I am always amazed at how much can be achieved through yoga in so little time. I have found that even 15 minutes of pranayama and hatha yoga in the morning can center my awareness and enliven my body and greatly reduce stress and fear for the upcoming day.

My teacher used to say that if you take one step towards God, then God will take 99 towards you.
Yoga is the step that we take, the satisfaction that we feel is God stepping towards us.

In November Linda will be offering a workshop where you will learn 3 15 minute routines that will give you the ability to practice yoga daily even with a buzy schedule.

Sujantra

I was reading a book by Rudolph Steiner the other day: he founded the Waldorf Schools. The book is about accessing the higher realms of reality and he wrote that one of the most important things in the journey is to have confidence in one’s goal. If we have confidence in our goal then we will trust that the goal itself will provide us what we need as we journey forward. One of the teaching from ancient Indian philosophy is: when the student is ready the teacher appears. The universe will provide us with all we need to move forward but we must be clear on where we are going and allign our goals with our deepest nature.
–Sujantra

We often hear the idea expressed that we are “one” with the universe and it is put forth as a spiritual reality. Thinking about it a bit brought me to the idea that we are also one with the universe in a physical sense in that we cannot exist without our physical connection to our environment.
When I think of being connected to something I think of it in terms of my existence is part and parcel of that to which I am connected. We are part of a whole. Without air I cannot exist. Without water, and moisture, and food I cannot exist. Therefore they are part of me.
Our link with the physical reality is a reflection of our spiritual connection to the universe.

Sujantra

During meditation we are able to experience a deep peace: it may be in our body, mind, emotions or heart.

Regardless of where we experience the sensation it is this very peace that is the seed of the universe. Just as a river flows through many different lands and terrains so to does that seed of peace flow and animate many parts of our being.

By feeling and focusing on that peace you can trace it back to the Source. That conscious experience is illumination.

We are in the process of developing a yoga workshop to teach the fundamentals of yoga to beginners. On the philisophical side it has me contemplating what I consider to be the basic teachings of spirituality.

The first of the basic ideas I have formulated is the following:

“We are all part of a living, expanding and evolving universe. It upholds our existence. We are drops in the ocean of Infinity. We are flames of a great fire, individual notes in a beautiful symphony. We are part of the great music of life.”

How to consciously experience this is the essence of spiritual practice. By calming your body, mind and breath you can begin to feel the subtle energy of the universe which courses through our being, animating and enlivening our physical existnece.

You can experience this and more at our weekly meditation on Tuesday nights at 7:30pm….

I may be living in the 21st century with all of its norms and social patterns of accepted behavior but many dimensions of me might as well be a caveman wandering through the dark forest in search of food and comfort.
My instincts and emotions are like a machine that runs on certain specific data that was programmed in thousands of years ago.
Much of our mind is dwelling in the dark forests of the past. The mind is chemicals that have changed little in thousands of years.
An interesting thing about the mind is that it fixates on what it wants and any variation from the specifics identified meets with a lot of resistance. Sri Chinmoy in one of his book Everest Aspiration expresses this very well: “We want to possess [a particular thing], but if one thing more or one thing less than what we wanted comes, we are not satisfied because human desire is so limited that we want the thing exactly the way our mind has conceived it.” This attribute of the mind is great when it comes to survival but runs us into plenty of trouble if it is our guiding principle through life.

As I meditated upon this idea it occurred to me that the reason for this goes back to the need for specificity when it comes to survival. Once an animal identifies a specific thing needed for survival, or a specific thing to avoid for survival, then it is imperative that the animal be sure to hone in and stay focused on that exact thing. The red berry can keep you alive, the blue on will kill you.

A child who is having a “temper tantrum” will often reject all offerings because the exact thing that they wanted was not given to them. They wanted the orange two-sticked popsicle and NOTHING else will suffice. And even that will now not suffice for they did not get it WHEN they wanted it. So it is not just WHAT but WHEN that affects the animals existence and hence our desires.

Welcome to the past!

I am in the middle of reading the Ramayana, the tale of Rama: one of the great figures in Indian lore. I am reading the version by William Buck…here is my retelling of one of the early moments of intrigue:

In heaven high above Indra turned and hissed like an angry snake, his fine robes were burnt and torn his face and chest covered with dried blood. He heard Vashishtas incantations and it made him angrier still. Indra looked around heaven and it was in hopeless ruin. The heavenly garden was uprooted. Heavens long golden street was lettered with slain Gandharavas and Apsarasas and the corpses of Demons. The heavenly stream of Ganga ran red with blood. The Battle of Heaven had just been fought. Indra and Heaven had fought hard and lost to the Demon King Ravana.

Indras eyes filled with tears. He reached down and grabed a large stone and flew with it up to
Brahma’s high heaven beyond change. Indra threw the stone through the most beautiful window of Brahma’s Palace. The guards ran to arrest the perpetrator but when they saw it was Indra they bowed down and lead him to Brahma.

Sujantra

I saw a movie recently that I found very engaging: Adaptation, with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. The movie deal with finding love and passion in life. If you like writing or plants the movie will have an extra appeal. Its about an author trying to write a screenplay adaptation or a book about plants and for the very movie you are watching.

The relevant issue to yoga is held in the following lines from the script.

CHARLES: I loved Sarah, Donald, it was mine that love, I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away.”

DONALD: She thought you were a nerd, Charles, she was making fun of you.

CHARLES: That was her business not mine.
You are what you love, not what loves you…that’s what I decided a long time ago.

–from “Adaptation”

Sujantra

Someone said that the only constant is change…and yet those who practice deep meditation have the experience of finding an unchanging reality of peace and calm. On the surface the two statements seem to contradict each other. How can there be two realities existing simultaneously? A reality of constant change and a changeless reality.

any thoughts?

The famous writer Albert Camus said something most notable (recently relayed to me by a friend and fellow yogi:) “… people expend tremendous energy just trying to appear normal.”

How true that is. Society defines what is “normal” and then most of us set out to conform to those norms. I remember walking the halls in high school and the strong sense of self consciousness that I had. So much was about what other people thought about me and what I was doing, wearing etc: pier pressure. It was during that time that I learned an important antidote to this great concern for how we appear to others (which is the root of the fear of public speaking.) The secret for me was learning to laugh at myself.

One day I realized that I was taking myself way to seriously. I did something that was not “normal” and was slightly ridiculed for it. Out of nowhere I just started to laught at the situaltion and what I had done. That proved to be a turning point in my life.

If you can learn to laugh at yourself then you can learn to shake off “failures and defeats” and take them instead as great learning experiences. Don’t take yourself to seriously…it feel good!