I have been in many spiritual or developmental containers over the last two decades. Some were transformative crucibles, where couples came in together. In others, people came alone, and their spouses stayed outside the work, waiting at home, curious or wary or quietly hoping it would pass.

Dear friends,

I have been interrogating what artificial intelligence may mean for women’s lives: our work and money, our intimacy, our mothering, our bodies and our safety. This summer the inquiry became a survey, forty-eight questions grown from real conversations with real women. The first wave has answered, and answered at depth, staying with the questions for half an hour and more.

The artisan-poured cement countertop weighed a thousand pounds, one big slab waiting to be moved from the barn to it’s home in the kitchen. My son jumped in to help, as good friends do, and I rode along in the truck, windows down, expecting a 30-minute stop in the afternoon gloaming. It turned into four hours deep inside the problem: how to move the piece without breaking it, get it around tight corners without any peripheral damage to cabinets and floors and walls (or to humans). Three strapping young men, an elder man and two women (one me) working it with dollies, blocks, boards and a fair amount of geometry. Someone measured the doorframe. Someone found the angle that would clear the step. When the slab tipped, the young men took the weight into their backs and legs, and the older man knew exactly where to set a block so a lever would bite, the scamperers moved the boards. Respect and good humor traveled around the circle freely, and the slab moved inch by inch toward its new home.

My friend and teacher Patrick Connor uses a phrase I’ve loved for years: becoming transparent to the light. It’s gorgeous language and mystical enough that one can nod along to it for a long time, before inquiring into how it really works, or what it really means in practical terms.

I had a friend over a couple of weeks ago. He’s lovely and warm and generous, but his chatbot was in the room with us. Everything we talked about: into the engine. Talking to the chatbot when I thought he was talking to me. Talking to the chatbot behind closed doors. Running my ideas through the chatbot. I couldn’t feel him, his tether was to the cloud. It was amusing, and then annoying, and then I got curious.

In this season, a theme has come of exile. In my clients and students, there’s a great deal of repair of familial estrangement happening.

I’ve also been in a process of looking at the dynamics of my own relationships, specifically at where there is reciprocity and flow, and where there is transaction and extraction, where to stay and repair and where to loosen ties and release.

There is a lineage hiding in plain sight inside Christian history: women whose experience of the divine arrived as sensation. As heat, waves, contraction, arching, melting, sweetness beyond containment. They described union in the only language adequate to it, which is the language of the body in ecstasy. For centuries this has been read as metaphor, pathologized as hysteria, or politely averted from. Read plainly, it is something else: a somatic mysticism, a Western sister-current to what the Śaiva Tantric traditions never split off. Shakti is alive in every cell, the body as the perceptual instrument of the divine.

Since my first yoga teacher trainings in 2001 and 2002, I’ve taught thousands of hours of asana yoga, in studio classes, in workshops, at retreats, at festivals, and at our retreat center and eco-village on Hawai’i. Since beginning the deep work of the Heart of Yoga transmission, and the study of classical tantra in 2008, my approach to the body portion of our practice has been continuously updated.

The first split here seems to be the relationship of AI to cognition. Some people experience AI as an extension of human cognition, and some experience it as a displacement of a flavor of being that is never replace-able, merely a parrot of the true creative pulse of the organic intelligence. The second group is not necessarily technophobic, but rather protecting the specific quality of knowing that comes from embodied struggle, from not-knowing, from the friction of working something out in a body-mind that literally has skin in the game. Frictionless cognition produces a different kind of human, and a different kind of knowledge, or rather not-knowledge, undigested, unlived, unearned. The outsourced mind is a narrowed aperture, regardless of how much it produces.