Yoga shows you the way and the spiritual community of friends and teachers illuminate the path, but you must take every step of the journey. The miracle you pray for is that you unroll your mat every day you can and get the courage to be a better person at the end of each practice. The long road towards enlightenment is a solitary path that is supported by friends and teachers but must be walked alone. Each footstep along this path of self-realization comes from your own inner fortitude. Each challenging posture that tests your limits of possibility is place where you flex your spiritual muscle and develop the gumption to imagine a life beyond anything you have known before.

All progress along the path of yoga denotes milestones crossed along the ravine of the human soul. You pay with the currency of your body and breathe and gain access to boundless energy, true power and compassionate wisdom. The story of you transforms from a tragedy into a hero’s journey into a purpose driven life. The practice of yoga has the magic to recast the pages of life in the new light of total presence and thereby set you free from past suffering. In the clear light of self-awareness you begin to see yourself for the free, happy and peaceful being that you are.

The understanding that you alone work diligently every day in your own practice means that you when the hard won fruits of your actions ripen you will know that you have played a vital role in this transformation. Teachers, guides and spiritual friends make the journey possible but if you do not learn and integrate the lessons even the best teaching is meaningless. You will look back at the years of life spent sweating on your mat and take stock for just how far you have come. This progress will not be measured in asana perfection, but instead in the steady knowingness that you have committed yourself to a more peaceful life. There is perhaps no greater sense of self-confidence that the certainty that you are strong enough to meet whatever challenges you face.

Before I started practicing yoga I did not believe in myself and I had no real way to measure success or failure. I judged myself by the external attainment of results and felt frustrated when I could not attain what I thought I wanted quickly. After I started practicing yoga I began to see that I am the master of my own fate and that my inner thoughts really did create my experience of reality. My thoughts defined my daily yoga practice and in the same sense my thoughts defined my life. In order to attain any level of accomplishment I had to start off my learning how to believe in myself. No amount of effort will produce the desired results without addressing deeply held beliefs about your sense of self-worth. The barrier between you and your dreams is more often my lack of belief in yourself than anything else.

Yoga is a paradoxical parameter with which you can measure your sense of self. If you enter the yoga world with a defeatist attitude you will experience more and more defeat. If you enter the same domain with happy disposition you will get more happiness. Kind of like a microcosm for life itself yoga is best understood as a playground where you test out your deeply help thoughts about yourself and see what kind of results you get from thinking the way you do. The kind of belief in yourself that you get with regular practice is not the kind of self confidence that comes from what you can and cannot do. Instead yoga helps you connect with a part of yourself that is beyond the physical and it is in that eternal place that your belief in yourself rests. Only when you touch the stable inner terrain of infinite self-realization do all the postures even start to make sense at all.

If you approach your practice from the perspective of attaining the perfect asana sooner or later you will fail. Even the strongest and most flexible person will get injured or grow older one day. When this happens it is not time to quit or time to punish yourself. Actually at the moments of perceived failure is often when the most yoga happens. Sometimes we have to gain the perfect yoga body and the perfect yoga postures just to “loose” it to injury or age so that we can see that the whole point of the journey of yoga actually has nothing to do with asana anyway. Yoga asks you to tap into a place within yourself that is able to have faith in the results that are not immediately evident. The only way that you can rest in the difficulty of the present moment is if you have full faith that your ultimate goal, the attainment of inner peace, is on the way.

In yoga you never fix yourself, but instead you reveal your true nature. This warm tender heart of compassion that beats strongly underneath any veneer of cynicism, anger or fear can never die. In fact it stays with you beyond your physical form and carries you forth into the next iteration of your life The eternal nature of the human spirit is what the heart of yoga really is. If you connect to that everyday then the journey is already coming to fruition.

It is not the physicality of hatha yoga that transforms, but the state of presence cultivated by a conscious effort to heal the body and train the mind that heals. It is actually higher awareness itself that brings about great changes in practitioners’ experience of reality.

One of the biggest challenges along the road to the discovery of presence is pain and injury. Paradoxically every yoga practitioner owes a debt of gratitude to each injured body part and all the accompanying emotions brought up. Most people, me included, have relatively strong egoic minds and need to be pushed to the precipice before they are ready to change. According to the Sanskrit “tapas” that defines accepting pain as help for purification, yoga defines pain as your teacher, but not in the most obvious way. It is not enough to feel pain and push through; actually pushing through some types of pain is pure insanity. Instead pain is your teacher on a much deeper level that forces you to dig deep into the heart of yoga.

