Author: pmcrose

Yoga and meditation are visits to the life force, or kundalini shakti.

This loving joyful energy fascinates, relaxes, and stills the mind; it both excites and satisfies the heart.

Discipline arises from love–wanting to return again and again to the font of immeasurable joy.

Even greater joy arises as you think about and learn to bring more and more of this blissful energy into your everyday life.

Even glimpses of this support your practice.

 

Today we celebrate in gratitude this awe-inspiring mysterious life force that creates all of us, and all of life.  In yoga this force is called the kundalini shakti.

Yoga and meditation are the repeated journeys to this source. We come to know this energy and the blessing of life–in ourselves and in each other.

Dance with it in love and gratitude.  Celebrate life!

Happy Thanksgiving!

A grateful heart is appreciative and satisfied.

It is not hungry for more.  It appreciates what is.

In the moment of gratitude, there is an upwelling of love.  There is peace and joy.

Gratitude opens the heart and makes it swell.

With gratitude, we invite our gentler and kinder natures to come forth!

It’s funny after 40 years of meditation and yoga I can still feel this way.  Oh sure, there are points I think I know what I am doing, and certainly I do in some ways.

But there is always this spot where you know you don’t know, where you are lost and confused.  Where it’s worth experimenting.  What you used to do just is not enough….it doesn’t seem to quite work, or simply does not!…

This is the point of growth.  It is where you know that you don’t know.  It’s embracing the mystery.

Herein lies the beginner, the explorer.  No matter how much you may know….

It’s always there to venture into.

When you love something, you’re drawn back to it again and again.

Over time, this looks like discipline, but it is really love in action.

Commitment to a schedule only makes this return to your love guaranteed and regular.

Let your love lead you into discipline.

Discipline can arise out of love!

Our stories make us rich, complex tapestries.

You cannot get rid of your stories anymore than you can get rid of your past, but you can add on to your stories, write new chapters here and now in any and all directions.

Now is the creative moment!  NOW!

Yoga awakens the awareness and flow of the life force.

Yoga is an awareness to this incredibly creative force, life itself, this mystery that flows through us and shapes our lives and reality.

We come to know through yoga that this force is enlivening and beautiful–both immensely delicate and enormously strong.

Yoga awakens and strengthens this treasure that flows through all of us.

And most importantly, as we become more aware of this life force, yoga awakens our love for it and our awareness of its preciousness and power.

Be open to this as you do your yoga and you will be amazed.  Your practice will be transformed from mere physical exertion to something truly sublime, inspiring, and potentially life-changing.

It is more than relief for the mind when it can finally rest in silence.

Something else arises in this silence, something else bubbles up from the heart.

Sometimes it is very subtle, like a slight smile in the midst of this quiet.  Other times, it is a surge of jubilation, an outpouring of love, scintillating warmth…even bliss.

And as this arises, the mind is spellbound and pulled deeper and deeper, enveloped in the awe inspiring contradiction of scintillating silence.

In meditation, our mind and heart…our being is drawn to this like a moth to light.  It is our nature to seek it.

Like a feast for the heart and mind, even if only for a moment, this truly satisfies and dispels our usual restlessness.

Simple stillness is so sweet–to have the almost always busy mind slowed down even for a moment.  At times the mind seems hyperactive, unable to stop its fidgeting and antics.  In stillness, the mind is satisfied, no longer grabbing at this and that thought, but finally at ease and relaxed, needing or wanting nothing, at peace in its stillness, happy in itself.

I realized yesterday how much I love yoga.

On the surface, yoga is a mix of body poses which require and foster greater strength and flexibility.

But with practice, something wonderful and mysterious begins to percolate in one’s body and consciousness.  It’s an uplifting force, a jubilation of the heart, a sensation like scintillating warm honey spreading throughout one’s body.