This decision has brought a lot of division and with each side taking stands against each other it has made me ponder where does the philosophy of yoga stand on this?  Every yogi knows that one of the ethical restraints of yoga is non harming, and that is what we work on, but wait there is more.  Each and every one of us has been birthed for a specific reason to work out some specific karma we have accumulated.  What one person does to eradicate their karma may be at odds for us to understand, but is crucial for their spiritual journey. 

For instance.  I sometimes eat meat, mostly fish.  This goes against the ethical restraint of ahmimsa, or non-harming.  I have gone vegetarian and have felt quite bad, not just once, but many times.  My physical body needs protein.  This is part of my karma.  I cannot keep up my practices or energy level up without protein, and believe me I have tried, in all sorts of different ways.  Recently, I took a yoga retreat with a gal from Miami, and she told us many stories, but one of them was her disclosing to her guru/teacher, that she eats meat.  Her guru said, well this is part of your karma on this birth cycle. 

After some more thought about the philosophy, and what yoga stands to teach us is really this.  Stay in the middle.  If you want to keep your body healthy stay in the middle.  That means no crazy fasting, then eating a bunch, or doing yoga for 10 hours a day for a year, then nothing for the next year because you are injured.  The sweet spot is in the middle.  But what if I applied that to my world, my thoughts about others, and about myself?

We cannot judge others, because we are not living in their body, and living out their karma.  What one person decides to do might be against what we would do, but yet, we are not in their body, and living out their karma are we?  What if we applied, “staying in the middle” and gave each person the grace to do what they wanted, and not to judge them, but to love them.  In high school both of my best friends got pregnant.  One decided to keep it, the other abort it.  Although not in touch now, I stayed friends with both at that time, because I understand both of their decisions, and understand life is sometimes gray, not black and white.  Both of them felt strongly about their decision, and I hope still feel comfortable about that decision today.

After the yoga has worked on your mind, what is left at the end of the day is love.  Patience to extend to others, patience for yourself.  Often it takes many births to kill the karma each of us has accumulated.  Once we know this for ourselves, we can simply love.  Go past the judgement and ranting.  Just be love. 

See you on the mat,

Paula

This decision has brought a lot of division and with each side taking stands against each other it has made me ponder where does the philosophy of yoga stand on this?  Every yogi knows that one of the ethical restraints of yoga is non harming, and that is what we work on, but wait there is more.  Each and every one of us has been birthed for a specific reason to work out some specific karma we have accumulated.  What one person does to eradicate their karma may be at odds for us to understand, but is crucial for their spiritual journey.  

For instance.  I sometimes eat meat, mostly fish.  This goes against the ethical restraint of ahmimsa, or non-harming.  I have gone vegetarian and have felt quite bad, not just once, but many times.  My physical body needs protein.  This is part of my karma.  I cannot keep up my practices or energy level up without protein, and believe me I have tried, in all sorts of different ways.  Recently, I took a yoga retreat with a gal from Miami, and she told us many stories, but one of them was her disclosing to her guru/teacher, that she eats meat.  Her guru said, well this is part of your karma on this birth cycle.  

After some more thought about the philosophy, and what yoga stands to teach us is really this.  Stay in the middle.  If you want to keep your body healthy stay in the middle.  That means no crazy fasting, then eating a bunch, or doing yoga for 10 hours a day for a year, then nothing for the next year because you are injured.  The sweet spot is in the middle.  But what if I applied that to my world, my thoughts about others, and about myself?

We cannot judge others, because we are not living in their body, and living out their karma.  What one person decides to do might be against what we would do, but yet, we are not in their body, and living out their karma are we?  What if we applied, “staying in the middle” and gave each person the grace to do what they wanted, and not to judge them, but to love them.  In high school both of my best friends got pregnant.  One decided to keep it, the other abort it.  Although not in touch now, I stayed friends with both at that time, because I understand both of their decisions, and understand life is sometimes gray, not black and white.  Both of them felt strongly about their decision, and I hope still feel comfortable about that decision today.

