Dear Revolution Community,
Have you ever been in love, or had such an intense crush on someone that you almost forgot you were separate from them?
Their happiness became yours, their sadness changed the course of your day, the line between where you ended and they began got a little less clear.
The yogis understood the power of that kind of absorption. In the Rasa Lila, the Gopis become so absorbed in their love and longing for Krishna that they begin to reenact his Lila (story), speaking of him, remembering him, absolutely fixated upon him until they began moving as him.
Attention becomes so complete that love becomes union. And in meditation, as concentration deepens, the line between meditator and object of meditation thins.
But what are we meditating on when we aren’t trying to meditate? It makes me think of the Cherokee legend of the two wolves. The grandfather sits with his grandchild. He says “Inside every person, there are two wolves. One carries anger, jealousy, greed, and fear. The other carries compassion, kindness, courage, and peace.” The child asks, “Which one wins?” And the grandfather says, “The one you feed.” And “feeding” just means what you give your attention to.
Our attention feeds the world within us and around us. The thought we return to again and again gets stronger until it becomes something physical.
Meditation is where we practice directing that feeding intentionally, but yoga’s deeper invitation is to notice where our attention goes all day.
Dean Radin once told Joe Rogan a remarkable story. After renting an office within walking distance of his home, he noticed a place called PsyQuest Labs had opened right next door. For weeks it appeared empty, until one day Radin saw a man inside and knocked. Before he could introduce himself, the man looked at him and said, “Dean Radin?”
They had never met.
The man explained that he was also a parapsychological researcher and had wanted Radin on his board, but didn’t know how to reach him. He had been practicing yoga nidra for hours at a time, followed by hours of intensely visualizing and absorbing his mind in the thought of Dean Radin coming to him.
Then one day, Radin simply appeared at his door.
The Upanishads offer a beautiful companion image for this, two birds on the same tree. One eats the fruit, tasting what’s sweet and what’s bitter. The other simply watches. We live a lot of our lives as the tasting bird, immersed in the fruits, in food, sleep, procreation, self-preservation, those primitive fountains. They’re not wrong. They’re part of our nature, but we can become so fused with one drive, one relationship, one fear, or one desire, that it starts to become hard to tell where the experience ends and we begin.
Yoga’s job is not to reject the fruit, but to remember the witness, to create space enough to see and decide. This is something that I’m experiencing, but it’s not the entirety of who I am. In that small space between seer and seen, choice becomes available to us.
What are you so close to right now that you can’t see it? What might change if you stepped back just far enough to see it from another perspective?
I’m excited to rejoin you in the studio this September in a yoga philosophy workshop where I hope you’ll bring whatever is on your heart. A question, a relationship, a struggle, a pattern. We’ll explore together how the yogis teachings can become tools for the lives we’re actually living.
As the air shifts and summer’s buzz fades into a quieter rhythm, September invites us to slow down, breathe deeply, and come back to center. This month at the studio, we’re focusing on grounding practices that help you reset after a full season. Think of this as a gentle reset, a way to realign with what matters before the busy fall picks up. I’m so glad to have you here.
Peace and Love,
Amanda and the good folks at Revolution Yoga
Originally shared in our September 2026 newsletter.