Excerpted from Parabola Spring 2012: The Burning World, by David Ulrich and Laura Dunn Recently, we collaborated on a series of classes in creativity and yoga. “Why?” — is the question we are asked frequently. Why creativity and yoga? Why would a yoga teacher and practitioner (Laura) collaborate in a series of classes with an [...]

(By David Ulrich, Reposted from The Slender Thread) A sudden answer to a long perplexing problem, a burst of insight that deeply informs your creative work, a moment of wisdom that changes the shape of your life forever or even the fabric of society; these moments are highly inspiring. As artists and creative individuals, we [...]

I love yoga for two reasons: Outer Awareness & Inner Awakening First, yoga has given me the gift of health and vitality. I was never a very athletic or healthy child. I was always in the nurse’s office for one reason or another. I was always the last picked person for volleyball in elementary school. [...]

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, [...]

How might we find—and strengthen—those slender threads that link heaven and earth, that relate our two natures, the earthly and the divine? If we wish to deepen into ourselves, transcend the ordinary mind, and come into contact with whispers of the greater intelligence and larger awareness that reside within ourselves, how do we proceed? What [...]

Article by David Ulrich David Ulrich is the Program Coordinator for Pacific New Media, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He is an active photographer and writer whose work has been published in numerous books and journals including Aperture, Parabola, MANOA, and Sierra Club publications. Ulrich’s photographs have been exhibited internationally in over seventy-five one-person and [...]

© David Ulrich My earliest memories of finding stillness were not through yoga, but through art. I studied art extensively in high school and in college, and those early experiences with art and creativity likely contributed to my interest in practices like yoga and meditation. During many extensive talks with David Ulrich, a well-regarded photographer, [...]

To be, or not to be–that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep– No more–and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the [...]

A few years ago, I conducted research on Buddhism and addiction at The Wat Thamkrabok Monastery in Southern Thailand. Within the monastery is a drug rehabilitation center that uses only Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and herbal remedies to “cure” addiction. The monastery was built in 1949 during the opium trade in Southeast Asia. Since then, the [...]

photo credit: Kanani Ann Daley You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye -Margaret Atwood My old home had a vicious cross breeze that often blew open the kitchen cabinets and tossed things from the dining table. One day, the wind blew over a full glass of [...]