The Pathless Yoga newsletter is dedicated to sharing the wisdom of Joan Ruvinsky, now in the form of transcriptions and recordings of her practices and talks, offered during her retreats, classes and seminars, along with information about upcoming Pathless Yoga gatherings and retreats. The text below is part of a dialogue from her last retreat given in Tucson, AZ in January of 2015. May you be nourished by her heart-centered and practical, often humorous and always incisive teachings on non-duality and life.

Love,  Kathleen

“I think ultimately when we first come to the teachings, we may come for comfort. Then, after a little while, the comfort wears off and we get to the hard parts. And then we go through the hard parts and get to the miracle… the everyday miracle.

Because every day, at the end of the day, we close our eyes and we die. And then maybe some dreaming starts up… and then it disappears… and then a waking state arises and we pretend that it is our real life… and then, at the end of the day, we lie down and close our eyes and go back to the Source. And so we’re living and dying everyday, and that’s just life.

But we don’t couch it in those terms, because we think when there’s nothing, that there isn’t anything and it turns out that when there’s nothing there’s everything. Its that paradox of emptiness and fullness… and the fullness is not different from the emptiness and the emptiness is not different from the fullness.

This is fullness.
That is fullness.
Take fullness from fullness
and fullness remains.

[Loosely quoting the Invocation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad]

What we’re doing here is recognizing, in community, this fullness that there is, and when you subtract everything from it, It still remains…”