have courage my friend...

New possibility is a moment for courage.

We are all unfinished business, full of potential. So clearly witnessed in children, but as adults we forget. We've already made a determination of who we are, what we are. Our propensities, our characters, feel locked. Can we be open to change in ourselves? Can we conceive ourselves as someone other than who we are at this moment?

How well do we want to know ourselves? The waters are deep; how deep do we want to go?

Trying out novel activities, visiting new places, hanging with different people, all allow us to see the world from a fresh perspective. To see ourselves with a fresh set of eyes.

But as we move toward change, the interim can be a time of darkness and fear. We hover at the precipice of the unknown. Can we shine a light heart into that place, embracing it with a sense of adventure, the thrill of possibility? Then we return to a sense of childhood and its days of endless wonder. Of discovery.

A seed travels the dark earth with the trust that it will emerge into the light, that the sun will be there to greet it. That it will be able to unfurl to the full intelligence it carries within. As children, we too believed in that power of trust. Return to it and we pass straight through the darkness to a new place. A place of potential. A place of growth and change. Of metamorphosis.

It's the spaces between the leaves that grant a tree its majesty, the silence between the birdsong that makes us hesitate and long for more. The moment to moment of an unfolding sunset, enriching its colours, then softening them again--this is where beauty is found.

The spaces between: in potential unfolding, in change. Take a breath and jump right in.

Transform yourself.

Bollywood fun by way of Devendra Banhart

in the garden...

To make a good garden, you don't just plant seeds. You need to feed it, water it, weed it. You pick out the rocks and the sticks and the slugs. You encourage the worms. 

In autumn, you clean up and prepare for the spring. In the winter, you compost. And plan. 

Your plants' needs are paramount. Which way does the sun travel? How many hours does it shine on your garden? And, by the way, have you tested the soil's ph levels? 

Yup, a good garden takes a lot of physical effort, for sure, but also a lot of thought. A lot of care.

And wouldn't it be easy--after all of the time invested--to keep it all for yourself? 

Instead of hoarding, though, the garden is the ultimate symbol of graceful abundance. Of bounty. 

You wouldn't give away your land, but you happily distribute the fruits of your labour on that land. You share your creative effort. An unexpected extra for dinner? No worries.  Just pick a few more lettuce leaves, another head of broccoli. Throw some more peas in the pot.

When we come to our yoga, our body is our "land." We engage every part of ourselves, consolidating our effort. All of our knowledge of alignment, all of our muscular engagement, is pooled. We reach deep, and we practice. We practice.

But what makes our asanas truly beautiful is when we reflect all that internal effort back out. While we turn inside ourselves in order to commit our fullest potential, we don't hoard it, we share it. And by radiating our energy outwards, we expand ourselves. We become more. 

We grow our garden.

seven billion light years

Gulls crenellate his rooftop,

a feathered battlement to drop their bombs,

and don't realize we wouldn't have religion 

if we weren't afraid of the unknown.

Knotted hanks as morning hair, 

our seas float out more bloat-walled bodies,

casks of conceit that asked simply to understand.

The answer's sent,

on its way, 

halfway home.

Pulsed messages encoded in a comet’s tail 

transmit rings of spectral shift--

saw one myself, just last night.

The answer sent

on its way, 

halfway home,

soon to burst the 5th magnitude

and speak to us, 

speaking so that we hear.

Attentions of course,  elsewhere

at the crucial moment,

our balance lost studying cellular notes

by our own light, keeping our own company 

to ward off small fears,

with a yell, 

with a hullabaloo.

But the answer's been sent

on its way, 

halfway home--look

at god's old tongue

sparking in the sky.

It’s seven billion light years on its way, 

while gulls still crack jokes like the first sound.

On its way.

But only halfway home.

beauty is as beauty does...

As shopworn as they may have become over the years, some truisms continue to earn their keep. Time and tide still wait for no man. Doubt is still the beginning of wisdom. And he who hesitates remains lost. As difficult as it can sometimes be to find commonality with others, these pithy little adages form a crossroads--a meeting ground--where divergent beliefs and backgrounds can discover a momentary convergence.

Certainly we can all agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for doesn't each one of us gaze upon our family with the rosiest of tints? Through this lens of love, our children are more deserving and our grandchildren more charming. Could any brother be funnier than ours? Any sister more capable, more thoughtful? Indeed, this is the very thing we count on from our kin; it's what counters the stresses of proximity and subdues the awkwardness of familial demands. It's what unpacks the baggage of past hurts, calms old rivalries. 

