7 Benefits of a Consistent Practice

When I completed my 200 hour yoga training, my lead teachers kept talking about having a home practice.  I would go home and roll my yoga mat out and try to recreate a sequence I learned in class.  Often, I would get a few poses in and and just get stuck.  I’d be hanging out in a high lunge trying to think of what comes next.

Or I would “forget” to roll my mat out at all.  Living in Austin in my 20’s meant that there was always a farmer’s market, new band, or food truck to explore.  It wasn’t rare that I would be too tired to come to my mat between social time, work, and all the yoga I was doing in my training and regular classes.

Once I received my certification and began teaching, I still struggled with creating time for a regular personal practice, despite one of my favorite teachers telling me that real teaching starts at home.  It wasn’t until I signed up for an Anusara Immersion that required a regular home practice as a pre-requisite that I finally began to settle into a steady practice. Continue reading “7 Benefits of a Consistent Practice”

Japa Japa Japa Jai!

Many people talk to me about the struggle of overcoming the mind.  It’s interesting to note that this often appears to be a unique problem that we each are struggling with much more than other more well-adjusted people.  Luckily, that this struggle is unique and separate is only an illusion.  The busy chatter of the mind is one of the blessed challenges that we’ve been gifted with overcoming as part of the One Human Condition.

We’re offered many options from different cultures and religion for how to overcome the monkey mind, from devotion to others, keeping too busy in our external worlds to listen to the internal messages, and of course, prayer, yoga, and meditation.  Patanjali speaks of using a mantra as a connection to the divine by repeating mantra while seated in meditation and throughout your day.  This is called Japa Yoga, and I’ve found it to be very helpful in interrupting negative or repetitive thought patterns.

Om Namah Shivaya
Om Namah Shivaya

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Abhinivesha Klesha: Clinging to Life

Our exploration of the Klesha has given us an opportunity to explore the different games our minds play with us to keep us from the true and ultimate reality.  These games fuse together into the great dance of life, dropping one foot and then another into the earthly world, the world of duality, where we live and love and learn the deep lessons that our souls are craving.

In this way, each klesha is a blessing for the gifts we learn from living wrapped in the illusion, then from awakening to observe the illusion, and finally in its unveiling.

The final klesha is Abhinivesha, the klesha of clinging to life.  In this gripping to a particular version of reality, we are unable to turn our gaze and twist deeply, looking over our opposite shoulder to the beauty of the non-dual world of which we’ve always been a part.

Marichyasana Three - Yogic Twist
Marichyasana Three – Yogic Twist

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Getting Things Done

The pace of life is slower and strangely more bureaucratic  in Central America.  For one thing, there’s no Google search with Costa Rica results, or GPS, or even a reliable internet connection!  These are all things I had come to depend on in my day-to-day life in the States before I left – especially GPS, as this girl is was not there the day they handed out a sense of direction.  For another thing, when you do find out where you need to go to accomplish a task at hand, the person who can help might be out for lunch, or the week, you might learn on arrival that you need a list of documents that don’t seem to correlate at all to the task at hand, or you may find that you must first visit two other offices before returning to building number one to accomplish your goal. Continue reading “Getting Things Done”