6 Paramita Oliveira Dissecting Our Defenses; Gluttony, Compulsions and Addictions In episode two of our study, Paramita Oliveira and I continue on a micro-but-mighty odyssey. The terrain is tracing the ego’s development as a series of solutions and defense mechanisms. We’ll examine the structure of the personality, which was built around a being in development who didn’t have the protection or cognitive capacity to navigate life’s difficulties. We start to recognize these solutions and defenses as being a distortion of our essence. The same way a prism separates white light into the full spectrum, the slings and arrows of this human experience fragment our light. Our fragmentation isn’t moral, its fundamentally human, but it can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and separate from our power. We will deepen in coming episodes and create a map that will lead us back to our wholeness using what in us is most unconscious and reactive as a doorway. In this episode we explore the outermost layer of the mandala; gluttony. We’ll entertain the possibility that our compulsions and addictions exist to keep us from touching a core of pain that we believe ourselves to be incapable of withstanding. We’ll speak about the connection between what was indigestible to us as children and the need to seek for pleasure outside of ourselves. Paramita Oliviera is a psychologist focused on the study of human behavior. She feels deeply privileged to have encountered self-inquiry and self-study in 1994, and was so touched by what she learned that in 2000 she began to dedicate her life to bringing this study to others. She has given workshops all over the world, while continuing her own personal study of meditation retreats and deeply immersing herself in trainings in India, her second home. She specializes in working with the patterns that prevent us from true transformation by keeping us disconnected from our deepest truth. Instagram: @paramitaoliveira YouTube: Paramita oliveira Amritakaya अमृतकाय is a non-profit learning platform offering tools and teachings to help us to enter into deeper relationship with ourselves, others, and life itself. Instagram: @amritakaya www.amritakaya.org [http://www.amritakaya.org]

Devipuram; The Goddess, The Guru, and the Teaching Temple with Rama Kandarpa

In this episode we travel to Andhra Pradesh, India, to visit a very special temple: Devipuram. We are joined by Rama Kandarpa who tells us the story of her father Guruji Amritananda Nath’s incredible life and mission. We learn of the rational nuclear scientist’s visions of the Goddess, and his wild mission to build Her a home.