drink up
As organic beings, we are either in tune with the ebb and flow of the earth or we are fighting against it. We feel so incensed when we wake up to discover a parade of ants making their way into our cereal box, or when a rock flies up and hits the windshield. Let’s regain a sense of the bigger picture. As inhabitants of our beautiful planet, we forget that our tiny slice of reality is not as big as we think it is. Not a single picture taken of our planet from space reflects even the tiniest notion that we exist; it’s not all about us. And yet, it is. It is us. We are a part of that wholeness. In fact, there is nothing BUT that wholeness in our lives. It is not our job to try and find or maintain our own stability, but to recognize that it is already the quintessence of our nature. We are held by the earth, literally. Gravity has never once slighted anyone. We are rooted to this place and the fullness it provides. Whenever we have feelings of isolation or separation, It is our responsibility to remember that we are forever grounded in the fullness that inescapably exists in every moment.
It is built into our society to believe that we are constantly without. It’s how capitalism and consumerism works. We are made to feel disconnected so that we can connect again by buying. If we believed we already had everything we needed, no one would buy anything. By looking deeper, and feeling that fullness surrounding us at every moment, we are never without. Every molecule surrounding us is not emptiness or space. It is equally as full as our bodies and the trees and the ocean. Air, trees, rocks, clouds, people, are all made up of the same molecules. There is not an atom in our lives that isn’t perfectly in place. By recognizing that fullness and witnessing it in every moment, we begin to acknowledge our part in the collective process of the universe. That fullness will guide us, it will protect us, and it will nurture us. There is nothing lacking in the earth, nor in our lives. Our glass is neither half empty or half full. It is always surrounded by fullness, we are the ones who have to have the humility to change our perspectives in order to recognize the truth.
“Practicing true humility means giving up the luxury of worrying about yourself” – Elena Brower
time to get dirty
We don’t have very much dirt in New York City. As grimy as this city sometimes looks, it’s not the earth, soil, nutrients which are essential to our existence; but it is here, buried far beneath the steel and tar and concrete. I just returned from one of the most profound experiences of my life where dirt takes on a whole new meaning. The Quechuan people of Peru are a culture who believes they receive everything from the earth, Pachamama. Just as plants are nourished by the soil, they believe all their gifts of living come from the earth, the mountains, and the rivers. It was destined I travel to this ancient place that felt such a connection to the earth; this had been my problem for the past three years: my first chakra, my muladara. My root, my foundation, my stability, and my flexibility has always been volatile. My fear attached to the stability of my home, my work, and my security kept me from feeling able to prosper in the manifestation of my dreams and experience all the things that I wanted to in life. I had been stuck worshiping the voice in my head saying “later, some other time, not you, you’re not worthy yet”. But through the utter magic in surrendering my will to grace, by releasing that voice in my head, by releasing attachment in my asana practice to achievement, and by repeating 108 everyday the mantra “I trust the process of life, All I need is always taken care of, I am safe”, I had been led to the one place in the world where people surrender their will to the earth. Their ancient knowledge of trusting and giving thanks to Pachamama, wills all they ask for to be provided. By allowing myself to trust the universe, I was shown how to trust the universe even more. The problem is half the time we don’t ask for what we really want. It’s some abbreviated, half truth that makes us feel safe or comfortable. The other half of the time the universe gifts it to us, but we won’t receive it because of our feelings of unworthiness. There are a thousand reasons why you’re stuck where you are, but none of them are worth keeping you where you are. These gifts from the earth come to us in the form of opportunities. I used to think of myself as a plant who wasn’t ready to be watered yet. It wasn’t the right season or the right climate, or there wouldn’t be enough sustenance to flourish. The truth carried by the Peruvian people who till the fertile soil of this magical place understand the power in honoring the earth. I have begun to dissolve these limiting thoughts. You are ready just by saying you are….the universe will take you by the hand and take you to what you want. When you look at how we live here, we are always trying to clean ourselves of dirt. We view being soiled as being dirty, unclean; earth is almost in the way of our perfect lives. We clear land to erect our own safety and and security when what we must do is remember what really nurtures us. Look past the concrete and tar and steel and make our gratitude for mother nature known. These people walk around with soil on their feet, and they don’t think of it as being dirty, they think of it as being one with nature. Allow Pachamama to take you to what you desire most.
