Yoga

the worst is that if you’re like me and are used to analyzing yourself, once the diagnosis has been reached and the mood swings identified, you gain hindsight, only this hindsight is of little use. Or if it is, it’s just to see that no matter what you think, say, or do, you can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and t

No: it came from me. It came from that powerful, self-destructive streak I had presumptuously believed I was cured of, and that raged like never before, driving me forever from my enclosure.

“If you’ve understood that you need to practice the form not just slowly but also quickly, that’s good. Now you must understand that it’s not enough to work slowly and quickly: you have to do both at the same time.”

When Charles de Foucauld woke up in the night, no matter what time it was, he made it a principle to get up and consider that the day had begun—a radical way of treating insomnia.

speed record is easy to measure. But a slowness record?

written three books exploring what the mystics have said about ultimate reality, long designated by the code name God, which in his view no longer suits us.

that I have the beginnings of Alzheimer’s—which wouldn’t be unlikely, because like the risk of suicide, the risk of Alzheimer’s is twenty times higher than average among people with bipolar disorder.

wrote The Cloud of Unknowing: “It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.” What did I desire to be? A stable man, a serene man, a man who could be trusted, a good man, a loving man. Because, of course, the real thing, and even the only thing, that is at stake in this combat, th

Frederica is a fictional character. I mean, a partly fictional character. She’s modeled on a real person with whom I gave a few lessons at the Pikpa, had a memorable booze-up, and listened to Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise, but most of the rest is invented. That’s what happens, inevitably, I think, as soon as you start changing proper names: fiction t