We are delighted to share with you Watkins’ 2023 list of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People – spiritual teachers, activists, authors and thinkers that change the world. The list came out in print in the issue 72, Winter 2023 of Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine on January 12. . Watkins bookshop in London has been encouraging spiritual discovery and providing seekers with esoteric knowledge for over 120 years. In 2011, we started publishing the 100 list with the goal of celebrating the world’s living spiritual teachers. Our special magazine issue features 16 pages dedicated to i ..read more

By Bethany Last   The Space Between Your Toes is a book about life.  The life of a yoga teacher, who decided the path laid in front of her wasn’t the right one to choose at that time. Choosing a career over university. Animals and nature over partying and late nights. Choosing to listen to what the trees whisper through their branches, choosing to hear what the wind has to tell. To dance in the rain and to bathe in the sun. Choosing to stop and pause and think. Becoming completely in tune with bird song and the soft rhythm of hoofbeats on warm earth. To bring more than stretching and ..read more

by Bob Makransky When a person’s body dies, what actually dies is the self: the sense of a detached perceiver, perceiving.  When there is no longer a sense of a separated perceiver perceiving, when everything is impacting upon our awareness with equal vividness, what is left is a feeling of oneness, a background of peacefulness, which is what magicians call higher self, or death.  Death is in the background all the time.  Death is the canvas upon which our lives are painted. When we feel that we are watching ourselves – that there is some part of us that is watching our every mo ..read more

by Erica Hornthal, LCPC, BC-DMT   Dance is familiar to everyone even if you don’t identify as a dancer, believe you have no coordination, or run in the other direction at the thought of dancing in public. Dance is woven into the thread of the human tapestry. It is no coincidence that when the world went under lockdown during the COVID19 pandemic, TikTok dance videos exploded. While this was and continues to be seen as entertainment, a way to combat boredom, or simply keep up with social media trends, it is actually self-regulation and emotional expression in disguise. Dance and movement ..read more

by Matthew Juksan Sullivan Zen Master Daowu and his student Jianyuan made a condolence call to a layman’s family. Jianyuan tapped the coffin and said, “Alive or dead?” Daowu said, “I won’t say alive and I won’t say dead.” Jianyuan said, “Why won’t you say?” Daowu said, “I won’t say.” – – Zen Buddhist Koan from The Blue Cliff Record   My father died in July. A progressive disease blighted his last years. As he planned, he passed away with the help of medically assisted dying. This meant we were living with the presence of his death for a long time before he actually died. It was a long wai ..read more

Do you believe the present is all that exists and is the key to spiritual awakening? Let us back up this assertion by claiming that space itself, and anything spatial, never extend beyond our current present. The reason we don’t see it is that we mentally separate space from time. Here’s how. ____ by Yann Flipo At first sight, to situate space in the present seems indeed completely incongruous to us because we have mentally made space this timeless frame, this Kantian a priori form that we may also call “immanence” (and from which the idea of nature derive naturally). In this perspective, the ..read more

This interview with Rupert Spira was conducted by David Chuter on 16 February 2022. It has been very lightly edited for clarity and continuity, but is otherwise a complete record of the interview.    David Chuter: First of all, Rupert, thank you enormously for agreeing to take part in this interview for Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine, to mark the publication of your new book You Are the Happiness You Seek.   Rupert Spira: Not at all, thank you for inviting me!   DC: The expectation is that an edited version of this transcript will find its way into the magazine this July ..read more

by Bianca-Jade Brown   Life itself is transformation. Everything we see in and around us is in constant movement, transforming from one thing to the next. On the molecular level, chemical reactions cause transitions from one state to the next, from liquid to solid to gases; everything is in a state of transition. Change and transition seem to be the natural state of the universe, to be in constant movement or flux.  Despite the obvious reality, of the facts, it seems as if humans have a massive problem with change, transformation and evolution, when ..read more

by Julie Lenore Baker   I think we’ve all asked ourselves this question at some time in our life and usually not come up with a very satisfactory answer.  We tend to start tackling it by blaming ourselves; after all, we work hard at our lives so surely, we should feel comfortable with them and know who we are, what we are and where we are going…  We are constantly told we live in a world of opportunity; we can do anything we want and have anything we want but the reality is that it’s this very fact that perpetually fuels the question.  The constant desire to possess things ..read more