the circle
As emotional beings, swayed by oceans, and moon cycles, and birthdays, and traffic, our job is to reconnect with our center; that burning flame of pure being, effortless clarity, and unconditional love. Our effulgence of joy is dependent upon our flow of love. If we do not love, we do not see. What we are doing throughout our lives is moving through cycles of creation, preservation, and dissolution. Become aware of the transitions between these. Change can throw us off guard and shut us down. Each stage must be given all the love you have. As you move through these three cycles, you might find discomfort with one or maybe all. Do you close yourself off to new experiences? Do you run from stability? Do you dread things coming to an end? This fear comes from the absence of sight, blinded by the absence of love. We have no vantage point while being pinned against a wall of our shame or pride or fear. We regain our vision by indulging in the expansion of our space in which to breathe in our love, opening our eyes to the realest reality which is of our unfaltering and inexplicable bond to the divine..
For me, I confuse preservation with stagnancy. I become so determined to move forward that I disallow myself the enjoyment of having something. An ice cream cone, a complement, an amazing apartment all seem like obstacles in my way from advancement. I must finish, I must see the next step, I must plan for the future. I become joyless because taking time for celebration takes time away for advancement. I can do better. I can achieve more. It’s not finished yet.
So there is the point. Why welcome evolution, if in sustaining that creation we will carry no joy because we are worried about loss, or worried about not creating something new? Because there is time. Rushing creates the dis-ease and disconnect we feel inside. Slow everything down. That is why we must be interested in finding the space between our thoughts, space in our bodies, and space in our actions. The illumination of that space breathes love, peace, grace, gratitude, and calm, allowing us to be witnesses to our experiences. The love that floods through the space we create by doing this will literally manifest itself into the most effulgent joy carried throughout the whole circle of creation.
All the Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
Hafiz
yes, and….
Our essential nature is simple; we are already our highest selves. Even if we choose to make decisions that don’t support that truth, our highest selves are still present. We have eternal opportunities to align our vision with this. All that is required is our devotion to loving everything.
After having shared last week about the evil voice inside myself, I decided to spend the week listening very closely to where it was coming from. Predicting fantastical negative outcomes for myself which rarely come true, sounds like an easy thing to manage. By simply reversing my thought patterns from psychic pessimist to fantasizing more positive possibilities, I control the problem. It still wasn’t gone completely. The biggest challenge for me was not proving this voice wrong, but listening to it without judgement. Sitting with every juicy little detail it wanted to predict for my day and learning to love it instead. By wrapping my arms around it in a big embrace it relinquishes it’s resistance. By loving it, it tells its tale about how I must be ready for things to not work out. I must have a backup plan because I’m not worthy enough to receive all the gifts that are waiting for me in this life. I am scared of disappointment. By finding and learning to embrace the root of the voice, I slowly disempower it’s resistance to love.
The most commonly held rule in improvisational comedy is simple; never say “no”, always use “Yes, and…”. This is the only way the game keeps rolling. Every time we find resistance within ourselves the game stops and the love stops. There is no room, no space to evolve. There is currently a commercial on TV that follows moments in a young boy’s life when he is given something. Each time he says “and…?”, and he is given something to make it even greater. At first I though to myself how ungrateful or how spoiled he was. Really it is the voice inside that resists these good things from manifesting, limiting the abundance that I allow myself to inherit.
I beg you to listen to these fearful voices inside yourself and do not concede. They are clouding your true nature. If you have a thought in your head that is not coming from love do not usher it away or bury it in the depths of your body. Listen to it fully and give it the compassion it needs to rest in peace. You have worked hard to protect yourself and these voices have put up a good fight. They are disguising your ability to receive and give abundantly with ever so brilliantly rationalized fear. Add the love they need to let this fear dissolve. Love them to release them. Love everything. EVERYTHING. Resistance cannot feed on love. By saying yes, we allow for that untapped grace to flow effortlessly through us, guiding us to the illumination of our highest selves.
in the mirror
My biggest, most ugly and frustrating character trait, is what I have come to call The Psychic Pessimist. Even though he is about as trustworthy as flashing neon signed fortune teller on 8th Avenue, I can’t manage to throw him or his decaying deck of tarot cards out of my mind. He sits in a large turban, surrounded by his mystical trinkets and charms, gazing into his crystal ball ready to forecast all of the horrible thing he sees happening to me. As I walk in the door, he sees the cashier at Macy’s not accepting my return for some unforeseen reason. He sees a confrontation at work ending in me getting fired. He sees my jeans ripping as I sit down on the subway.
