The many practices of yoga–including active poses, breath work, restorative poses, chanting, meditation…–scaffold support for our transformation and feed its fire.
Experiment to find which practices help and grow your repertoire of tools to support your transformation and expanding sense of well-being.
Refresh, de-stress, recalibrate.
Regular yoga.
Revitalize your practice to start the new year and resolve to make it more regular to support your well-being throughout the year ahead.
Try some candle gazing, and bring some light into the new year.
Sit as you would normally for meditation, except with eyes open, and focus on a candle flame in a dark or near dark room.
As you watch the flame, you may feel calmer, your thoughts may settle or get slower, you may feel lighter or uplifted, more balanced, or easeful.
As we do this practice and focus on the flame in the dark, we are tangibly and subtly training our minds to focus on the light in the midst of the darkness.*
May we share this light with one another to brighten each other’s lives and this world and help to make this a happy new year!
*Like the candle flame illumines the dark, so too the Self illumines our being. Our yoga practices yoke us and refresh our presence to the light.
What if happy holidays was not a seasonal state, but more an everyday feeling or state of mind or being?
What if Santa’s ho-ho spirit could fill not just his jolly belly, but yours and mine?
Ho-ho-ho! See you at yoga and meditation.
We know jolly ol’ Santa has his sleigh that takes him in the sky.
So too the practices of yoga and meditation can take you on quite a ride and lift you higher.
Ho, ho, ho!
It’s the longest day of dark in the year, the winter solstice, the shortest day of light.
Let’s brighten things by sharing our inner light–a generous compliment, a smile, a word of gratitude, a warm or tender hug… a gift!
Let’s each of us help to pull usl from darkness, into light.
Ho, ho, ho!
We don’t know the source of Santa’s jolly nature.
Yogic sages and poets claim this joy and bliss are the very nature of our inner Self.
And through our yoga and meditation, we can tap into this inner joy.
Ho-ho-ho!
The natural high or bliss you can tap into through yoga and meditation can suffuse your being, during and after practice.
If you’re expecting this to make you only jolly or extremely happy, you may be missing its effects as it makes you more settled or grounded, less stressed, more relaxed and easeful, more balanced and steady. It can bring about a smile or a feeling of greater satisfaction.
Start to make an effort to notice this, the often subtle fruits of your practice that are so good for your being!
Ho-ho-ho!
During this holiday season, let’s remember that yoga and meditation are about the light they can bring us.
We can feel it in so many ways–a lighter mood, a slight smile, lighter shoulders, less worries, feeling less overwhelmed, maybe a lilt in our walk, a happier heart, even tears or laughter.
Yoga and meditation bring us light, lightening and enlightening us
We can bring our joy and our sadness, our pleasure, our pain, our laughter and tears to our yoga and meditation practices.
Like a hammock, the practices and that which they take us to is always there holding us… even through difficult times.
Doing the practices, we can rediscover and deepen our awareness of this again and again.
During all of life’s ups and downs, our practices are for all seasons of life!
The Every Day Yogi 