Like a hard casing, accustomed or habitual fear can enclose and constrict the heart.
Our bodies constrict and close in ways that mirror this.
Yoga and meditation helps expand the heart while dissolving these physical and energetic boundaries and establish new patterns that are more expansive and open, allowing our greatness to shine forth more brightly.
The craft of yoga is the effort we put forth to practice. This takes discipline.
Yoga itself happens–a taste of union, of samadhi, of bliss, of deep happiness and joy.
It is the gift of grace plus effort!
At times in meditation, the mind calms and thought waves subside like a smooth, serene mountain lake with no disturbance.
The trail to such a lake is strewn with haphazard and sundry thoughts and stories, scenery on our way to our destination.
Repeating a mantra and/or watching the breath, by-pass these usual concerns.
Take a break from them, and you can enjoy the awe of this breath-taking scenery–our mind, a mountain lake unperturbed.
Yoga and meditation unmask us from the roles we play and give us a rest from them.
We can explore the immense freedom of being itself and feel its inner peace.
Like a visit to a waterfall, we leave refreshed and renewed.
Yoga poses knead the stress out of us like kneading bread, decreasing the heaviness that weighs us down. As yeast gives bread its lift, so too the prana, the vital life force stimulated by yoga uplifts us.
Any baker is amazed by the miracle of yeast, any yogi the miracle of prana!
As we turn our awareness inward via yoga and meditation, a blooming of our inner being begins to unfurl.
The technologies of yoga and meditation are the tools we use to explore.
Through our practice, we practice using them.
The yoga of asanas or poses employs physicality to unfurl our being deeper into the source of our aliveness.
Starting with movement of bones and muscles and breath, we unfurl and are transported almost magically and mystically to this source and begin to vibrate with its innate and immense joy and inner peace.
At the beginning of meditation, there’s often a flurry of thought as the tautness of the spring of the mind unwinds and settles.
Do not worry about this flurry of thought. It does not mean you cannot meditate, that your mind is too busy to grow quiet.
It is a natural occurrence of the mind settling.
This unfurling of the mind is a necessary step as we fall into meditation.
As we regularly practice our yoga and/or meditation, we become more established in the Self, in this deep happiness not contingent on any circumstance.
As we become steadier in this, we become steadier amidst life’s vicissitudes and less effected by their flux, more able to face life’s challenges with greater inner peace.
We wash our clothes when they get stinky and dirty and lose their freshness.
We sleep when tired to renew ourselves.
So too through yoga and meditation, in the flurry of life’s activity, we recenter and renew ourselves.
The Every Day Yogi 