Author: pmcrose

Like the oyster to sand, may your yoga and meditation secrete the juices to transform life’s inevitable irritants into things of beauty that you value, and at the very least make them less irritating.

The feeling that you have when you do something is what you automatically receive. You are feeling it and its reverberations as you do whatever the act is.

When you perform any action out of love, you receive the automatic reward. You receive love!

Yoga is not something you only do on the mat.

Perform more acts of love in 2025, and make this an even happier new year!

Practice makes progress, not perfect.

That’s why it’s called a yoga and meditation practice.

As we practice, we care for the well-being of ourselves and others. The practices are for progress with this.

Progress is never-ending. Perfect is “achieved” or “reached” (as if it can ever really be achieved or reached?!).

We are ever-evolving human beings.

Ready for some progress with that?

See you at practice!

In meditation and yoga, we usually begin our practice in the choppy waters of the everyday thinking mind.

As we practice and dive deeper, we encounter quieter, steadier currents.

At times as we practice, we may drop deeper still to the ground of our being and experience its vastness.

As we finish our practice and return to our daily life, we are buoyed by the active waters of everyday life, and we again rise to the surface. But we are more refreshed and restored.

Now we have experienced some of the deeper currents that move our lives. We carry these fruits of practice back to the surface. We know more intimately what supports our everyday life, and we are grateful for this.

There is nothing like a deep dive!

The middle chakra is the heart chakra, with three below and three above, our baser or lower frequencies and our more ethereal higher frequencies.

The alchemy of the heart melds these, and composes the music of the heart from this full range of the lowest to the highest tones of our being.

Love is what brings it all together.

When we move forward with love, we have all our being working in harmony tuned by the heart. We are literally more composed, if you will.

Yoga and meditation help to tune us to this love frequency and get us moving to it.

In the game Marco Polo, we listen and pursue the person answering with “Polo” when we yell out “Marco.” The goal is to catch that person. We seek them.

Such it is with meditation and mantra. The Self or universal vibrates with mantra. We say this enlivened mantra and feel its reverberations. We lean into it. We seek it.

It is leading us to the Self or the universal. We follow these vibrations, its sensations, to That which we seek.

“Marco!”…

Through the practices, we bring a meditated person to the world.

This is not a panacea for the ills of the world or for our problems.

But there is no doubt that regular practice is good for our personal well-being and for those around us. Yoga and meditation can help buffer the headaches of this world by tempering our experiences and responses to them. The practices can help surgically remove impediments to our joy and love and help us lead healthier lives.

No, certainly not a cure-all, but the practices are very good medicine!

There’s an expression in AA a friend tells me: “No better, no worse.”

With such a vision, we put no one on a pedestal. In fact, there are no pedestals.

Just all of us equally human, doing our best.

The yogic sages tell us the universal or divine energy contracts to become each of us. This energy is alive in us as us, each of us contractions of this amazing and mysterious force.

Through the practices, we come to know and experience this force that dwells in each of us as us. We develop a relationship with it.

As we sense this, our perspective subtly, but significantly, shifts, and we begin to change how we see ourselves, and others, and how we live. Maybe with a little more love… a little more respect.

All of us, this infinite array of contractions at play, being us, doing our best for this world!

It’s easy to see how the droplet in the ocean is the ocean and still the droplet, being both the ocean and the individual drop at the same time.

It’s a little harder for us in this ocean of humanity and living creatures to see ourselves as the whole of living creation and an individual ego or person all at the same time.

Yoga and meditation can help us experience this merging of ourselves with all of life while still being this distinct person. We can begin to see and feel ourselves as the one in the many.

As the common allegorical story goes, it’s easy to know what part of the elephant we are and not realize we are all the entire elephant at the same time.

The practices can help us clarify the person we are and how we are simulataneously connected to all of life.

We are this distinct droplet in the ocean of humanity and life and, at the same time, all humanity and life.

The practices can bring this experience alive for us, helping us find our place in this world!

Addressing the chakras or energy centers in our being through yoga and meditation helps coordinate and align them to work together better, strengthening our sense of being and peace.

By doing this, we literally run better. It’s like going in for a tune-up.

Hummmmmm!