On the 21st, the Summer Solstice, I volunteered at a free yoga event in NY’s Times Square for for yoga enthusiasts “to find tranquility and transcendence in the midst of the urban energy of the world’s most commercial and frenetic place.”

I met lots of wonderful other volunteers, including Laura Butler, ISHTA yoga teacher, pictured below. We had a laugh about the names sounding similar; then I discovered that they also practice kriyas. Even though I’ve been telling people about Isha for over two years, I still find it tough to describe what it is; and I still get thrilled at the opportunity.

The t-shirt that I made got a good response and people seemed interested in the flyers we distributed for Inner Engineering Online after the session. They were particularly surprised to hear it was online. New York has tons of free yoga events during the summer; we already attended Wanderlust, and look forward to many more opportunities to spread the word about IEO and Sadhguru’s program in October!

Wonderful coincidence–I bumped into a friend I’ve known since high school, Bajir Cannon & his wife Maki. He said he saw me on the screen but didn’t think it was me since he thought I was in India. Without realizing, I happened to have taken their photo (I was taking random pics of participants in line)! Bizarre…

I made it to the big screen in the Big Apple! Can you spot me?

Absorbed in conversation about yoga!

Like my handmade shirt…?

Attempted meditation

Blackberry-asana?

I felt so inspired throughout the day. I have been feeling particularly charged up since starting Inner Engineering Online, and today was my fifth class. It definitely struck a deep chord.

Lastly, I’ve been curating content for an event we are planning (more details to come). I have basically spent all day reading & watching Sadhguru. If that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is.

I will share a couple aha moments below. Please check out the rest of the live tweets from @ishafoundation.

The host, Terry Patten, said that Sadhguru sounded so optimistic, to which he replied that he was simply a realist, with this caveat:

So quit your kvetching already!

Isha has been highlighted in Huffington Post Impact section (what a great surprise!):

For today’s Volunteer Spotlight (and since Earth Day is just a week away), we want to recognize the incredible achievement of the Isha Foundation, who organized over 400,000 volunteers to plant two million trees on a mountain in India in just 25 days. This group of volunteers also set the record for most tree seeds (850,000) planted in a single day (a record they plan to continually break in the years ahead).

Sadhguru seemed surprised when I asked him about how to encourage people to volunteer their time. He replied that people should be even more selfish than they already are; after all, taking care of our environment and others helps improve our own lives.

“We’re not saving the planet,” he told me. “We’re saving ourselves.”

Sadhguru does not believe that this volunteer effort should be the work of a select group of activists.

“It’s everybody’s work. All of us breathe, all of us eat, all of us walk on this planet. This is not somebody’s work, it’s everybody’s work. Unless we get it into people’s minds that this is everybody’s work, you will not accomplish much on this planet.”

In addition to the wildly successful environmental initiative, known as Project GreenHands, Isha’s Action for Rural Rejuvenation works to address economic, agricultural and social mobility problems in rural India.

“Even though I was only 31,  my health had completely crashed to the point I thought that my life and career were in jeopardy. Within a week of doing these practices I was completely renewed on every level and haven’t had a health issue since. Instead of struggling to complete the 30 races a year, I now effortlessly completed over 50 events last year. My family was so impressed they have now all gotten involved in Isha.”

Here he goes into more detail on his experience of Isha Yoga:

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“Sadhguru is mystical, insightful, beautiful, funny, wise and grounded. I have taken two of his Isha programs, in Los Angeles and Tennessee, and strongly encourage you to explore this program for yourself–it’s not to be missed.”–Anjelica Huston, Inner Engineering Intensive flyer

From an interview with Huston in Vanity Fair:

She is being helped, she told me, by an Indian guru, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, whose name she spelled out for me like a conscientious schoolgirl. “He reminds me of my husband visually. He has the same lovely brown skin and liquid brown eyes. Very handsome. He’s a modern guru. He plays Frisbee on the beach with us.”

“Do you meditate together?”