It is the reason, Dorothy, that there is no place like home. You bask in your family's warm glow, as surely as they do in yours.     

The mind has an endless capacity for magic and illusion: The Great Cerebrum, Conjurer Extraordinaire. Rabbits out of a top hat? Pah! Kids' stuff! Disappearing doves? Bush league! Facile hocus-pocus! Our minds can retrieve smells, rescue sounds, and salvage emotions with seamless skill. Distance is conflated--time, as well as space. Like a waking dream, our memories can enlarge rooms, diminish faults, sharpen action and mute dialogue at will. An opaque veil drapes gracefully over problems, erasing them as surely as Botox on a wrinkle. Quantum theory posits ten dimensions: incomprehensible to some, maybe, but the mind already has no issue with being in multiple states and places simultaneously, thank you very much! 

So we have the capacity, but we must learn to control the act. Why wear those special rosy glasses only while at home? After all, you look so good in them! Warp the space between yourself and others to be understanding, be loving. And o it as much for yourself as for them. Your thoughts make their own lasting impression on your physiology. What is belief but practiced thought? 

When asked how the ordinary Archibald Leach became the inimitable Cary Grant, Cary said he simply imitated who he would like to be, until one day he woke up and that was exactly who he was. 

Create a revolution in yourself. Become the you you want to be.

    

what god? why god?

As a subject, the divine describes humanity's relationship with what we understand our source of life to be. What we call "the divine" is our (admittedly often feeble) attempt to describe our own nature. How we should lead our lives. How we should treat one another, treat ourselves. 

Where our destiny lies.

This is it, really, isn't it? After all, would we have conceived religion if we weren't afraid of the unknown? We've been trying to figure out what it's all about--because it's only when we picture an end, a destination we're aiming to reach (a goal, if you will) that we can begin to take steps toward it. 

What is our goal in yoga? It's a place of self-fulfillment, of radical transformation. A glorious abode where peace and justice reign. A kingdom of understanding. 

It's where we burst the confines of our skin, slough off our shadowy cloaks of pain and isolation and reveal our true hearts, as vast as the universe itself. Where, in a zone of transcendent love, we recognize at last our connection to the rest of life. We identify our inner divinity, and our inner and outer worlds merge.

When we are facing the right direction, all we have to do is keep walking. And breathing.

shine a light...

If you awoke a butterfly or a moth, would you mourn your lost caterpiller status? Would you refuse to move on? Or would you unfurl your gorgeous wings and fly?

When next you feel yourself up against a wall--fearful of what comes next--take a breath to create the space for new possibilities. Treat the wall as a threshhold and step forward into the unknown.

The spaces in between are perilous, dark. So what do we do? 

We shine a light.

Tension resides in the superficial muscular layers. Releasing these muscles with a thoughtful easy breath, we access our deeper muscles, contributing a more vital stability to our asana. Mobility and flexibility are increased.

The purpose of life is to taste life, drink down the light of consciousness and become more than you were before. More you.

take it off the mat...

Remember the old song: the knee bone's connected to the shin bone...? It happens it's true. 

We tend to think of our muscles and bones as isolated pieces, and complain about our tennis elbow or our tweaked knee. In fact, we call the ocean many things too. Sea and bay, inlet and strait. Pacific, Aegean, Indian, saline, choppy, Caribbean blue. But it's all one body of water. And the reality is that we are one too are a single interwoven unit, where pain is often felt far from where the misalignment causing the pain originates.

If we allow the foot to pronate, the muscular connection can travel up the shin and into the knee. Rounded shoulders can pinch the bracchial nerve and affect the carpal tunnel of the wrist. We might trace the pain in our inner knee to a tight illio-tibial band. Everything is connected.

Just as you can reshape the body by developing different muscles, you can re-train the body to move away from pain by altering your alignment, by releasing connective tissue, by strengthening underused muscles to relieve compensatory action.

The key is to find a balance in the body where all the pieces are working together. Nobody's taking over, overriding everyone else. And no one is getting a free ride on someone else's effort.

    

How do we affect this change?

We ignite the inner voice to overcome outer resistance, listening to the heart to overcome the head. We open to the possibilities within, to our deepest desire. We move from where we are, to where we want to be. We soften our outer edges and expand our potential from the inside out, rather than setting up boundaries from which we have to work to escape. 

It's physical. And it's philosophical.

Because if you want to take it off the mat, you have to live it. Otherwise, it's just exercise.

liberation and manifestation...

