Frams Torners....letters in disguise
Occasionally I'll post something totally random like this that I've seen while on the road. This one I saw in a little village in a pretty remote part of South Eastern India in a road side shop. As…
The Blog — 1037 posts since 2008
Timeless wisdom for a focused life.
Teachings on awareness, energy, and purpose — alongside the retreats, talks, and travels that fill the rest of the journey. Drawn from ten years as a Hindu monk and decades of teaching, written to be applied to your life today.
Rice, food of the south
The harvest festival, Thai Pongal, takes place on the 14th of January and is celebrated predominantly in Tamil Nadu, South India. The festival is dedicated to the sun god, Surya, and marks the…
Smashing the Ego
At a small Shiva temple in the countryside of the Chettinad region, we stopped to participate in a Hindu custom in which a coconut is smashed on the ground in front of the temple to symbolize the…
A gorgeous sunset in Chettinad
A flashback to yesterday evening, about an hour or so after we arrived in Chettinad and checked into the mansion, Markley and I went for a walk and we were blessed with an extremely gorgeous sunset…
At the Ayyanar temple
Ayyanar is a village god, loosely affiliated with Hinduism, but emerging from a folk tradition of protective deities that keep disease and misfortune away from small rural villages. In one area of…
Fire ceremony at Pillayarpatti
Today we went to the small town of Pillayarpatti in the heartland of Chettinad to an ancient Ganesha temple. The priests in the temple come from the best priest training school in South India and the…
Learning Chettinad Cooking
Our spiritual and culinary adventure is coming to a conclusion and today we had our last cooking class. It was on two Chettinad style dishes. The first was "Mint Chutney" and the second "Kola Urundai…
Bathing the Elephant
Driving down the road to Thanjavur, we crossed a river where a temple elephant was about to get one of her two daily baths.
I can't concentrate!
A question came in to me on email asking for some insights on concentration. "I can't concentrate. Please help."
Thanjavur's great temple
This morning on the way to the heart of the Chetinad region we stopped in Thanjavur to visit the temple built by the great south Indian king Raja Raja Chola. The temple's name is Brihadeeswarar and…
Visiting the home of a Sari Weaver
After our ceremony at the Airateswar Temple in the village of Darasuram we visited one of the local sari weavers. The town is famous for sari weaving and most of these weavers supply the larger…
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