During this holiday season, let’s remember that yoga and meditation are about the light they can bring us.
We can feel it in so many ways–a lighter mood, a slight smile, lighter shoulders, less worries, feeling less overwhelmed, maybe a lilt in our walk, a happier heart, even tears or laughter.
Yoga and meditation bring us light, lightening and enlightening us
We can bring our joy and our sadness, our pleasure, our pain, our laughter and tears to our yoga and meditation practices.
Like a hammock, the practices and that which they take us to is always there holding us… even through difficult times.
Doing the practices, we can rediscover and deepen our awareness of this again and again.
During all of life’s ups and downs, our practices are for all seasons of life!
The cave of the heart echoes with stillness and love.
Go there, and let it permeate your being.
Our lives are animated by the ripples or waves that flow from this cave.
Through yoga and meditation, we can explore and ride the waves of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions back again to this source, the silence that echoes in the cave of the heart.
Stop for a moment and notice how good you feel when you feel gratitude….
You can’t help but feel more… gratitude.
Meditate on this.
At difficult times in our lives, it’s common to feel overwhelmed and find it hard to find time to practice.
Parables and true stories abound of yogic sages and meditators telling us to do just the opposite–to turn even more than usual to the practices for support during our most difficult times.
I have always tried to follow this advice not to “solve” any problems, but to find the space the practices can provide–the support and love that arises, bringing greater balance or equilibrium or calm, engendering greater compassion for myself and others.
Turning to yoga and meditation at difficult times has always been a good turn, a turn that’s only intensifying my love and appreciation for the practices that are always there for you… if you only turn to them.
Yogic monks often sojourn to caves in the Himalayas for seclusion to pursue their practices.
We needn’t trek to the Himalayas or some sacred shrine or place to enter the heart.
We can go to the cave of our heart through the practices. It’s as close as our next yoga pose, pranayama, or meditation.
The effort to show up for practice transports us there and ushers us in….
According to the yogic sages and poet saints, the heart, literally, of our being is love.
Our yoga and meditation practices can be our journeys to forge deeper, cleaner, and clearer “connections” to its ever-present and boundless flow.
When we take care, our love flows to ourselves and others.
At times, we do things to “take care of” someone or something.
At other times, we take care and hold the space of love, doing nothing.
Connecting us more deeply and intimately, and all the more subtly, to our heart, yoga and meditation can help us “take care.”
Who would think that this silent and nearly motionless meditator could be having a torrid love affair?!
Mesmerized by love, in love, our meditator is carried deeper and deeper.
May you too be mesmerized in meditation into silence and drink up its elixir to share through your open heart.
*To read more about the yoga of devotion and of the heart, Bhakti yoga, click here or here.
A teaspoon of sugar can totally change our somewhat bitter coffee or tea.
So too with yoga and meditation to our mood, to our day.
Regular yoga and meditation, to our life….
The Every Day Yogi 