Listen with your whole being.
What you truly are and how you appear are not-two.
Being Yoga is the name I give to an approach in which doing flowers as Being. We begin with what is here: breathing, sensation, movement, listening and the questions that everyday life brings. Through this exploration, the assumption of being a separate, incomplete individual can be seen and released.
Why? Why Study All This?
For peace of mind, lasting contentment and well-being.
The point is self-knowledge: wisdom that includes and transcends intellectual knowledge. Through Knowing via Being, we examine the assumption that we are separate or incomplete, and that fulfilment must always be found elsewhere.
This understanding finds expression in everyday life—in how we listen, relate, act and meet change. Peace does not require life to become free of difficulty, nor does contentment require a continuously pleasant experience.
My Grounding in Advaita Vedanta
The focus of my teaching is spiritual awakening in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Advaita means “not-two.” It points to the absence of a fundamental division between what you truly are and the reality of all that appears.
Vedanta means the end or culmination of Vedic knowledge. Here, “end” points to the outcome of exploring the Vedas and Upanishads: self-knowledge, wisdom that includes and transcends intellectual knowledge. The teaching is fulfilled in direct, lived understanding.
Study provides words, distinctions and questions through which a mistaken understanding can be examined. Listening to the teaching, reflecting upon it and contemplating its meaning belong together. Intellectual clarity matters; its flowering is wisdom lived.
Jean Klein and Being Understanding
My study with Jean Klein is a central influence on this approach. I first heard the expression Being Understanding from him. I use it to point to understanding inseparable from being: wisdom expressed in living, rather than knowledge held only in thought.
His approach to body-feeling, listening and the energy body informs my teaching. A posture or movement becomes an opportunity to listen. Attention opens to the felt body without requiring it to conform immediately to an image of how it should be.
As Jean Klein pointed out, working with the energy body still involves a subtle separation. In my approach, this work prepares the ground for inquiry into that separation itself. The doing flowers as Being through recognizing the not-two that has always been the case.
Listening-Feeling: The Everyday Beginning
Living meditation is listening. By Listening, I mean an openness that includes hearing, sensation, movement, thought and silence. Listening-Feeling allows experience to reveal itself before we decide what it must mean.
Sit comfortably. Feel the contact with the chair or ground. Allow breathing to happen. Listen to a nearby sound and a more distant one. Notice a thought or feeling as it appears. Nothing needs to be forced into a special state.
What is changing is known. The inquiry turns toward the Awareness because of which that change is evident. Can the assumed boundary between the listener and what is heard be examined, rather than simply accepted?
The Energy Body, Prana and Spanda
The energy body is approached through body-feeling: the felt vitality, sensitivity and movement of living. Prana is vital life-force energy. We understand it through its activity and expression—breathing, sensing, moving and the constant change of everyday life. Prana is the breath within the breath. Prana is Flow.
Kashmir Shaivism, particularly its teaching of Spanda, provides a valuable lens for this exploration. Spanda points toward the subtle dynamism of consciousness. Through Jean Klein’s influence, this language of body-feeling and openness has a place in my teaching.
The practices can begin with an apparent distinction between the person attending and the sensation attended to. This practical starting point does not settle the ultimate question of separation. My approach brings embodied exploration into dialogue with Advaita self-inquiry. Read more in Kashmir Shaivism and Spanda: The Energy Body and Spiritual Awakening.
Teaching Through a Lens
A lens brings a relationship into focus. A teaching can approach the same undivided reality from the intimacy of self-inquiry or from the apparent totality of life. Atman names the Self, your true nature; Brahman names limitless Reality, Source by whatever name. Atman is Brahman. The difference in naming does not divide what is undivided.
I use images such as the river and whirlpool, water and wave, and the symbol of Om to make these relationships available to contemplation. A whirlpool has a recognizable form and activity; it has no existence apart from the river. The image invites inquiry into appearance and its basis.
My presentation of Om is a contemplative teaching lens. Its curves, crescent and dot help us consider experience and its apparent divisions. The symbol is itself known by Awareness. Turiya, called “the fourth” from the standpoint of waking, dream and deep sleep, is the ever-present Awareness that illumines them. The image points; recognition concerns what you are.
From Naming a Thing to Meeting Its Activity
Language is useful, yet a noun can make a living activity seem fixed and separate. “Breath” names breathing. “Body” names an ever-changing expression of life. Regarding the heart, we often treat a verb as a noun: its living actuality is activity.
In other contexts, we give a name the apparent power of an actor, as though the word itself explained what is happening. My teaching invites a fresh look at both habits. We can use names without allowing them to replace the living encounter.
These inquiries help expose assumptions about appearance. Awareness itself is not another changing activity to be grasped or maintained.
Self-Inquiry and the Switchover of Insight
Self-inquiry asks what the word “I” refers to. The body is known. Thoughts, feelings and the sense of being a separate person are known. Do these changing appearances exhaust the meaning of what you are?
It is the nature of an error to cease once seen. The switchover is the insight through which misidentification is recognized as an error. Self-realization is the removal of that error and abiding as what has never been absent. Practice prepares and inquiry clarifies; neither creates the Self.
Understanding may continue to find expression as habitual reactions are met in daily life. Listening, relationship and responsibility remain opportunities for this understanding to flower.
Exploring the Teaching
You can begin with Start Here, explore the Practice Library, or read about self-inquiry meditation. My About page provides more of my background; Learn with James describes ways to study together.
Yoga is the flowering of Being Understanding: the wholeness already present becomes evident as the error that veils it is seen and released.