So why exactly did I hire this guy, and why can’t I give him the boot? The sad reason is that I think he keeps me safe. I keep him around just in case things don’t work out or if something goes wrong, I saw it coming. The sick reason is because on some level I don’t believe I deserve everything to work out positively because I’m not a good enough person. There are gaps in my self esteem that prevent me from living in a peaceful and mindful reality, based on the reflections on how I see myself through the external.
We use everything and everyone around us as mirrors with which to see ourselves through. By viewing these things or situations negatively I shape the way I view myself. This negligent fortuneteller I’ve employed foresees every experience’s possible negative outcome, and it keeps me small. It makes me view myself as someone who isn’t deserving of good things under the guise of keeping me safe from possible harm.
Yoga helps me to give my apathetic medium the pink slip. Yoga is not a mirror, but a true an honest gaze into yourself. My hamstrings and lower back are tight. EXTREMELY tight. (Hamstrings relate to stability, home, foundation) For me, I get wrapped up in the drama of my muscle tension. How can I stretch? How can I grow? But muscle tension is related to feelings. Did you know that under anesthesia almost anybody could wrap their legs around their head? But if we were to wake up in that pose, we would instantly spasm and strain and damage our muscles. It’s not called muscle memory for nothing. How do we draw ourselves away from the drama locked inside them? Come back to your structure, your foundation, your bones. Let them hold you. And so it is that my lack of faith in my foundation, (physically and fundamentally) is what leads me to conjure up constant thoughts of my demise.
Settle into your bones. Let them hold you and support you. New years brings such a demanding pressure to create new goal and resolutions, and then we go outside in this winter weather don’t want to do anything. There is much to be read into that coincidence. It’s not in our immediate muscular action where change takes place, it is within the trust and strength of our infrastructure. We needn’t do anything but clearly and firmly establish the foundation of our dreams and goals to allow our muscles to open and effortlessly carry us in the right direction. The Psychic Pessimist is an employee of my self deprecation. Now is the time to discover what employs the voice in your head and acknowledge that it isn’t working for you. Let your yoga practice illuminate you in a way which allows you to see yourself fully. Only then can you change the way you view your surroundings. Wrap yourself around the most healing, the most generous and solid perception of what you truly are; an inseparable part of the divine.
storytellers
Since the dawn of time we have been telling stories; it’s what we live for. From enacting stories about battles around a prehistoric campfire, to listening to the latest neighborhood gossip, watching our favorite TV shows, seeing plays, movies, Facebook statuses, newspapers; all ways of connecting, imagining, escaping, feeling, healing, hating, inspiring, commiserating, and loving ourselves and others. When I speak to my friends, my mind races to think of all the things that happened to me to share with them. Funny, embarrassing, exciting tales of my life I want to replay for them. Alone with myself, my mind replays stories, entertaining myself with events from the day, week, or entire lifetime. We are captivated by our imagination, our desire to be carried away by what was or what could be. We allow these stories to become theories of how things might be. Our heads become a vast library filled with novel after novel of our collected and created episodes. On the street they come out in theories of how I should behave, or how things should be or how they were. On my mat they dictate how things were yesterday during practice, how much farther I should fold. Your head can look like the library from the opening scene of ghost busters, books flying off the shelves, a tornado of stories haunting you in a spiral of terror.
