Jaya Kula Press has released its first book: Pilgrims to Openness – Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life. You are now free to take the teachings with you to the beach, read them in bed, and give them to your friends, relations, students and, well, anyone you think can benefit. (more…)

Pilgrims to Openness, the first Jaya Kula Press book, has a cover. As promised, I am sharing it here.

There’s a fascinating bit of background – on the background. I was searching the Internet for image inspiration, and I came across the blog of a young Kashmiri scholar, Mrinal Kaul. Mrinal is a lover of old manuscripts, and in his travels from one archive to another, he found a beautiful manuscript in a Delhi museum.

This manuscript, Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka, is written on birch bark, as many old manuscripts are, including the bible and the Rg Veda. In fact, birch bark is still used in Tantrik practice. Yantras are sometimes drawn on birch bark, and adepts write mantras on birch bark. It is said that a yantra written on birch never loses its power. (more…)

If you’re a repeat reader of Jaya Kula, you may have noticed that the proposed logo for the new Jaya Kula Press has changed several times. Well, we have settled on a final form, and I thought it might be fun to explain what it all means.

I’ve already written about the meaning of “Jaya Kula,”, so I’ll just start with the yantra. Yep, the downward facing triangle inside of the circle is a yantra.

A yantra is a living technology that serves as a vehicle for human beings to realize more about themselves and the cosmos. When we do practice with yantra, we can directly enter into an embodied understanding of the more subtle, expanded mode of being, or Reality from which the yantra comes. (more…)

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• on-the-day reminders about Jaya Kula classes and events,
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In Ma’s love,

Shambhavi