Posts by Irene (Aradhana) Petryszak

Find out how the path of bhakti yoga—love and devotion—prepares us to receive unconditional love, wisdom, and joy while elevating our everyday life from the mundane to the sacred.

Does anger get the best of you? A longtime yoga practitioner who found that ahimsa, non-violence, is easier in principle than practice, shares her experience of how the tools of yoga—witnessing, self-reflection, and meditation—can help us maintain balance, even in the midst of stressful situations.

In this humorous story involving a much-anticipated banana muffin, Irene Petryszak looks at how attachment and desire lead to anger, and how worldly objects—beguiling but impermanent—can never bring us the lasting fulfillment that we find within ourselves.

“Be humbler than a blade of grass,” begins a verse of the renowned Chaitanya’s Prayer. What does it mean to be that humble? Does it mean being weak and submissive, without a will or desires of our own? Seeking answers, Irene Petryszak uses the lines of the verse as a guide to discover just what qualities of character it takes to be truly humble and whether being humble is about weakness or strength.

We are used to practicing physical cleanliness, but how often do we think about cleaning our mind? Yoga practices for purifying the mind and heart help clear away old self-limiting thoughts and emotions that hold us back in life and in our spiritual quest. Irene Petryszak explains the deeper aspects of cleansing in this second post on saucha (cleanliness, purification), the first of the Yoga Sutra’s five niyamas (observances).

Even if we have been practicing spiritually for a long time, we can forget the importance of basic cleansing on the physical level. Keeping our surroundings clean and our body free of toxins can make a big difference in how we feel. And, as Irene Petryszak explains in this first post on shaucha (cleanliness), the first of the Yoga Sutra’s five niyamas (observances), purifying on the physical level lays the foundation for purifying on the more subtle level of our mind and heart.

The unbroken lineage of the great sages of the Himalayas has, for thousands of years, provided aspirants with living light on the spiritual path. These masters are channels through which the teachings flow and are renewed. A student of Swami Rama provides a glimpse of how this modern master taught and guided his students.