“Yes, there are about 70 of us, and you sit cross-legged on the floor for about three days and feel like calcification itself. And then, somehow, you feel a little better. Maybe even get thinner and smarter. We go through a series of exercises, which were kind of familiar to me,” she added, and began to laugh. “I had an Italian grandfather on my mother’s side who became a yogi, and whenever we visited him as children we had to stand on our heads and sing, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day!’”

Mr. Geithner has his work cut out for him, economists and policy analysts in both India and the United States say. Reaching economic agreements between the two countries has traditionally been an arduous task.

“On principle, they both agree on everything,” said Jahangir Aziz, chief India economist at J. P. Morgan in Mumbai. “It always comes down to the nitty-gritty and that’s where things get stuck. Part of the problem is neither of them wants to give the other side an inch.”

Shouldn’t the US go a little easier on India, given the size of its market?

It took nearly 20 years for the United States to lift a ban on imports of Indian mangoes, for example, and a deal to allow energy-strapped India access to American nuclear technology, agreed to in principle four years ago, still has not cleared all the legal hurdles that would let American companies sign contracts here. The two countries remain far apart on American farm subsidies and India’s unwillingness to open its markets to foreign farmers, because they both want to protect their agricultural sectors. The countries’ disagreements there helped to scuttle global trade negotiations in 2008.

A funny & relevant tweet from Sadhguru’s public talk yesterday:

When you start thinking only I am right and everybody else is wrong, this is the first step towards madness.

Surely the US qualifies?

Some live tweets:

I live in joy. Not skipping-around-and-singing-happy-songs joy. Just joy—peace. stillness. calm.

There are moments when I’m knocked out of my bliss by external situations, but before long, even that will subside and the external world will have no effect on my interiority (except to enhance my experience of life). However my interior, if properly balanced, can have an incredible impact on the external world. I can reverse this vicious cycle.

Today, in my mid thirties I am in what feels like, near perfect health. I have moments of extreme emotions; sadness despair, anger, jealousy, fear and all of the other “normal” human emotions (there is nothing normal about any of these emotions, but it is commonly accepted by our society that it is, so I will just play along for now). I might even have hours, or maybe a day. MAYBE.

Most often, these moments are small (it doesn’t feel small when I am in the middle of feeling down about something or other) but in the grand scheme of my life, the underlying emotion I feel is joy, happiness, and compassion for the life all around me. It doesn’t mean that I hold hands with everyone and sing gospel songs. It means that I see the world with a greater sense of clarity and I feel calm and still enough to simply do what is needed.

Science has come up with so many ways to provide comfort on the exterior of our lives. Why can there not be a scientific way to create a more pleasant experience on the interior? This was always my search, to find relief from the demons in my mind that tore me apart. I realize now, that not only can the demons be exorcised but they were hiding some of the sweetest thoughts and emotions I could have ever imagined.

How to get to this place?

I wish I could give you a list of resources so you could choose which option is suitable for you. But all I know of is one. The science of inner well being taught through the programs provided by Sadhguru and the Isha Foundation. All it did for me, was allow me to experience what has been inside of me all along. It is not progression, it is a regression, back to what it means to be truly alive.

For 3 days, we did things that would have made us look so crazy to the outside world. For 3 days we looked within ourselves and found ourselves not just inside but outside; in every person, stone and leaf. Even in the wind and clouds and the wonderful rain. My tears didn’t stop flowing for 3 day…I wasn’t sad, just overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. I felt so foolish for being the way I was and the way I had lived. I believed that looking inside means cutting off everything that outside provides because these outside forces are distractions. In the process I had really stopped living. As my tears washed off these imaginations and prejudices I had, something inside of me grew bigger and bigger to encompass everything that ever existed and allowed me to melt away completely.

And here’s an excerpt from Eleanor:

Everyone’s experience of BSP is completely different. I experienced a wide range of emotions at BSP, from total exhaustion and a desire to go home immediately, to transcending that into complete peace and exuberant joy. By the end, I never wanted to leave. When it was time to go home, I bid farewell to my dear, new friends and started thinking about what was next for me in the world of yoga. All in all, it was an unusual, wonderful and worthwhile experience.