Sacred Letters

Offers letters of the Sanskrit alphabet as key to understanding Yoga and the Divine

These original meditations on the Sanskrit letters range from personal narratives to metaphysical and theological speculations, linguistic play, and inter-spiritual allusions to other works and traditions, all relevant to living a contemplative life in the contemporary world.

Sowder’s book is anchored in the devotional Tantrik, Śaiva-Śakta tradition, focused on the Divine Feminine, but allusions to western mystics (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) also appear frequently. No other book like this exists.

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.