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The yoga mat and meditation cushion are both transformation stations.

In yoga, you may get stronger and more flexible via asanas or the postures.  In meditation, you may get calmer while on the cushion.

But do not be mistaken.  These benefits are only the tip of the iceberg.  Neither practice is an isolated activity you do for a time and then afterwards resume your normal life.

With yoga and meditation, you come to the mat or the cushion again and again.  They are like a good friend that you implicitly trust with your heart, mind, and body.  You offer yourself willingly to the practices.

And as a consequence, both can transform, and over time improve who you are as a person, how you are in the world, and how you live.

Yoga and meditation literally are for life!

 

Enthusiasm can fuel your yoga and meditation practices.

When you show up to the yoga mat or the meditation cushion with enthusiasm, you can feel it propelling you forward.

Smile at your good fortune and be thankful for this amazing and most natural, seemingly endless, positive energy.

Again and again, enthusiasm will motivate, energize, support, and sustain you in your practices.

Silence hangs around

in the only way it knows,

without a sound,

patiently waiting for you.

When doing postures in yoga, we stretch and breathe into tight areas of the body to create more space and flexibility.

Similarly, we can relieve stress when problems arise by not reverting to the reflex of panicking.  This urgency to immediately solve and quickly rid ours and our dear ones’ lives of “problems” creates a lot of stress and may actually be counterproductive.

Instead of this “automatic” fright-flight response, creating space within one’s psyche for periods of confusion and disarray may help with resolving problems.  Things can ferment, coalesce, fall apart again, then possibly come together to a more organic solution.

We can learn to be more comfortable with uncertainty, even welcoming it as necessary to this creative process.

Breathing into these tight emotional, intellectual, and spiritual spaces creates flexibility and freedom for the heart to be able to relax and smile as it finds its way.

How can I celebrate the flow of life through me?

How do I honor it?

What can I give it, after all it’s given me?

Love and respect hardly seem enough….

But then again, maybe I’m mistaken….

What can I give life?

Everything I’ve got!

All my effort in love….

From a welcoming heart.

Silence hugs the vibrations of the gong,

yet lets them go freely about their way…

as they fade…

and finally cease,

having returned home.

 

We vibrate just like the gong…

and silence carries us

through our lives,

until we too eventually fade…

and return home.

 

 

 

 

 

If change is constant,

then even I am different in the next moment.

Nothing is fixed, not even me… or you!

Not even our center is fixed; it too moves in the flow.

A regular yoga and meditation practice more enables us to tune in to and become absorbed in the peace, joy, and creative dynamism of this center amidst the continuous flux.

The silence I want to tell you about

is beyond words….

In that moment in meditation or yoga when silence finds me, awareness absorbs in the still center.

It is as though there is or was no me.  Awareness of me is gone.

There is, in its place, awareness of an alive stillness, pulsing with bliss.

I am a student of this silence–eager, supplicant, and grateful.

It carries me, just as it does sound, held in it, cradled.

 

 

Most of us think of asanas or postures when we think of yoga, all the bendy poses yoga’s famous for.

However, there are eight limbs or aspects of yoga to help us lead a meaningful life with less suffering.  Asanas are only one of these limbs or practices.

Pranayama or breathing exercises is another less well-known but marvelously helpful practice.

One such practice is alternate nostril breathing, nadi shodhana.  Like a fresh spring breeze to the head, mind, and emotional state, it cools and refreshes.  Emotions calm, settle.  A new steadiness and grounded clarity arises and remains even after just a few rounds of alternate nostril breathing.

Click on the link above for a video to learn nadi shodhana, and try this simple yet amazing yoga practice.

 

To read more about the eight limbs of yoga, click on this link for another great article, “What Are the Eight Limbs of Yoga?”