I heard about this famous yoga festival at the yoga studio, and just decided to do myself a favor and take a retreat up to Joshua Tree, California, for some desert transcendence. It was also a great occasion to get out of town with the RV, and explore this new world (for me) of tribal yoga.

Bhakti is one of the eight limbs of yoga: the Yoga of Devotion, traditionally practiced as a celebration of god in all its forms, mainly through music and dance. Because this particular BhaktiFest fell on Mother's Day weekend, they dubbed it "ShaktiFest" in honor of the Feminine Principal, Shakti.

I have developed an interest in Kirtan music--a style of call-and-response music with chanting, usually in Sanskrit. Although original forms of Kirtan were quite strict about instrumentation: tablas, sitar, harmonium, hand cymbals, and others; the Westernized versions include electric guitars, synthesizers, bass and drums--a sort of kirtan-rock fusion. At this ShaktiFest there were the traditional instruments used in most acts, but for most of the headliners, bass, drums and guitar delivered slow, funky grooves with soaring vocals, simple chord changes and lots of singalong. Dancing is considered an honoring of the music, so everyone dances as they chant, and it is very liberating. Great fun!

The temperatures during the day were in the 90s on the Central California high desert, but cool breezes and cool attitudes, plus low humidity helped create an aura of high-vibe floatingness--indeed, even the young children and babies all seemed to be in a constant state of meditation.

I reluctantly left Monday morning with a wonderful meditative glow or bhav (ecstasy), with the distinct feeling I'd truly found my tribe.

This book, by Tibetan Buddhist leader, Chogram Trungpa, came to me very magically.

I read Elizabeth Lesser's Broken Open, and in it she makes several references to Trungpa because he was her guru (which she says was the most difficult yet enlightening of relationships).

This picqued my interest, so I had decided to order some of Trungpa's books. The next instant after this decision I walked by my bookshelf and immediately zeroed in on Shambhala by Trungpa. I had no recollection of ever buying it, and I'm still stumped as to where it came from, yet there it was. I was obviously supposed to read it!

I'm on my second close reading of this remarkable little book. The Shambhala teachings are on the esoteric side in Tibetan Buddhism, said to have been passed down from the high beings in Shambhala, the mythical civilization that some believe still exists in some remote Himalayan valley.

In Trungpa's skillful hands, however, these teachings have given me a whole new take on what it means to be a warrior in life. He re-frames many concepts that we in the West have degraded into dirgeful mundanities--such as: Discipline (actions expressing Basic Goodness), Renunciation (renouncing the distance between self and others), Fearlessness (beyond fear), and many others.

This book is jammed packed with tons of useful and interesting ideas, such as the Four Dignities represented by four animal forms: The Meekness of the Tiger, the Perkiness of the Lion, the Outrageousness of the Garuda (mythical bird-man), and the Inscrutability of the Dragon. These all represent facets of the Warrior's behavior and how he is in the world.

"As a warrior, you are willing to take a chance: you are willing to expose yourself to the phenomenal world, and you trust that it will give you a message, either of success or failure. Those messages are regarded neither as punishment nor as congratulations. You trust, not in success, but in reality." --p. 71, Chogram Trungpa.

Check it out.

I took some time on my way back from ShaktiFest to visit some old friends in Los Angeles whom I hadn't seen in over 35 years. When we last saw each other we were all in our 20s, and looking back, we were really just kids--not fully formed yet, dazed and barely awake in this big ol' world called life.

We shared our trials and breakthroughs with marriages, kids and ourselves, and I was struck by the central theme of all of our lives being spirituality. Keith had taken up meditation with his daughter, and Shawn found her spiritual peace in her art.

I extolled my 10-year love affair with yoga, and Shawn was inspired enough to say she was going to check out some yoga studios doing gentle yoga, perhaps as a way through her migraines.

To our super-literal and image-centric American culture, yoga is still mostly thought of as the postures (asanas). Indeed, even people going to yoga asana classes say, "I'm going to yoga," or I "do yoga" and everyone just knows they're in a class with people doing yoga poses.

For me, yoga has become many more things: how I pay attention, how I breathe, how I react to life, how I create, and how I am generally with my life. Even the great Patanjali, who is considered the ancient founder of yoga, gave little mention to asanas other than to say one needs to maintain a strong and flexible body in order to walk the yogic path to achieve communion with the Divine.

All that said, I do go to "yoga classes" several times a week, as it is a good focusing discipline for me to feel I'm doing something good for myself. And, it reminds me what life is really about--finding and being the Greater Better Self in Service to the Goodness of Life.

E3 Energy Cream -- for those minor pains and discomforts that come along sometimes with the asana exercises; ALSO, Formula E1 that de-stresses and harmonizes body systems to help you be in the NOW.