Author: pmcrose

When the weather calms and the clouds part, you can see forever.

You’ve persevered the weather and the climb, making adjustments all along the way to stay safe and sure-footed.

Inner mountain!

The mountain sees and hears the swirl around it.

Inner mountain is a practiced steadiness amidst it. It is a steadier presence to all including hardships, “bad” days, sadnesses, angers, and fear.

We can use any number of means to come back to this inner mountain–our breath, asanas or poses, meditation, reflection on sacred texts, chanting….

It, like a muscle, is strengthened with practice.

It is not a goal we reach or a skill we master.

Inner mountain is an on-going practice.

In these unsteady times, what can return you to your inner tadasana, your inner mountain?

Your inner mountain is steady in the midst of unsteady and even tumultuous circumstances.

I just recently heard this said by a fellow yoga teacher about effort when reaching one’s limits in yoga poses:

Dance around your barriers when you come up to them. Dance at the barriers, and then release.

With fewer fireworks this 4th of July to light the sky, take the time to meditate or do some yoga.

May you be touched by a bit of joy–spread your inner smile, enjoy the full moon…

take in and spread the light.

Let’s make fireworks in each other’s lives as our nation reaches for a new kind of freedom and security that includes people of all colors.

It’s time we let freedom ring for everyone!

Some days in meditation are a sea of confusion, like being lost in a snow globe that hardly settles.

And other days in meditation, we feel and experience much more of the space amidst the swirl, that which witnesses it… the stillness amidst it.

We practice meditation and yoga regularly to develop stamina of equipoise, to not be carried away while in the presence of the swirl.

We become more like the mountain, steady and rising in the midst of all that goes on around it.

We become a steadier presence.

*Steadiness amongst the micro-movements in any yoga pose nurtures this equipoise. We can practice being the mountain in Tadasana, Mountain Pose.

In breathless times like these…

it really helps to breathe!

Can I hug you at a distance with my smile,

and my eyes of appreciation?

With these words I write?

Can I hug you…

(safely) at a distance for now?

Nature so subtly like a rose’s scent can nudge us into a less thought-driven state.

So too with yoga and mediation.

Sweet!

Gandhi is falsely credited with saying, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

He actually said, ““If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him…We need not wait to see what others do.”

We are living through one of those remarkable periods of history and change.

Every day or as often as you can, regularly come to your yoga mat and meditation cushion. Embrace with me the process of yoga and its ability to transform this world from inside out.

Be the shift!