Happiness Archives | Essential You Yoga

Breath as a Bridge to Joy

“The yoga tradition tells us the mind and breath are twin laws of life, they travel together. When the mind is calm and clear, the breath flows smoothly. Conversely, when the breath flows smoothly, the mind calms and clears.

The condition of one determines the condition of the other….We experience the boundless joy deposited within the mind itself, which manifests when the mind is able to plumb its own depths.”

~Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, The Secret of the Yoga Sutras

When I started my yoga practice, I was regularly not breathing.

Crazy, right? But my body’s reaction to stress was to tense EVERYTHING up, including my abdomen, and just hold my breath.

In that state, my feelings of stress would increase to feelings of panic, and everything would feel like a life or death situation. Psychologists call this “fight or flight” syndrome, and it’s a classic reaction to stress.

Continue reading “Breath as a Bridge to Joy”

Happiness is Already There

Perspective is everything. It’s well known within the yoga world that five minutes in a headstand will shake up your bad day and improve your mood. Yoga inversions move the physical body up side down, sending our feet reaching towards the sky and our heads rooting towards the earth. This change in our physical bodies gets our blood flowing to the heart, drains the lymph system, and invigorates our energetic body. It also uproots the emotional and thought bodies, subtly shifting persistent thought patterns to allow us to see through the illusion that is unhappiness and connect to shri, the true joy of the present moment.

Moving to Central America has created a change in how I define happiness. Our Western culture often teaches us that happiness equates to acquisition. Read: get happy by chasing your desires. I spoke here about how corporations launched a successful campaign on the public to convince them to buy what they don’t need. The reason that campaign had so much impact is that jumping from desire to desire is part of the One Human Condition. Continue reading “Happiness is Already There”

Sacred in the Mundane

–Counting–

Counting cordobas is a practice in staying present. A practice I sometimes find more difficult than my meditation practice some days. The thing about cordobas is they value 24 to the dollar, so you very quickly reach large amounts of money that you are regularly counting.

I can’t count quickly and accurately in Spanish, at least not up to high numbers. Perhaps someday. Let’s be real, I often don’t count quickly or accurately in English, either. I get distracted so easily during this task! Thoughts will intrude mid-count, or my ears will latch onto snatches of conversation occurring around me. Conversations in Spanish become harder to ignore the higher my comprehension level rises.

So I count and I practice. Each day at the start and end of my shift, I count and recount the cordobas. I train my mind to stay present on the number – in English, in Spanish, in the moment.

–Dog Walking— Continue reading “Sacred in the Mundane”