It is important to our evolution to carry with us these tails of triumph, adventure, heartache, and shenanigans, but we must be able to put them aside to return the the present chapter. There are many schools of thought which ask for you to clear your mind of thought in order to achieve a higher state of being. And maybe for some one hundred and twenty year old sages living in caves, it is a true reality of being. But us storytellers still living out our desires, our hopes and dreams, our achievements; our mind must be filled. What we must strive for is not clearing our mind of thought, but being in control of what books we take off the shelf. See which stories are old and out dated. Which are myths, non-fiction, humor, opinion. To go a step further, come to realize that just like a real book, just because you’ve read it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, or reread it. Don’t shut out thought or stories, listen to them fully. Know what is on every page. Then you can comb through each of your thoughts as an editor in chief of your publishing company and take out anything that doesn’t belong there any longer. You are in control. We can’t take away all thought at once, you can’t drop off all the books in your mind to the Salvation Army. Start by ridding your internal book shelves of all the things that don’t serve you. Then maybe you can begin to open up the books still remaining and revise them one word at a time. Maybe then someday our thoughtless minds can sit atop a rock somewhere, not missing all those stories we had a hundred years ago which eventually we decided all became outdated.
beginner’s mind
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
My inner-voice has diarrhea of the mouth. I’m everything I hate in a conversation partner. I interrupt myself, I talk to myself incessantly about the same thing over and over, and I pretend to listen to my heart when all I’m really thinking about is dinner. I’ve started to take a big look at this rude party guest as part of a life coaching workshop with the Handel Group. (Yes you should check them out!) Whilst delving into 18 different areas of my life, cultivating my perfect dream for them, my current reality, and the difference between them, it’s very hard to maintain my focus on the moment. Well taking a huge sword to hack at all the cobwebs shadowing my past and looking at my progress, has driven me away from sitting with the reality that everything is still perfect in this moment. How can I be at peace in the present while kicking up the dirt of the past AND dream about my ideal future??
I’ve become a self help junkie. I can’t get enough. I can’t let go of the idea that there’s things I have not yet unearthed. It’s like I’m a compulsive hand washer of the head. If I have a negative thought, I feel like Lady Macbeth rushing over to a sink to get the spots off. I have zero tolerance for myself. Yes, I love myself enough to do this work, but where is the love within the work???? I feel like Conan the Barbarian, swinging a giant mace around all the character traits I wish to tame. There is nothing gentile about this method. There is no love. Your body doesn’t respond. Your mind doesn’t cooperate. This inner voice emerges, bossing me around. The same voice you hear on the yoga mat telling you to bend your knee more, relax more, you’e not breathing, you’re not flexible enough to do that.
This voice overstays its welcome because we exist within a paradox. We have living inside ourselves both a teacher and a student. One resides in our head, and one in our hearts. The problem is we think we know which is which, but we forget the truth. Our head thinks it’s the teacher, but really it is the listener. All it does is regurgitate information passed on by our world or if we’re truly listening, our hearts. It tries to help, but it only has the experience of the past at it’s disposal if it doesn’t remember it’s really the student. This messenger will talk forever because it forgot how to listen.
This is because we no longer approach learning in the way we used to when our hearts were the most open. Think back to kindergarden, sitting with your legs crossed on a large carpet, hardly able to sit still with excitement. What is the teacher going to say? What am I going to learn? Our eyes wide and sparkling with the anticipation of what’s to come. Butterflies, space ships, dinosaurs, firemen; we couldn’t get enough and it all blew our minds. We believed our bodies and minds could accomplish anything because our hearts gave us the encouragement to love, to dream, to explore, and we listened. Somewhere along the road, our student brain decided it had a good enough picture of life and honored itself with the degree of teacher.
Return yourself to rightful balance. Exploring your practice as the student who learns from the true teacher, the heart. Bow before it with the reverence it deserves, meet it cross-legged and wide eyed with excitement for the journey it wishes to lead you to unfold inside yourself. That nagging voice inside of you is nothing more than a bratty student who has decided to be the class clown instead of focus on the lesson at hand. It will keep you occupied for hours and hours throwing spit wads, drawing funny pictures, and telling you that school sucks. But your classroom which is your body has so many wonders to explore, that only your true teacher, your heart, can guide you through to transformation.
raise it up
An acting teacher of mine liked to remind us of what he called The Middle Class Agreement: I’ll never be without food, clothing, or shelter and in return I’ll mind my place. Never being seen as too big, or too imposing; always staying in line. I won’t speak out of turn, I won’t shine, but I’ll always have just enough.
