Sacred Letters: Sanskrit, Yoga, and Awakening the Divine - Tapa blanda

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Longtime yoga and meditation teacher Michael David Sowder is an author, poet, and professor of poetry, religious studies, and yoga studies at Utah State University. With a PhD from the University of Michigan, Sowder is the author of two collections of spiritual poetry, The Empty Boat and House Under the Moon, and two chapbooks of poetry. Feminist poet Diane Wakoski chose The Empty Boat to win the 2004 T.S. Eliot Award. His chapbook, A Calendar of Crows, won the inaugural New Michigan Press Poetry award.

Sowder’s writing explores themes of yoga, Buddhism, mystical experience and contemplative practice, wilderness, and fatherhood. He has appeared in MuseIndia, The Bombay Review, Shambhala Sun (now Lion’s Roar), American Life in Poetry, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, Sufi Journal, New Poets of the American West, and The New York Times Online. He frequently travels to India, where in 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar. Trained in a Tantric yoga tradition, he has been practicing and teaching yoga and meditation for almost fifty years. The founder of the non-profit, Amrita Yoga Institute of Logan, Utah―which teaches yoga, meditation, contemplative practice and philosophy―he founded the first prison meditation program in the Alabama prison system in 1978, as well as prison writing and meditation programs at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Facility and at the Cache County Jail in Logan, Utah.

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In the fascinating cosmology of bhakti-tantra-yoga—a tradition into which I was initiated in 1975—sacred sound first emanated from a Formless Cosmic Divinity or Presence, as a movement of OM, and then as the fifty sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet, which became mantra, scripture, and in a series of further emanations, the forms of the universe. Now, human encounter with sacred sound, mantra, scripture carries us back on an inward journey to Divinity.