For more than 30 years, Yoga Journal has been helping readers achieve the balance and well-being they seek in their everyday lives. With every issue,Yoga Journal strives to inform and empower readers to make lifestyle choices that are healthy for their bodies and minds. We are dedicated to providing in-depth, thoughtful editorial on topics such as yoga, food, nutrition, fitness, wellness, travel, and fashion and beauty.
Explains how to successfully navigate the process of initiation, instruction, testing, and self-transformation under the guidance of a spiritual teacher • Explores how to approach a teacher for initiation and the importance of gauging your inner response and feeling of trust and resonance with the teacher • Discusses the process of separating from a spiritual teacher and how to negotiate the emotional conflicts that can arise at this stage • Shares the author's experiences with several remarkable teachers and details lessons learned through testing and confronting doubts and fears In the search for inner awakening and self-realization, a spiritual mentor can be key to advancement. Yet the process of finding an authentic spiritual teacher who resonates with you can be daunting, especially for anyone who has had a negative experience with a guide. Exploring the emotional nuances of mentoring relationships, Greg Bogart details the path of spiritual apprenticeship: the process of aligning with a teacher, establishing a dynamic spiritual practice, and the later stages of separation and finding the teacher within. The author explores the importance of gauging your inner response and feeling of trust and resonance with a teacher and your readiness to receive initiation. He explains how the teacher-student relationship affects the student’s state of consciousness over time and how most students eventually need to become independent from their spiritual guides. Describing emotional conflicts that can arise at this stage, he shows how wise teachers accept our need to separate and graduate while immature teachers try to thwart and control us. Openly sharing his own personal journey, the author illustrates the lasting resonance of his encounters with several provocative spiritual mentors, including Swami Muktananda and Dane Rudhyar. He discusses how some fierce teachers practice "crazy wisdom" to confront our doubts, fears, and fixations and to activate our dormant potentials. Examining practices in Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist Yoga, Sufism, and Jewish and Christian mysticism, he also explores the deeper mystical aspects of the guru-student relationship. The author shows how, ultimately, initiation leads the spiritual seeker to find the teacher within and how this can naturally lead to teaching others. Describing nine stages of the spiritual seeker’s journey, the author affirms that a direct path to self-liberation is still attainable through initiation and instruction in the company of sages.
How can a relationship with a spiritual guide aid a seeker on the path to enlightenment? Author Greg Bogart details the challenges and problems that arise in this unique student-teacher relationship, from the process of chosing a spiritual guide through the end of the association and the separation from the teacher. There is a natural cycle that both teacher and student follow in the process of discipleship, including -- Initiation and testing of the student -- Attainment, enlightenment and separation -- Finding the teacher within and becoming a teacher for others Author Bogart takes a positive and highly nuanced psychological and intellectual approach to every area of discipleship, including the ethical ramifications of every interaction between student and teacher. For example, he thoroughly discusses -- How to seek and choose a teacher -- The importance of the teacher's lineage -- How to recognize healthy and unhealthy forms of merging with the teacher -- The role of the student's ego and personal limitations -- The role of effort and grace in the formation of the connection The Nine Stages of Spiritual Apprenticeship also includes a full overview of the nature of -- and the path to -- discipleship in the major world religions and mystical traditions, including Sufism, Hasidism, Christian mysticism and the major Buddhist sects. Thorough, inclusive, problem-solving, ethical and inherently positive, this is a one-of-a-kind how-to book that will serve all who seek spiritual enlightenment.
A wise and practical quickstart guide for anyone who wants—or already has—a spiritual teacher. The User’s Guide to Spiritual Teachers is a necessary book for anyone who has, or wants to have, a spiritual teacher—regardless of faith or tradition. This book addresses concerns that many of us have on the spiritual path, including how to find a spiritual teacher, how to manage expectations about what they can do, and what to do when you realize you’re in a dangerous relationship with one. Spiritual teachers of all traditions will themselves find this book incredibly useful as they reflect on how they benefit their students or may be overstepping their boundaries and actually creating harm. This is your place to look for information, inspiration, sanity, and words of caution.