As you read this idea, you might think it sounds preposterous that our culture lives like that; we’re taught that each of us is unique and special. But we each carry a piece of this other debilitating thinking around with us. In school we’re taught to conform to the thinking of the institution. At a job we are taught to conform to the workplace. Media begs us to conform to popular ideas and trends. As yogis, our practice gives us the capacity to be more receptive and more adaptive to our surroundings because we become more in tune with ourselves. But looking more carefully, our surroundings have the ability to lower our expansive vibrations by trying to dutifully adapt. We spend all this time on the mat cultivating this higher vibration inside our selves and then step out into the world thinking “How dare I shine brighter than everyone else”. “How dare I take up more space”, “All of these people on the street are rude and imposing”, thus allowing all of these conformities to take precedence over the beautiful space and resonance we’ve manifested inside. Our vibration is lowered. It’s like showing up to a party looking your absolute best, only to discover that no one else is dressed as nicely. You loosen your tie, take off the high heels, the hair comes down, you untuck your shirt, all because you didn’t want to stand out.
SHINE! Raise the vibration! It is our duty as well as our blessing as yogis to raise it up. We will always be met with resistance, a drag, a lowly base vibration so much of the community generates, and it’s easy to think “what’s the point”. Some people might take offense because they don’t feel as strong, or deserving enough to open to that divine power the we have ushered into our being. It is our responsibility and our challenge to hold our focus, to hold still in our vibrational power. Unconditional love will be the tool used to soften our judgement and our resistance to patience with those who struggle to raise their own. We are the ones with the power to be the beacons of grace, being mirrors for those who have not yet witnessed the potential inside themselves. Never should we lessen our expansion to pacify our shadow selves. Be that force, that light, that presence, inspiring everyone to be their most radiant selves. Our insecurities, fears, and doubts will dissolve by the sincere attention given to raising the vibration of our hearts.
ooooh, shiny!
I won’t lie, I woke up this morning on the wrong side of the bed. I felt like I had been wedged in between the mattress and the box spring while Jabba the Hut rested peacefully above me all night long. Sick? No. Hung over? No. Jabba the Hut really spent the night? I wish.
It’s been an emotional last couple of days for me. I started a life coaching workshop on Monday, where even before the first class we were asked to write about 18 different areas of our life and talk about our ideals, present situation and the gap between them. As things started to come up, I took notice of myself, my behaviors, my habitual patterns, and by just taking notice things begin to shift. It can feel shitty because it’s damn hard work to change old worn out patterns. But feeling confident that I had conquered new ground, I found myself reaching out saying “I want more, I want to go further.” I see my habits, I see the ways to make improvements and I want to check theses things off my list and get on to the next step.
It is so hard to be in the middle of a lesson. The real reason I woke up in this bad mood was for not being in the present moment. Instead of laying these key life lessons out on the table and applying them to my life and living in my new found expansion, all I wanted was to receive more; like a spoiled little kid who received a toy for his birthday. Instead of taking it out of the box, I just looked around the room for the next present to open. Just because we intellectualize some revelation about our life, doesn’t mean we’re living it and doesn’t make us worthy of receiving the next. Our true evolution depends on living in our inspiration. Staying present means using all the gifts that we receive and not just searching for new ones; believe me, the universe knows the difference. Play with your new toy. Live your inspiration. Not just for a day, or a week, and feel sad for not yet having something newer and shinier come your way. Yes we live in a dispensable world. Everything around us becomes so instantaneously outdated that we are are always looking to replace it with with something new. It is not a grounded spiritual practice for evolution. Get to know your life lessons. Don’t just receive them, take them out of the box, play with them. Get to know every part of them, inseparably carry them around with you under your arm like your favorite childhood Tickle Me Elmo doll.
