Author: pmcrose

At the heart of our yoga and meditation is the desire for our well-being, whether it be to improve or maintain it.

We wish for this same well-being for those we love, for those we care about.

When we witness a tragedy, we extend a prayer or a wish for the victims’ well-being.

We may initially begin our yoga and meditation practices for our personal benefit, but as we practice over the years something may shift that blurs the ego delineations of who we are and how we are interconnected.

We can practice for the well-being of all of us because at our root, like the giant redwoods or the lovely aspens, we may be more interconnected and not near as separate as we may think.

Relying on circumstance for our happiness and joy is, obviously, a very dicey thing.

Good situations come and go (and so do bad, thankfully).

If there is, as the yogic sages claim, a happiness and joy that just is independent of circumstance, then that’s for me. I’ll put my efforts in that direction.

Yoga and meditation can guide and train us to look in this direction, to steady and ground ourselves in that–a happiness and joy that just is, as a condition of our being.

For all of us, it takes the consistent and steady effort of practice to find this and to stay with it. But if we can, we know we have found something that is so valuable and dependable.

Where will you look for your happiness and joy?

Things can be hard.

However, there are two kinds of hard–one through effort, the other through suffering.

Putting forth the effort to do yoga and meditate can be difficult. We need to overcome tendencies to resist–whatever they may be… and show up for practice. The result is a happier life–not free of suffering but with less of it, full of more love and joy and compassion.

Or we can forgo practice and suffer the absence of that which can help us have a happier, more fulfilling life.

Hard??

This song lyric pretty much sums it up.

Great yogis and sages say we can’t find love, and happiness, in the variable world–at least not the deepest sort that’s unaffected by circumstances. We are talking about a love, and happiness, that endures despite all.

This love, and happiness, is right here with us all the time, according to the sages.

We’re simply looking in all the wrong places.

According to them, we need to turn within and meditate and do yoga, and then we just might be fortunate enough to encounter this love and happiness, or get glimmers of it.

And at least then we’ll be looking in the right place, which is certainly a good place to try.

See you on the path… no, I mean the road to happiness… and love!

Yoga and meditation help us reset and transform into enhanced versions of ourselves. Sort of like you and me 2.0… over and over again, modifying and adjusting and improving. This transformation can be nuanced and very subtle or substantial.

The practices poise us for the grace of The Great Transformer to “adjust” what needs adjustment for the always variable circumstances of our lives.

2.0… 3.0… 4.0… 4.2….

Unique flavors, unique tones on a piano with an infinite keyboard, unique tapestries–each person, each event, each moment of time… unique.

Yoga and meditation can awaken us to this and help us be more present to the time we have–unique.

Yoga and meditation support our well-being in all regards and in all circumstances.

Like that which support the domes of grand stone buildings, the practices buttress our lives lifting us, while firmly grounded here on earth, toward the heavens.

In truth, the practices help us realize this Grand Buttress that is always there supporting and uplifting us.

The inner teacher has a very large classroom with a very full curriculum–our lives.

Through our yoga and meditation, we start to listen to the inner teacher. We come to attention.

Class is not in session only when we practice, but for our entire day and night, week after week, and year by year.

Listen up, class is in session!

As we practice our yoga and meditation, we travel through the veils of identity that our Source has become.

In varying degrees, we may be uplifted and feel greater love or compassion, greater unity with humanity and nature, greater peace or centeredness… we may feel more expansive. We may just feel a significant and noticeable shift in energy or mood. Whether these effects of practice are slight or great, they are always beneficial.

Close your eyes on your meditation cushion; begin to move on your yoga mat.

Welcome one and all!

Socrates and Plato proclaimed the need to know thyself on the road to happiness.

In yoga and meditation, we can come to use all the human tools or capacities the life force or consciousness has created and animated to know itself.

As we practice, we peel the layers of our being and pierce or see through their veils. We use “thyself” to know thyself.

We are the mirror that mirrors who we are.

Our practice is the road, if not to happiness, to greater contentment. And if we are fortunate, it is the way to greater and greater happiness.

We yogis and seekers share the road! See you there!