Living with Gratitude

Whatever you’re thinking about the surprising results of this crazy election, we need to keep love and compassion at the forefront of our everyday lives.  Before I knew what was about to occur, I found a presentation on finding happiness.  I want to share it with all of you.

The 3 areas of study were presented by author, Vishen Lakhiani and were taken from his book, “The Code of the Extraordinary Mind”.   I will remind you that with any new habits, they are simple but not easy.

1.     Practice Radical Forgiveness = Hacking into the Past

a.     Action Item – forgive something or someone every morning

Research has indicated that forgiveness eases the load on the heart and can help with back pain.   It also enables you to see the world as less daunting and gives you increased physical strength.

When you’re truly at peace and in touch with yourself, nothing anyone says or does bothers you.  No negativity can touch you.

2.     Feel You Are Enough -Hacking into the Present (Marisa Peer)

a.       Action Item – write it down in places you will see it constantly during your day

When you feel that you are enough just as you are.  It increases your self-esteem and gives you the motivation to do more.  You don’t have the barriers of fear that you are not capable of achieving what you want. You can separate your shortcomings from your sense of self.   You no longer take criticism personally.  Skills can be learned. You are still enough.

3.     Be Present = Hacking into your Future (Sonia Choquette)

Action – notice something right in front of you

Noticing an object directly in front of you and studying that object. See it as you never have before.  Breath deep and allow for a minute of mindfulness.  We need space inside us in order to be grounded.  Over 1000 studies in healthy self-esteem have found that mindfulness increases longevity, and reduces the odds of heart disease.

 

Here is the link to the entire presentation.  It begins with a guided meditation by Vishen Lakhiani which was shared by my friend, Marilyn Boehnke. You can fast forward past the meditation. The title of the presentation is a bit shocking. “3 Ways to be Unfuckwithable”. https://youtu.be/EaRu14P9H84

 

Pose of the Month – Bridge Pose

(SET-too BAHN-dah) setu = dam, dike, or bridge bandha = lock

Bridge to Health

Looking for a beginner backbend that you can take at your own pace? Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) lets you control the depth of the bend as you turn your back into a bridge between your shoulders and feet. Best of all, the pose quiets the mind, energizes the legs, improves digestion, and can relive headaches.

Here’s how to get into this pose:

Begin on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Separate your feet to hip distance and point your toes slightly in so that your feet are parallel.

Draw your heels in toward your hips until they almost touch. Straighten your arms along your sides with the palms down. Take a deep inhale. As you exhale, press the palms into the floor and begin to lift the hips off the floor. Keep the shoulders down as you breathe into an appropriate position.

You can take a shallow bend by lifting the hips only a foot or so off the floor, or a deeper bend by sending the hips as far to the sky as possible. Your palms can stay on the floor or you can roll onto your shoulders and interlace your fingers underneath your hips. As you breathe, lift your chest toward your chin and reach your knees away from your hips.

Be sure to maintain the natural curve of the neck against the floor. Remain for five to ten breaths, then lower back to the floor and rest. Over time, as the spine opens and relaxes, you may want to lift the hips higher to the sky. Whatever version of the pose you select, enjoy the blissful feeling of stretching and opening the chest.

Create Life You Love

By Nora Isaacs Yoga Journal June, 2008

There are times when you know just what to do, and life seems to rise up and support you and your ideas. And then there are times when it is all a little murky, and you might feel a bit lost. Thankfully, you have your yoga practice to come to-a time to tap into a deep connection with yourself and remember who you really are and what is most important to you. Nothing could be better.

When you bring the spacious awareness you experience in your yoga practice to your whole life, you’ll experience the kind of presence that will make you stop in your tracks, engage your senses, and find joy in daily life. But for most of us, accomplishing that is easier said than done. Often it requires a conscious effort to examine the status quo, push in new directions, and find fresh approaches to evoking that same sense of grounding, connection, and happiness we find on the mat.

Here, then, are 10 possibilities to help you get there. Put these ideas into practice one at a time, or try several at once. You might want to welcome one of them into your life as an offering to the New Year. Whatever approach you choose, here’s to feeling more alive, more present, and more aware of what makes you happy.

1. Get Energized About Your Future

Your yoga practice helps you live in the present, but life in the world demands a certain amount of decision making and planning. What’s your vision of where you want to go and how you’ll get there? When you take a proactive approach, your dreams are more likely to become reality. Knowing what you want is, of course, the first step.

If you need help discovering your life’s path, start by talking it out, says Nancy Wagaman, a life coach in San Diego. You can develop a goal list and create affirmations, she says. You can draw a picture of your future—even pray for guidance. “There are so many ways to energize the new vision you want for your life. The more you energize it, the more you draw that energy to that vision. And the universe tends to support you,” she says.

Of course, your vision may change over time, but the important thing is that you’re an active participant in your future.