Yoga is a dedicated and lifelong practice that requires steadfastness and focus. You can’t keep changing your foundation for the latest and greatest, we need something solid and grounding. The lesson for me was that whenever our wanderlust selves are desperately seeking inspiration, it is not because we need to sit and be content with being empty, but because we still have plenty to work. Continue to return to the present moment and play with what you have already received. Trust that when it’s time, a bright shiny package of inspiration will arrive on your doorstep.
what we don’t know
Someone the other day was talking to me about our brain capacities and why we are so limited to using such a small percentage of it. The main reason being that we only recognize what we know and what we recognize we don’t know. Meaning, our brains make us think we don’t know only what we think we don’t know. We know there’s a new store around the corner but just don’t know what’s inside it yet. We know there are 8 more chapters left in this book, but don’t know yet what’s written on the pages. So we are in a way, not so open to the idea of the unknown. Think about when Galileo told everyone the earth was round.
Meditation/ yoga bridges the gap between our perceived unknown and the truly unknown. As our concentration deepens, we begin to journey past our mental limitations which fills us with the potentiality for change. Our narrow-minded thoughts begin to inevitably shift. So without getting too heady (as this is not a blog on quantum physics) let’s get to the heart of it…….
What we are doing as yogis by trying to stay in the present moment isn’t just about clearing our thoughts, or being more present, it’s about keeping our minds open to the unknown. By acknowledging our physical and mental limitations as being constricted by what we perceive we don’t know, we begin to move past it. The more we open to this idea, the more room there is for growth, expansion, divine evolution.
How can we know best if we don’t know everything? There is a humbleness which arises from the recognition of our flawed perception. Opening to the possibility that the unknown vastly surpasses our limited notion of it, leads us closer to seeing things as they truly are. We are led in the right direction because we become pulled by our intention instead of our feeble logic. This is why children are so free, they know they don’t know anything! Reconnect to the instinct that everything is possible. What is all of this really? Just the emanation of unconditional love.
sincerity
I heard a word this week that hit me pretty hard: sincerity. The concept of unconditional love is a pretty lofty one. In fact, its application into everyday tasks evolves involuntarily through our other practices. I know I rarely approach the checker at Duane Read and think, “I offer you unconditional love”. Or even if I do, it’s still a pretty elusive thing to practice just by thinking to myself that I want to offer it. What I can do instead of thinking about this pie in the sky ideal while paying for my Aquanet and Secretary’s Day greeting card, is offer my sincerity. To approach everything we do with our utmost sincerity, draws everything towards us. It is in fact the manifestation of unconditional love. Only that which serves our hearts can we offer our sincerity to. It breathes within it connection, respect, devotion, presence, clarity, steadfastness; all bringing us closer to an offering of unconditional love.
Why are we so much less connected to this idea than we ought? It is because in our society we are taught to reach, to grasp, to take, to win. There is no need to be sincere if there are enough things to protect us. Our money, our material possessions all become our foundation and we use them to act on our behalf instead of our hearts. All of these things make us lazy. We give our money to the person at the register forgetting to see them as people. We wish our friends a happy birthday on Facebook without having to do more than click a button from our phone. We walk down a busy street with our hand out in front to elbow our way through the crowd. Sincerity returns us to our hearts. We see and hear and feel again, all from our heart.
Sincerity restores us to presence, almost like living within a moving meditation. It makes our decisions, our humor, our skepticism, all come from our true center, bringing balance, inner wisdom and steadfastness to our intentions. It’s the overstimulation surrounding us every minute of every day which forces us to not see things, to guard ourselves. This is a consumer nation. Everything around us is trying to convince us to buy something. We retreat, we harden, we protect ourselves from this insincerity; we have no choice. We must not open our hearts in spite of this, we must open our hearts because of this. Our task is to keep the balance. Not just within ourselves but in the world. Nature offers nothing but it. There are no spring flowers blooming in January, there are no whales swimming up the Mississippi River, they are all in the flow of grace. We are the only beings with distractions keeping us from reveling in it at all times. Let our sincerity guide us back.
keeping house
Anyone who steps foot into a yoga class for the first time has either left feeling warm and tingly from realigning and releasing, or run screaming from the studio having no idea how much they’re holding onto inside themselves.