Explores the reasons why sexual transgressions between spiritual teachers and student occur, when this type of relationship becomes a problem, and how to avoid it from happening.
The author explores the idea that the most powerful astrological technique is a quiet, meditative mind. The book presents astrology as a form of active meditation where we contemplate whatever is arising with expectancy, receptivity, and conscious use of will to shape what unfolds. The author presents meditations on the spiritual lessons of the planets and zodiacal signs, and, with the plentiful use of case histories, describes the technique of symbol amplification, which enables us to unfold the deepest meanings of chart symbols. The book ends with a discussion of astrology as a spiritual practice.
This book illustrates the power of astrology to facilitate emotional healing, aid the lives of couples and families, guide career development, and promote focus and purpose in daily life. Astrology's Higher Octaves combines therapeutic astrology, the astrological study of relationships, vocational astrology, archetypal psychology, dreamwork, and the synthesis of astrology and music. Through detailed examples, readers learn to refine their interpretive skills and to practice astrology as a vital catalyst for both inner and outer works, a way to achieve integration. Influenced by Jung's interest in astrology and dream analysis, Greg Bogart, PhD, presents a potent technique for combining astrology and dreams, where parallels and synchronicities between dream imagery and planetary symbolism amplify the truthful messages both convey, showing clear steps forward for transformation at crucial transitions. He illustrates how vocational astrology, informed by career counseling theory, helps us choose optimal occupational paths and fosters strategic timing and steady accomplishment in the realm of work. Readers also learn about diurnal astrology, which enhances the enjoyment of daily tasks and activities, sharpening our sense of purpose and time management skills. The book concludes with the spiritual value of astrology, a practice that refines us vibrationally in a manner analogous to music so that over the course of life we can discover and express distinctive tones. Recognition of the potentials shown in the birth chart prepares us for gradual sculpting of the life until it becomes a reflection of our celestial ideal. By unifying astrology with psychotherapy, vocational counseling, and dream interpretation, Astrology's Higher Octaves expands the celestial art's range of social influence and teaches us to extend the ray of consciousness in many directions simultaneously.
At a time when psychotherapy seems to be a purely secular pursuit with no connection to the sacred, The Sacred Cauldron makes the startling claim that, for both participants, psychotherapeutic work is actually a spiritual discipline in its own right. The psyche manifests the sacred and provides the transpersonal field within which the work of therapy is carried out. This book demonstrates some of the ways in which a spiritual sensibility can inform the technical aspects of psychotherapy. "The Sacred Cauldron is truly a book to be read by both therapists and non-therapists, for it offers a thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive passage through the spiritual quarrels and complexities of our time and addresses our common summons, which is to treat the life of the spirit with the respect, the gravity, and the centrality it deserves. This book is instructive to all, for Corbett not only marshals a wealth of scholarship and clinical experience, but also expresses challenging insights through a calm, reasonable, and commonsense appeal. After this book, the reader will be more thoughtful, more considered, more sophisticated, more appreciative of the importance of therapy as a vehicle for healing and for engaging the numinous." --James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and author of What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life Dr. Lionel Corbett trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is currently on the core faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and the author of The Religious Function of the Psyche and Psyche and the Sacred, as well as various professional articles. His main interest is in the religious function of the psyche and the ways in which this function expresses itself through the structures of personality.
This book explores archetypal symbolism, predictive technique, and counseling process in therapeutic astrology. Combining insights from Jungian depth psychology, developmental theory, alchemy and dream symbolism with the precision of planetary transits, progressions and midpoints, Planets in Therapy is an inspiring approach to the healing art of astrology. Planets in Therapy clearly and succinctly explains the interpretation of the language and techniques of astrology, the depth psychological, transpersonal and spiritual meaning of planetary symbolism, and its power to heal and transform. Greg Bogart masterfully guides the reader through the principles of psychological astrology, emphasizing the process of selftransformation, spiritual evolution, and discovering the meaning in every event and every moment. A wide range of examples demonstrate how to apply this knowledge to skillfully help others as a counseling astrologer.
