O Lord, Thy Name inspires such glory in my soul! It expands in the universe embracing all! It touches the shore of blessed salvation And each day adds purpose and new revelation! O Lord, This body may whither, become old and diseased, But Thy Name in my heart shall never cease! This poem from Little Flowers of the Heart, written over forty years ago, expresses the love I have for the chanting of God's name(s). In all my years of yoga practice and in every Hindu community in which I have participated (and other traditions as well), we chanted beautiful songs, prayers and mantras that have sustained my soul with spiritual nourishment and a kind of ecstatic love. I feel it has brought me into the very presence of God and connected me to an ancient tradition that is still so accessible today. Even when I am not chanting or singing, I am humming: I can't help it! I am filled with a sacred vibration. According to

Krishna, my Ishta devata Time is not for the sadhak He eats and sleeps the Lord His music is the primal Om And truth his two-edged sword. The sadhak wakes to ecstasy And bathes in shores of bliss His tongue tastes sweetness all the while And happy worlds his wish. Unattached to pleasure and pain Breaking Maya's chains He is one with everything Released from time again. The fourth poem in my book Little Flowers of the Heart is my favorite. The words have stayed with me as a prayer for over 40 years, and it is only today that I am coming to understand them. What does it mean to be released from time again? I have been studying the Yoga sutras of Pantajali through the discourses of Swami Krishnananda, the scholarly devotee of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, my beloved satguru. In a two-volume set of over 1200 pages--I am a quarter way through the second volume--Swamiji discusses the way of liberation through a one-pointed fixin

Little Flowers of the Heart is my first foray into publishing my own poetry . It feels right to start with this little volume of devotional poems from 1976-77, wr itten when I was just 19 y ears old . I was joyfully preparing for a trip to India to see Sathya Sai Baba , and l ittle did I know that I would be placing the poems directly into his hands during the Sivarathri festival in Puttaparthi in February, 1977 Luckily, I was prescient enough to keep a handwritten copy . T he format of the poems in t h e present book -- spacing, capitalization, and punct uation-- follows the exact format I used in the originals . The book includes a short preface in which I tell the story of my early spiritual experiences and, especially, meeting my spiritual mother, Diane Marquer, and the many miracles that followed . But it's the poems themselves that stun ; they're dripping with bhakti (devot ional love) and filled with simple beauty and truth. W hile working o