Some of the most enjoyable parts of writing the Yoga Psychology book involved weaving stories of the amazing exploits of various animals.  It was great fun putting together the story about the "waggle" dance.  When we were looking for information on intelligence in birds, stories seemed to start popping up here there and everywhere… Read More »

These are excerpts from the book, “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”.  For me, at this point (1-12-14) the most interesting thing about the following passages is the rather dramatic change in evolutionary biology in the 6 years since the book was first published. During the 5-6 years… Read More »

I recently (1-6-14) received a very interesting question about the introductory blog post on the evolution of consciousness (here: http://www.ipi.org.in/blogs/the-evolution-of-consciousness-introduction/ Here it is: “Reading the following paragraph “Hayward goes even further, speaking from a Vajrayana (Tantric Buddhist) perspective, saying that there is an initial nondual (without the apparently separate “I”) awareness which is the foundation… Read More »

GAINS (the Global Association for Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies) recently published an article on “Being Playful in  Left Brain World.”  It was beautifully written and inspired me to reflect on some of my own struggles with left-right integration. It started when I was 4 (well, not exactly, but I’ll get there).  My older sister and brother… Read More »

NOTE: this is the opening of the 2nd chapter of our Yoga Psychology book. This was an extremely interesting section to write. First, we set ourselves the task of writing about only those things that would be acceptable within the current scientific mainstream, while still trying to push the boundaries – at least somewhat.  One… Read More »

“Sharon” is a composite of several military veterans I’ve worked with as a clinical psychologist. We used Sharon’s story in our yoga psychology book (Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”) as a way to illustrate in very practical, down to earth terms how what Sri Aurobindo calls the… Read More »

The Evolution of Consciousness: Introduction I’m going to be putting up a series of posts on the evolution of consciousness from a yogic perspective.   These are in part excerpts from our book on yoga psychology (inspired primarily by Sri Aurobindo, but taking into account a wide range of spiritual and scientific sources). There were two… Read More »

A friend just sent this article from the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/16/left-right-brain-distinction-myth I'm quite grateful for this, as the whole question of left-right hemisphere differences was supposed to have been thoroughly refuted in the 90s (most popularly by Jerre Levy).  On our website (www.remember-to-breathe.org) which uses Dan Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology as the basis for understanding the brain,… Read More »

moonlight sonata mp3 10-19-11 (it's probably best to listen through headphones. If you want to use this as part of an "experiment" - try listening starting at the line below, "and I started watching".  You'll probably find at first that your attention seems split, with the music almost as a kind of distraction.  At some point,… Read More »

            Here’s an interesting (intuitive/speculative!) chart – playfully done; don’t take rigid categories too seriously!) – looking at psychologist Clare Grave’s developmental theory which has been popularized (unfortunately, to some extent) by Don Beck as “Spiral Dynamics.”  There’s some interesting parallels with Sri Aurobindo’s symbolic (the lowest levels), typal (mythic,… Read More »