Feelin’ a little frazzled, beat, overrun or overwhelmed? Got the holiday blues? Or just need a pick-me-up or more energy to go?
Just a little yoga or meditation help with this. Try a few poses, or Legs Up the Wall, or a few minutes of meditation or breathing (pranayama).
Even a little bit of help can be a lot.
Breathe in some prana, imbibe an extra shot of the life force, and you may become the life of your party.
You know those dehydrated sponges, all shrunk up and small? And when you add water, they almost miraculously expand and come to life.
Well, yoga and meditation are about the same… bringing us more to life and expansive.
Soak this up when you practice! Expand your being and your heart.
Just like that dehydrated sponge, the prana shakti grows us!
The practices are more about a returning rather than a holding.
When we notice we are “off” or out of balance, askew emotionally, mentally, energetically, or spiritually, we have the practices to bring us back more into balance.
Like a homing device, yoga and meditation return us when we are thrown by events or merely out of kilter.
When we realize the need or desire to realign and make the effort to return to practice, we point or turn ourselves in the direction of our deeper self to come home to ourself.
We turn toward what matters most to us, returning. This is the practice, again and again.
What if that good feeling we felt during yoga and meditation never really left us? What if its source and the experience of it was and is always with us?
What if it was us that left it?
How can we return to it?
This is the practice!
Most company we grow tired of, even most good company, and want or need a break.
However not with the Self, the universal.
In fact, the challenge becomes how to remain in its company.
For this, we have the practices to realign ourselves and to develop, deepen, and strengthen our bond.
This takes practice, like any good relationship does!
The caress of yoga and meditation, whether we feel it or not, gives us greater ease.
Even if ever so lightly, it is there… and a great blessing.
We grow the best we can in and through love.
Yoga and meditation can help put us in this flow of love and be carried away by it!
It takes very little yeast to get the fermentation process started and the reaction beginning as the yeast feeds itself on the flour, in turn causing it to rise.
Very little yeast sets the reaction going.
Same too with the enlivened prana shakti. Through yoga and meditation, we can tap into this awakened energy, even just slightly, and it gets the reaction going that uplifts our hearts, our bodies, our minds… our lives… and those of the people around us.
Even just a little bit...
We all know the familiar expression, “you are what you eat.”
The same goes for thought. You are what focus on and think about, what you focus your thoughts and energy on.
When you think happy thoughts or about happy experiences, you feel happy. When your thoughts are sad, you will feel sad.
Instant karma. In the thought world, we immediately reap what we sow, instantaneously.
We are what we focus on or chew on.
Chew on this for a while!
How do you thank That* which supports you for a lifetime?
With infinite gratitude, that goes on like an endless hall of mirrors…
Yoga and meditation are the road and the road map to feel and know and explore this for life, and be infinitely grateful.
Go explore and be grateful!
*That–the life force, the prana shakti, the chi, the universal self… ever-present and ever-loving, compassionate, joyful, enthusiastic, scintillating… the heart of our being.
The Every Day Yogi 