2. Plug Into Your Spiritual Self

Reconnecting with your innermost self can open the doors to an entirely new and unpredictable path.  Getting away from routine relationships and environments makes it easier to drop into stillness and examine the undercurrent of your life. Once you do, you can plug into a connection with your divine nature. On retreat, you can also practice accessing your true self so that you can call on it anytime in your life.

3. Let Go of the Old

Writing, drawing, doing yoga—there are many pathways to bringing all that’s inside of you out and into the world. For several years, Tiffanie Turner, an architect from San Francisco, felt creatively blocked. As an experiment, Turner began writing three pages in her journal each morning. After a few weeks, she noticed some dramatic changes in her life. “I drop off a lot of baggage in the morning and feel clear for the rest of the day,” she says. Turner found that her anxiety levels decreased, too. “I write down things that worry me in the morning, or a horrible dream that would normally stay with me all day. And when I do, these things pretty much don’t exist for me any more.”

“Once you let go of thoughts that aren’t truly serving you, you’ll feel lighter, more creative,” says Courtney Miller, a yoga teacher in Manhattan, who includes journaling in her yoga workshops. “It’s as if you have more space inside for noticing what makes you happy.”

4. Serve Others

If you haven’t yet noticed, time spent trying to fulfill your desires usually isn’t that fulfilling—even when you achieve or get something that you think you want. But when you turn your attention to the needs of others, you often feel a huge sense of satisfaction. Focusing on other people enables you to be engaged without having to figure out what’s in it for you. And seva (selfless service) can be very empowering, showing you that your actions really do make a difference in the world.

5. Honor Your Physical Self

You often hear about spacious awareness in the mind, but it can also be found in your sense of physical self—in the way you move externally, and then process things internally. That’s why San Francisco chiropractor Colin Phipps does a seasonal cleanse about three times a year. He says that the cleanse cultivates awareness by giving him emotional clarity and providing a healthy ritual to follow. “It’s a conscious effort to become much more attuned to my sense of self and where I am in the world,” he says.

6. Be Daring

There’s a lot to be said for having the discipline to stick with a specific style of yoga, getting to know it well, and working through resistance to aspects that you know you don’t like. But exploring a new style of yoga can be revitalizing. Experimentation and play in your practice can teach you to be, err, more “flexible” in all of your life and more aware that there’s always more to learn and explore.  When you delve into the scariness of something new, that’s usually the shock that you need to awaken your spiritual practice and passion.

7. Soothe Your Mind

Meditation quiets a busy mind and cultivates a witness who can watch what’s happening in your life with a bit of emotional distance. The benefits are enormous—many meditators say they have more clarity, experience less anxiety, and feel better physically. Most of all, the practice offers an experience of calm and contentment.

Are you willing to commit to meditating every day for 30 days? If so, you might find your whole life transformed. “An agitated mind squanders such an amazing amount of energy,”; says Richard Faulds, a senior meditation teacher at Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. “If you can still the surface of the mind, you’ll say ‘Wow! This is who I really am!’ You get a taste of something that’s really quite profound. You will want to sustain it.”

8. Notice Your Surroundings

When you’re reassessing life, it’s tempting to spend a lot of time focusing on yourself. But it can be transformative to connect with the world around you, to meet your neighbors, to enjoy the changing of the seasons, to take an interest in what’s happening in your community. Simply being aware of your environs creates a sense of interconnectedness—and suddenly you can’t not care about how your actions affect people and your environment.

One way to feel that connection is to make a commitment to eating seasonal and locally grown foods. “Once people become dedicated seasonal eaters, suddenly they become aware of things like water issues, ranchers’ issues, and political issues in their community,” says Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets. Plus, these foods taste better, do less harm to the environment by reducing resources needed for shipping, and put you in touch with the cycles of nature.

9. Create Community

Karen Habib had been plagued for years by a feeling of emptiness that she couldn’t quite name. Habib, who lives in Manhattan and worked in corporate marketing at that time, craved meaning, community, and a place where she could feel grounded amid the hustle and bustle of New York. So when the opportunity arose for her to move into the Integral Yoga Institute in the West Village, she went for it.

When you live in close quarters with other people, they can certainly press your buttons. But when that happens, Habib thinks of a statement attributed to Integral Yoga founder, Swami Satchidananda: “The stones in a river start out rough, but with the current continually bumping and polishing them, they end up being beautiful.” Since moving into the institute, Habib has gained clarity to pursue a life-long interest in interior design. She has also discovered a renewed sense of vitality, strength, and gratitude. With her yoga community, she now has a sacred center to come home to, daily yoga classes and workshops at her disposal, and a place to meet like-minded yogis she can relate to. “When I walk into the center, I breathe and sit to do Pranayama and think, ‘God, am I lucky!’”

10. Make a Nature Date

It’s easy to overlook the most obvious accessible antidote to stress, worry, and busyness: the outdoors. Sense the earth beneath sense of gratitude for the abundance that is right in front of your feet, watch birds soar, feel the wind on your face—these are all reminders that your troubles, and even your joys, need not be all consuming; you are part of something bigger.

I walk slowly but I never walk backward

 Abraham Lincoln