spirituality

By Shayna Stock
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2011

“If we focus our actions and ambitions on creating independent, atomized versions of ourselves, we will never find ease. If you look at the most contented people around you, you’ll see that the ease they exhibit is actually a peaceful and creative engagement with the world.”
-Michael Stone, “No priests, no temples: Yoga and the practice of change“

Spirituality and activism are not strangers. The intimate relationship between the two is evident in the work of icons like Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X and Desmond Tutu, for whom activism was part and parcel of their commitments to something or someone beyond the sensory world.

The very concept of social justice emerges from the recognition that we are all interconnected – that your freedom is vital to my own, and that so long as anyone remains un-free no one can truly be free. Read the rest of this entry »

An interview with Michael Stone

By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine

Many activists practice yoga, but few would describe their yoga practice as a form of activism or treat their activism as an expression of their yoga practice. Michael Stone is working to change that.

An unapologetic misfit in almost any category, Michael Stone is a non-practicing psychotherapist, a devout iconoclast, a dissident Buddhist and a yoga teacher whose students won’t wear lululemon clothing to class for fear of being teased. His work at the intersection of yoga, Buddhism, psychotherapy, ethics and social action is refreshingly direct, pragmatic and free of dogma. He heads the thriving Centre of Gravity sangha in Toronto, and is the author of several books, including Yoga for a World Out of Balance: Teachings on Ethics and Social Action. Read the rest of this entry »