Sylvia Winters

In my yoga teacher training, I learned the word Vairagya . It can be roughly translated as renunciation, detachment from the pain and pleasure of the material world, or dispassion from worldly things. When I first heard of the idea, it reminded me of existentialism. I heard the word existentialism much earlier in my life; with my temperament and experience, it was natural that I was drawn to it. As I grew older, however, I realized I had misunderstood it all the time. It is easier for a novice thinker, such as myself, to quickly conclude that the universe is indifferent and our life has no meaning. The way I see it now is that existentialism is about forging meaning from within the framework of mundane life, which at first glance may seem meaningless. At its core, existentialism is about determining one’s own meaning of life and committing to it. It is with a similar attitude I approached the idea of Vairagya . Like existentialism , Vairagya is the very opposite of nihilism. It is ...

In An Unquiet Mind , Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison wrote she once had been making several copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Renascence . It isn't clear whether Dr. Jamison was copying by hand or machine, but the idea stuck. Two years after reading her book, I finally copied the poem myself. It took just under two hours of handwriting. I have read few poems myself, but whenever I had a chance to memorize a good poem, it invariably had something to do with the theme of rebirth and rediscovering of self. There is something deeply personal about these poems, something that I yearn to experience intimately but fail to achieve in most activities hitherto. It is true that for the first 23 years of my life, death was a fashionable idea—but one out of my power. Life was foreclosed the moment my childhood memory started; it was not one of color, not one of black and white, but one of gray. A numbness, where even the idea of ceasing to exist became too much of an effort. I did not know ...