After moving past the sanskrit, the falling onto your neighbor, the feeling like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, it’s easy to fall into the category of fair weather yogi. Go to yoga to feel de-stressed, detoxed and detoured. Stroll around with a yoga mat and a smug 70-degree-partly-cloudy grin which says, “I feel better, shouldn’t you?”. We’ve dust-busted away all the bad little bits of anger and stress and returned to our pleasant neutral selves. There comes a time when we must transcend this personal bliss and begin to emanate something more than “peace” or “perseverance”. I’m just going to throw the big one out there; unconditional love. To not take this on is like having a home which you keep immaculately groomed and beautiful and never invite anyone over to share and enjoy with you. To spend day after day designing and dusting and shining, all so you can walk around and say “ah it’s so clean and perfect in my home”. I had a good friend once tell me they didn’t like practicing at a certain studio because of it’s location on one of the busiest streets of New York. Leaving the studio, the outside world felt like it permeated into all the peace they had just spent the past hour and a half cultivating. This puts us head to head with our real task, this is where the real yoga class begins.
The true gift of our practice is received only in the sharing of our cultivated love; only then will it come back to us. This is the real strength found in the practice of yoga. After all we have overcome and all the peace we have found inside ourselves, by ourselves, we must offer it freely back into the world. It mustn’t be treated as something so fragile or fleeting. The stronger and more gracious you are with it, the deeper your roots grow, the more abundant it becomes.
We can become consumed with action driven merely by thought, or desire, or emotion. But instead we must learn to be led by our hearts, disassociated from action and outcome. Our actions are then manifested from our hearts. This is what moves us forward, this is what gives us the courage to discover the hidden spaces inside of ourselves. We CAN be guided in this way. The scarier, the uglier, the nastier it becomes, the more courage it will take. But it is what moves us into a greater state of awareness of ourselves and creates greater opening.
Instead of living in this unscathed sanctuary, I give you the task of throwing the biggest party you’ve ever had. Or invite at least one person into your home in the next week. For dinner, for coffee, or just to give your neighbor a book you wanted them to have. Share what you have. Offer up your unconditional love. Do not save it for just yourself, your mother, your wife, your baby, your friend, or for when the perfect moment arises. Become rooted in the emanation of unconditional love so that you may be guided and provided for in all of your dreams and desires.
not this time
Welcome. I will begin by saying that in my lifetime I have had zero interest in writing my thoughts down, but as you create and discover space inside of yourself, I recognize the importance of exploring the untapped and unexpected potential it bestows. It has less to do with suddenly finding some new talent for writing, but more in believing that internal expansion brings insight and clear vision which becomes more easily accessible and shared. Like uncoiling a garden hose. (don’t worry the metaphors get better)
So much of my youth was spent watching my parents’ careful struggle with divorce, finances, jobs, abuse. Their perseverance of it all was sometimes maintained by choosing inaction, which was brought on by the fear of jostling the Jenga tower of life. I know this was to provide security for their nest. “Not this time” became a popular phrase in our household. It became less about financial security to 8 year old me, but instead took hold of a deeper understanding of myself as not being worthy of receiving. It was never safe to receive.
What we forget is that things will fall apart. It is the nature of life. If we don’t let things fall apart, they can’t come back together. We can’t get a clear view of our situation if we’re straining to keep it together. We’re too busy trying to hold things together by those last few threads of security, of familiarity, to tap into the grace and unconditional love that is always available to us. The universe is continuously demonstrating this. The cycle of life depends on rebirth. Have you ever seen a tree that is covered in dead leaves?
So how do we maintain our composure throughout all this? It is the yoga that allows us to hold our seat. It allows us to not be afraid of backing off from our growing pains. Yoga becomes the eye of our storm, rooting us to the center of it all. It grants us the grace to move through and transcend the constant flux of the material world. We are then held together by our connection to the universal consciousness inside ourselves. Then we may sit and watch peacefully in the center of all the impermanence which cycles around us. This is how we open to grace.
We are all worthy of this. There is no need to feel stuck. It is only the clenching onto the strings of security that keeps us stagnant and small and unworthy of change. Now! It is “always this time”. There is always a way. Everyday is that rainy day you saved up for. If you are making a decision based on fear, than look deeper to see what strings you’re holding onto that are keeping you from moving forward.
