Chris (Hareesh) Wallis

What is Shiva-Shakti Tantra? Did John Friend make it up?

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To me, one of the most tragic outcomes of a scandal such as we have seen recently (and I have seen others, too) is the swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme: from irrational faith to irrational cynicism, from accepting everything you are told without adequate reflection to rejecting everything you are told without [...]

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Integrity and Lack Thereof: What it Means to be in Process

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Only two things are ultimately indispensable for walking the spiritual path: the ability to inquire within and find out what’s true for you, and the courage to follow that conviction. A word that’s being thrown around a lot right now is integrity. Unfortunately, it’s a word that can easily substitute for a careful, sensitive, individual [...]

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How Should the Teacher Behave? vs. What Can I Receive?: Understandings and Misunderstandings Around the Role of the Teacher

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It’s extraordinary, the capacity of human beings to complicate things. In the spiritual life, very little is as subject to stories about “how things should be” as is the role of the teacher. And these stories are highly effective at getting in the way of receiving something from one’s teacher(s). Let’s cut through all these [...]

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Teaching or Transmission? Igniting the Fire of Transformation (video)

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Teaching or Transmission?  It Makes All the Difference When You Want to Ignite the Fire of Transformation. Every yoga teacher wants to powerfully impact her students and improve their quality of life – and she usually imagines that she will do so by being a good teacher. I want to propose that in the field [...]

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Does the Practice of Yoga Automatically Make you a Better Person?

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Does the Practice of Yoga Automatically Make you a Better Person? Or, How Yoga Can Make a Jerk into an Even Bigger Jerk Recently, yoga teacher Hala Khouri posted on Facebook a question about yoga teachers crossing boundaries and treating their students inappropriately, triggering a number of interesting responses. This touches on a issue of [...]

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A Path of Total Transformation: the Bay’s first Immersion into the teachings and practices of Classical Shiva-Shakti Tantra

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Many practitioners of modern yoga today, especially in the Anusāra fold, have heard something of the philosophy of classical Shiva-Shakti Tantra. Few, however, have had the opportunity to learn of its integral vision of a yoga practice of mind-body-spirit that is so perfectly wedded to an inspiring nondual vision of reality that it brings profound [...]

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20 Years of Contemplation Reaching Fruition: My Engagement with the Pratyabhijnahrdayam

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I first encountered this fascinating and seemingly esoteric text with its lengthy unpronounceable title at age 17. I was immediately intrigued by its mystique, and though it was largely incomprehensible to me, some of its sutras (tersely worded key teachings) stuck with me. I contemplated bits and pieces over the years, sensing that within the [...]

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