Cultivating the "Holy Wow!"

2012 has arrived! May this year bring you more fully into your heart!


These first six days of the new year have blessed us in Northern California with some of the most spectacular sunsets I've witnessed in my years here. Firey reds and expressive oranges have given way to explosive pinks and deep mysterious purples. Every afternoon I have gone out to witness the unfolding light and a swelling of pure amazement pours out in the oh so eloquent, "Holy Wow! Amazing!" And the cool thing is that each day, it seems to get more incredible.


In our journey into the heart, into the space of the great I AM, we are much the same as this ever expansive unfolding light show I've been witnessing. Delving into our practices and fully engaging our hearts into all we do, we bear witness to our own inner expansion bringing us to a state of sheer delight, wonder, and astonishment at who we are. It's a state called "camatkara," which is eloquently defined by my friend and tantric scholar Chris "Hareesh" Wallis as "the state of fully self-aware expansive wonder, where Consciousness is suffused with the sudden rapture of great beauty, vibrating with awestruck joy." (Tantra Illuminated, Anusara Press, 2011)


As 21st Century adults, it is so easy to step into the current of cynicism (anti-wonder). We get sucked into a black hole of thinking we know everything and being amazed by nothing. People think the spiritual path is is meant to take you closer to a void of nothingness rather than a throbbing, pulsating state of expansive wonder. And, rather than being curious about the mysteriousness of 2012, we grasp on to apocalyptic visions of fear. With all this, it is time for visionaries of the heart to join together and proclaim 2012 as:

The Wonder Year.
Amazing. Astonishing. Awakening.

This is a year to soften ourselves back to a place of curiousity, wonder, and delight at the very fact of our embodiment. To be born at all is really quite incredible, if not improbable. To be born into such an exciting time of Consciousness awakening among so many wonderful practioners of the heart is downright jaw-dropping. In my classes, all of 2012 will be dedicated to actively cultivate this "Holy Wow" so that we can shine light into a cynical culture. Together, we will meet each breath, each pose, each sunset with fresh eyes, enthusiasm, and curiousity.