Hanuman Sessions for Winter Spring 2025

We're Gonna Need a Monkey That Flies

Sunday, December 1, 2024

Aho’Rajanaka,

I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. I am so very grateful for you and our community. Our work together in the coming year will provide ways to expand and endure, weather the storms that are coming and create the countenance we will need to flourish. We must define ourselves; not allow the current of the times to wash away our values. Yoga is a summons to courage, it is to surpass not merely to defy or elude the forces that would decide for us who we want to be. We’re going to need stories, examples, ways to shift our understandings and prompt us to action.

Thank goodness for Hanuman.

We’ll be having a Hanuman Special Session today, Sunday, December 1^st at 5pm Eastern.

Zoom in today (it’s the usual Sunday link): https://rochester.zoom.us/j/314987250

Today’s Session will serve as something of a preview. Beginning in February we will have Sunday Hanuman for the winter and spring months. We’ll trace the great yogin’s story from origins to his last sighting (as a monkey, that is) in the Mahabharata. We’ll record today if you can’t make it, and there is a podcast coming this week.

We’re going to need a yoga of courage and compassion, of fortitude and probity to address what is coming. I mean to sound no alarms but those you already hear in your heart.

We’re going to need a yoga that is at once more nuanced and more forthright. For that Hanuman provides an invaluable body of mythos and understanding. Hanuman is far more than servant and devotee. In fact, our thesis is that these features of his mythic character are his māyā, not false or fabrications but rather ways in which he assumes an appearance so that we may take a measure of ourselves. Ours is a Tantric Hanuman (with a decidedly Rajanaka flavour) and this is our topic for today’s prelude to the coming Winter Spring Sessions. Come and hear about what this interpretation is about and how it is so very relevant to our current times and to our lives as 21^st century people of engagement.

More soon then, with affection,

Douglas