When we come to yoga, we come into the body. We enter it and experience its physicality: its exhilaration and its pain, its limits and its potential. Yoga is really about body awareness. We are learning to feel deeper. To manipulate muscles. To expand the breath. Alertness to our body becomes our meditation. 

After all, the body is where we experience this world. Through our yoga, we use the body as a means of knowing ourselves. And when we open the body, it's as a doorway into the process of achieving a fuller, more expansive self. We remove physical blockages, push back the boundaries of our muscles and ligaments, the boundary of what we thought was possible. 

And we achieve freedom. 

We begin by grounding. Without grounding in the body, we can find ourselves on shaky ground mentally too, daydreaming and lacking focus. We spend so much time in our minds, considering the past and planning the future, but grounding in the body, we root in the Here and the Now. Once inside ourselves, we draw from our instincts, our heritage, our culture, the memory of all we have learned. We tap into our own evolution to enter the collective unconscious, regaining the power of our roots.

In our minds, we live in our imagination. A vast potential, but all that can exist there is an idea. In order to make that idea manifest, we need discipline to narrow our focus, to gather our energies to that focus. We need to create boundaries and define a form for our mental energies--a project, a goal, a plan. Then we draw that energy into our bodies, draw it into to our hearts, our limbs, our hands. We move the energy, channel it. And it condenses and becomes manifest, because only by focusing energy can we create matter. 

We turn our consciousness into matter, and our ideas take root and become real. We

create. The earth is our vehicle, carrying us through time and space, but our bodies are our own personal ride for this journey. They are where our life on earth begins and ends. They are the form through which we know what we know, do what we do. Thy are where we collect our experiences. Where we initiate action. Our bodies are the container for our spirit, for our mind, and the storehouse of our feelings and emotions and memories.     

How can we expect to find understanding anywhere else but inside? 

So when we come to yoga, we come to the body. Enter the body now and hear your breath. Sharpen your ability to listen to yourself from within. Let your breath expand you from the inside, in order to get ready to expand your potential. Find that what you thought possible has changed. Find that you too have changed. 

Welcome to yoga.

The space between...

In Tantric philosophy, 1 + 1 = 3. How so, you say? (I thought Indians made great mathematicians!) Recently modern science has come to the same conclusion: one smell plus another smell, creates not a mixture, but a completely third smell.

What they are talking about is The Space In Between, the potential of two things coming together and making something other than the original ingredients. The old "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" thing. 

The word "tantra" itself illustrates the understanding: it means to weave. We have two simple piles of string, but when warp and weft combine, cloth results. 

The Space Between. It's where great things happen. It's where potential resides. Conversation. Family. Friendship. Community. Culture. You never sit at home alone and laugh your head off. But get with friends and alchemy reigns. You brainstorm. You cooperate. You light up with love and the warmth of intimacy. You giggle your fool head off.

Each of us is unique. with our own set of likes and dislikes. We act differently, look differently, think differently. So if we consider these distinctions to be a problem--if only one way can be the right way--then where is the potential for growth? How can we ever be more than we are at this moment? Instead, we look to The Space Between, the conversation, to bring us somewhere we haven't been before. Our unique attributes increase in value when we value everyone's uniqueness; we all become indispensable. And from all of our contributions culture blossoms and bears its fine fruit.

Like a prism, our beauty is manifest in a full spectrum of colours. Yet, in truth, it is one light. 

One Source.

keep breathing...

Close your eyes and Come Inside.

With each inhale, feel your inner body expand. Breath past the periphery of your skin. Breath in 3-D: ribs expanding laterally, back filling, chest rising. 

Feel your attachment to the ground, and from that, let the breath climb your spine, growing your torso, your shoulders, the crown of your head. Feel taller than you've ever felt before.

Increase the space inside you. Claim that space with your next breath.

Imagine a small light inside your belly. With each inhale, let the light get brighter, dim slightly on your exhale. Grow brighter, then dim. Brighter, then dim.

Begin to deepen your breath and brighten the light. Listen to your ujaii, to your neighbor's ujaii, murmuring like the ocean.

Put your ear to Shiva's conch and hear the primordial OM, the sound of all creation. Your ujaii and your neighbor's ujaii are vital components of the sound of the universe. Match the sound within and without, letting your breath wash over you, as soft and seductive as the sea lapping the shore.

Float your ribs up on a breath, bringing the light up to your neck, into your head, until your whole body is glowing. Sparkling. Polished with breath.

Open your eyes and take your light into the world.