Registration will close this month for The Tender Harvest, a harvest yoga, meditation, and culinary retreat at world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland. Join this Sept 20-26, 2026, for a time of deep nourishment, learning, and inspiration. Just 2 rooms still available!
A dog’s retching yanks me from sleep. I’ve been floating between worlds all night, and suddenly I’m across the room before a thought can take shape. The dense atmosphere of a dream lingers as I kneel to wipe the floor, then thins as my mind reaches for it. I was in a foreign place, though the landscape felt familiar. I was with friends, though they were not themselves. There was a house. The house was a river. Its rooms were water.
With a sigh, the dog returns to bed. The house settles back into stillness. I move mutely to my meditation cushion. Incense lit, tea steeping, for a time, I watch tendrils of smoke and steam mingle in the dawning air.
Practice teaches us to notice what’s here. Gradually, our attention steadies and we begin to perceive what is real—the interplay of spirit and matter, psyche and body—through the tuning fork of our awareness. We grow quieter, more supple, more receptive—less beholden to neurosis and fixed assumptions. What we lose in certainty, we gain in texture and attunement.
As humans, especially now, our well-being depends on how honestly we inhabit the faculties of our aliveness. What do we know to be true, and by what inner or outer measure? How much doubt do we allow in the margins of confirmation? What may appear real, yet on closer examination, carries the subtle signature of an illusion? And, inversely: where have we developed trust in modes of knowing that defy rational explanation?
In classical yoga philosophy, pramana offers a basic epistemic map. It names three valid sources of knowledge: direct perception (pratyaksha), inference (anumana), and trusted testimony (sabda). I know the river is cold because I have placed my hand in it. I know the river is cold because it flows from glacial melt. I know the river is cold because someone I trust has told me so.
Of these, direct perception carries the weight of fact. Yet fact alone does not confer context. The elephant’s tail may still seem a pestle to a blind man, as the Buddhist parable goes. Here, the animal’s trumpet or a friend’s account can augment our own perception. Thus, these three sources of knowledge uphold one another.
But in Paris last month, standing beneath Hilma af Klint’s paintings at the Grand Palais, I sensed how this era of dissolving certainties is inviting us to loosen and refine our frameworks for human intelligence. Knowing is not the intellect’s final stamp of approval. It is a function of our embodied, psychic, and spiritual capacities—and it keeps calling us to widen what we recognize as real.
Born in 1862, af Klint painted vast, abstract diagrams of a reality folded within this one: swirls of color, spirals, botanical forms, and galaxies. Her pioneering abstract works, begun as early as 1906, were long kept hidden and revealed only, at her direction, decades after her death. Working with a circle of women known as The Five, she participated in séances where language and image moved through them. One presence, whom she called Ananda, instructed her to create a series of paintings “for the temple.” These “pictures for the future” were meant for the future, for an audience who could see beyond the pastoral and parlor depictions of her time.
Standing before af Klint’s paintings a century later, I considered what it takes to be faithful to what arrives through intuition—to stake our knowing on image, or symbol, or an inner insistence just beyond explanation.
Carl Jung described intuition as that which “mediates perceptions in an unconscious way… and has the character of being given.” Distinguishing it from the more rational functions of thinking, sensing, and feeling, Jung characterized intuition as irrational, bypassing conscious logic to immediately grasp hidden patterns, meanings, and future possibilities.
In the years surrounding the First World War, Jung recorded dreams, visions, and dialogues with figures arising from his psyche. He came to understand that aspects of the psyche “produce themselves and have their own life.” The Red Book was later compiled as a document of these encounters and his willingness to be reshaped by them during an epoch of social collapse. His family kept the manuscript hidden for decades, wary of how the public would judge Jung for its contents.
Certain ways of knowing do not sit neatly within pramana. They are not quite direct perception, not quite inference, not quite testimony, unless we expand the aperture of perception to include dreams, images, symbols, and phrases that arrive unbidden. These belong to another register, one involving a relationship with what we do not fully understand. A mingling with mystery. A participation.
An increasing number of my therapy clients report consulting AI about the emotional content of their lives. I feel ambivalent. On one hand, it seems to help people articulate their inner life with greater clarity and identify practical therapeutic tools. On the other hand, if deferred to prematurely, AI’s logic can displace the authority of these clients’ own process, pulling them away from their attunement to the questions themselves.
As artificial intelligence becomes an ever more seamless extension of cognition, my concern is what happens to the musculature of our knowing. Will we still value entering the river to feel for ourselves? Or standing beneath a painting whose frequency has waited a century to be transmitted? Or cultivating the integration of direct experience, the rigor of inference, and the discernment of who and what we trust?
The meaningful questions of our lives ask something of us in return. Some questions are not meant to be resolved or even unveiled too directly. Some things must be distilled in time—granted permission, respect, faithful return, and a tolerance for not yet knowing.
Together, we are making sense of being human in an era of radical change. Your presence here matters. Thank you for reading, sharing, ‘heart’ing, commenting, and subscribing to The Guest House.
+ Join next month’s yoga & meditation class on Thursday, August 20. Only on Substack - a thank you to paid subscribers.
+ Find me at YogaSource in Santa Fe every Wednesday morning, 9-10:15 am MT / 11 am-12:15 pm ET for Dynamic Practice. This class is fully analog—live and in person. Register through the studio here.
+ I’ll be returning to world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland, Sept 20-26, 2026, with Erin Doerwald. This retreat will feature yoga, meditation, farm-to-table meals, and curated outings—plus rest, nurturance, and imagination. Just a few spots left. Check out all the details here.
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