During our busy day, we can always stop
and breathe…
and remember the joy and stillness that’s always with us.
Doing this can help bring the benefits of yoga and meditation more and more into our daily lives.
Also, remembering experiences from the yoga mat and meditation cushion can help us as we go about our daily activities.
Their energy can permeate our lives like the all-pervasive sunlight cast on this earth.
Bring kind support to those in need, not a compulsive ardor that feels their pain and is driven to solve it.
How does the breath absorb the mind?
Like a sponge soaking up water?
Or moist soil the water sinks into deeper?
Stilling its disparate foray here and there
into one-pointedness
absorbing its activity.
The heart can smile, so satisfied
in the stillness I love.
Resisted emotional pain can lodge somewhere in the body causing physical pain.
Yoga and meditation can help us with this resistance. They can provide the support to meet this pain, accept it, and move on.
Even this pain is another form of the life force. Give it up to the benevolent heart.
Grace is as light as the air we breathe.
The life force is ageless.
Sometimes, I have trouble not getting irritated when someone’s irritated. And then, I might get further irritated with myself for getting irritated.
In turn, my spouse might get irritated with me for being irritated. And then irritated with herself for being irritated… which might further irritate me.
This hall of mirrors is a trap for a type of emotional mirroring that is most always not helpful.
The same endless cycle can arise for anxiety, anger, fear, or sadness among others.
Meditation brings stillness to this endless frenzy of mirrored troubled states.
Meditation is the mirror that does not deflect these turbulent states, but accepts them with compassion and love, knowing difficult times can be difficult, and accepts them without spreading them further.
Meditation can bring peace to the frenzy, accepting it, and making it no longer something to fight, resist, and spread.
As I watch my breath in meditation, the still center draws my mind inward much like gravity pulls water down a drain.
I guess I have to leave this quiet space,
or do I?
I do not need to feel another’s suffering to know it and be of help to them. Taking it on can be debilitating.
However, I want to feel for their suffering and wish to do what I may to alleviate it.
The weight of the world on my shoulders is, to say the least, infinitely overwhelming!
But with compassion, I can have the power and clarity to try and do my part to help lessen suffering.
What can I do to help? What is my part?
You might enjoy a listen to the lesser known song by Ringo Starr–“The Weight of the World!”
Yoga and meditation can support a greater freedom from getting carried away by our compulsive habitual reactions, strong emotions, and irritations. Gradually, we become freer.
And yet being more established in our center, we are freer to feel these inner vicissitudes of emotion and thought. From our more silent center, we can come to witness them more. These inner “problems” are freer to be, to be witnessed, and in time to pass or dissipate. We become freer to choose how we respond to them.
Yoga and meditation celebrate freedom and love. They open us to the wonders of the life force, the kundalini shakti, and lift us like no other fireworks can. They open us to a bliss and freedom beyond any words–a real showstopper celebrating freedom!
Happy 4th of July! May you in some way find a bit of freedom in your heart, mind, body, and spirit to celebrate this awesome life we are living.
The Every Day Yogi 