Annie Schliffer

About the Author

Annie Schliffer has been a full-time studio potter for forty-four years, working at The Rochester Folk Guild, an intentional community dedicated to the study of crafts, organic gardening, and the study and practice of Gurdjieff ideas. (www.rfag.org). A yoga student and teacher, she integrates the craft of pottery with the practice of yoga.

Author Archive Page

The Yoga Master at Ninety, an Interview with B.K.S. Iyengar

June 21, 2016By Annie Schliffer

Born in India in 1918, B.K.S. Iyengar has been teaching yoga since the age of seventeen. An innovative and exacting teacher for more than sixty years, he has guided the establishment of many centers of Iyengar Yoga worldwide. His message is “Yoga is for everyone.”

What is the miraculous? Our first thought may be that it concerns a supernatural and sensational event. And yet this Summer 2018 issue of Parabola reveals that the most ordinary action—digging a garden or cooking a meal or making art—becomes sensational when it is performed with mindful awareness of what we are doing. Any action may be automatic or creative, repetitious or truly alive, participating in the life that is happening in the instant: “The situation is completely different when my action is not a repetition but something new, an action that can only take place in the present moment to respond to a need that I recognize right now,” writes Jeanne de Salzmann in this issue. Read more>

Stephen Weiss, MD, portrait of Brother David Steindl-Rast, Mt. Saviour Monastery, Elmira, NY

Learning to Die, by Brother David Steindl-Rast

The only point where one can start to talk about anything, including death, is where one finds oneself. And for me this is as a Benedictine monk. In the rule of St. Benedict, the momenta […]

The Art of Cleaning, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Hilary Hart

Housework as spiritual practice, from a Sufi master

Marion Woodman and the Search for the Conscious Feminine, by Patty de Llosa

“The true feminine is the receptacle of love. The true masculine is the spirit that goes into the eternal unknown in search of meaning. The great container, the Self, is paradoxically both male and female […]

Hearing the Cries of the World, by Mark Nepo

This story is so old we don’t know who told it or who it’s about, except that it speaks to all of us. We no longer know if it was a “he” or “she” at the center of the story. […]

To Go Beyond Thought, an Interview with Karen Armstrong

One bright spring day, Parabola met with Karen Armstrong in her suite at the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan. The petite, friendly 62-year-old British ex-nun, arguably the most influential commentator on religion in the English-speaking […]

The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, a not-for-profit organization and the publisher of Parabola Magazine is now participating in the Smile program on Amazon.com! By going to the AmazonSmile website the shopper will find exactly the same products and prices as on the regular Amazon website, but 0.5% of each purchase will be donated to the charity of their choice.

When you login to shop at the Smile site, you will be prompted to select a charity from a preset list, or search for another charity. If you wish to donate to The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, simply type the name into the space, and you’re done! All your eligible purchases will be marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” in the box on the right that gives the price, and will generate a donation.

For more information about the program, see https://smile.amazon.com/about. We hope you will make The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition the charity of your choice!