After the yoga has worked on your mind, what is left at the end of the day is love.  Patience to extend to others, patience for yourself.  Often it takes many births to kill the karma each of us has accumulated.  Once we know this for ourselves, we can simply love.  Go past the judgement and ranting.  Just be love.  

See you on the mat,

Paula

Doing the yoga is a pretty straightforward simple act.  When you make the choice to come, you come and take the class, working on the physical act of moving your body, and coordinating your breath at the same time.  The whole time you are moving, breathing, the channels inside are you are opening up, circulation is increasing, dead cells are carried away, and new cells are being rebuilt, before you enter your car for the ride home.  These channels connect to every tissue, organ, and gland in your body.  Slowly overtime, the yoga starts to build and work in your body, with every practice, every day.  The effects are so subtle, one hardly notices them, until you stop for a time, maybe even months, and realize the yoga was working at a very deep cellular level, keeping illness at bay, keeping you in a good mood, more days than not. 

It is hard to stay focused to the goal of yoga.  You may climb up the ladder very quickly, achieving many difficult poses, only to slide back down again, losing your progress.  At this point, you might question if the yoga is working, especially when you hit a slow progress, even slipping backwards.  This is when you need to keep on practicing.  It’s very important at this time.  If you ask yogi’s, some will mention, they have practiced on and off again, for many years, but never steadily for a time.  They have never hit a difficult period in their practice. 

Like life, practicing yoga can be a struggle to fit in.  Those difficult times or when we face uphill battles are crucial periods in our practice where the yoga can really make huge strides.  Achieving postures here are not the goal but just showing up for you;  your physical body, mental body, and spiritual  body. 

This is not something I can tell you, you have to experience it for yourself.  You have to feel inside the storm, and when the sunshine comes out in your body, through the practice;  You have to feel this.  Yoga will make you flexible, but that is not the goal.  Yoga will increase your strength, and stress resilience, but that is not the goal.  Yoga will do many things, to keep you healthy, but the goal of yoga is to open your mind.  When you are working on those tight hips, or inflexible hamstrings, yoga  is opening energy channels in your mind that allow you to accept new ideas, new ways of thinking and doing things. 

This is a lofty goal.  Great thinkers and achievers sat back and allowed “What if?” and started to dream the impossible.  Imagine if the whole world practiced yoga.  I dare say new inventions, different ways of helping humanity would unfold for the greater good of society. 

So next time you are on your mat, breathing, moving, think about those energy channels.  Carrying away the bad and replacing it with good.  Yes, the yoga works, even in our worst practice on our ugliest day, when we simply show up and do the practice. 

See you on the mat,

Paula

Does anything ever annoy you? Wow, this could was a loaded question to me years ago, because EVERYTHING annoyed me….let me tell you……

Things that annoyed me:

• People who ate with their mouth open, or crunched loudly
• or dragged their fork through their teeth with bite fulls of food
• People who drove slowly
• People who didn’t step up to the line, waiting
• smelly smells , heavy perfume
• basically at some point, everything annoyed me

What I’m saying is this. I spent a lot of time before a regular yoga practiced thinking about how annoying different people are….slowly, as I practiced yoga,, these thoughts, along with others began to slowly disappear. It didn’t happen over night, but with a regular yoga practice, my thoughts tend to be much more positive and hardly ever annoying. This is due to the simple fact on how yoga works in your body. With your breath and movement these “annoying things” were removed, that previously had been stored somewhere in my body.

Your nervous system works like that. You take in information that might be beneficial, and store it in nervous system. The very physical practice of yoga is to heal the nervous system, meaning we are in a hyper state, or a sleepy state. Left untreated and unbalanced the nervous system can bring about a host of problems that you will have to treat, ie: high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, kidney/organ problems . That is why it is upmost importance to practice yoga. The cooling sensation of a forward fold stimulates the rest and digest state or parasympathetic nervous system, and raising your hands overhead, leaning back, or backbends stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. We need both to be in a balanced state.

Being annoyed is just another state of anger or frustration. We think we have to control our surroundings, when really we can control the way we think. People have told me, well that is just the way I am, that’s how I think. Well just imagine a world where everyone had a more positive outlook on life…….

Because when you are positive, your body is most likely healthy.

See you on the mat,

Paula