Pain is your motivation to learn healthy alignment, better technique and more efficient movement patterns. If the way that you approach your physical body leads to injury and suffering it generally indicates that it is time to use that sensation to motivate yourself to try a new method of movement. Many people take their first experience of pain in yoga as a sign to change styles of yoga, but if the deeper question of technique and alignment is not addressed the same injury will just reappear later. If you can recognize pain as a signal to retrain your movement patterns to an empirically sound method then you will find a new freedom in your yoga practice. Rather than jumping ship from one style of yoga to another the best course of action is to use your rational mind to learn a new approach to the postures and movements that give you pain. Discovering a healthy use of the body and making small adjustments to your approach will alleviate pain caused by unhealthy movement patterns. If you listen and change your approach the pain eventually disappears. When yoga says that pain is your teacher it does not ask you to plow through blindly. Instead pain is your motivation to make the changes in your technical approach to movement in order to be healthier and ultimately free from the kind of pain that will injure you.

As a general rule yoga practitioners should never feel pain in the joints of the body. The joints are made for mobility and need spaciousness to bend and fold. If you feel sharp pinching sensations in your joints it is not an indication to keep going, instead it is an indication to stop and re-learn your technical approach to movement mechanics in your body. Muscles are a different story. A little muscular soreness is an unavoidable sensation when you work your physical body. Doing deep work on an area of the body should produce a bit of soreness the next day. If you work your back muscles in backbending postures intensely with healthy alignment under the supervision of a qualified teacher you can expect that the muscles around your back will be a little sore. Wondering whether this is healthy is like doing bicep curls at the gym with a personal training and then questioning the health of having sore biceps the next day. But if your elbow joint started to hurt while attempting bicep curls at the gym your trainer would ask you to stop and readjust your technical approach. Similarly if you feel pain in your joints such the veterbrae, the shoulder joints or the sacro-iliac joints when trying a complex movement like backbending, your teacher would ideally ask you to modify your approach so that you will be pain-free in your joints and just a little sore in your muscles the next day.

When pain arises in the joints it is the body’s way of asking you to listen and if you refuse to heed its gentle call you will almost certainly experience an injury one day. In this sense tapas purifies you from the inside out. Sometimes we approach our bodies from a perspective of command and control where we dictate from above what we want from our bodies in the name of effort. However this approach that attempts to divide and conquer weakness with brute force leads to wrong type of pain sooner or later and is not actually tapas. Most often yoga practitioners decide to tune out joint pain because they do not want to modify the practice they have grown attached to. But the irony of the situation is such that if you ignore pain when it surfaces mildly it only gets worse until it is so severe that one day you will no choice but to listen.

If find yourself faced with a debilitating injury one of the hardest things to face is your own ego. The egoic mind hates to feel like it is slipping from the front of the pack and will cringe and twist when you lighten your load to go easy on your body. Just let the ego bleed itself to death. This ample serving of humble pie will be just what you need to be free from that little whiny voice in your head that thinks your value is tied to your achievements. And this is the best type of pain to accept on the road to purification. If you find yourself caught in the quagmire of injury try to accept where you are and unroll your mat every day as a commitment to the devotional path of yoga while learning new techniques that keep your body healthy. As someone who has personally gone through a complete litany of painful injuries that have forced me to modify my practice for a period of time on the road to better alignment I really empathize with your ego’s pain. There is nothing fun about suddenly not being able to do what you could once do every day with ease and grace. It feels like a slap in the face and all sorts of nasty emotions arise. Everything including jealousy, anger, anxiety, depression and much more all arrive and try to knock the stuffing out of your yoga practice. But the only way out of the illusion of the ego is go straight through it. If you face a battle of ego when you modify your practice to be pain-free in your joints you can rest assured that you are absolutely doing the deep work of the spiritual path of yoga.

Injury demands that you ask what your every-moment priority really is and requires you to be totally present. The question you must ask is at the core of your dedication to yoga. When you can no longer do the “cool” moves you must determine whether your motivation is truly finding inner peace or just the advanced postures. The honesty that yoga demands forces you into an honest relationship with yourself. Only in the clear light of pure consciousness can you make peace with who you really are underneath your need for achievement and perfection. Only when you release the egoic mind can you actually practice yoga as a healing modality. For when you have passed ambition, goal-orientation, attachment to outcome and the need to achieve you can just be in a state of acceptance and listen to your body. Then you can make whatever modifications are needed and experience the free space of acceptance and non-attachment where all healing happens.

The iconography of the yoga world transports would-be practitioners into an idyllic scene of blooming lotus flowers and gently flowing estuaries. The promise of sincere yoga practice is that this paradisiacal realm of inner peace is one day be attainable for all practitioners who commit themselves fully. Yet the “real” yoga often feels more like a brutally honest mirror of our life experience than a blissful walk in the park. There is a period of time when all yoga practitioners confront the injuries, obstacles and pain that prevent them from experiencing the grace and ease of life on other side of the looking glass of life. The search for this inner sanctuary is a winding road that passes directly through all the chaos, ungroundedness, past hurt and trauma that we thought we were running away from into the serene world of spirituality. We cannot look for the seemingly impenetrable infinitude outside of ourselves; instead we must look directly within. The only truly lasting flash of effervescence is the landscape of our own soul discovered and experienced first hand through daily diligence and sincere spiritual practice. The bridge to this highly illusive, deceptively simple and heartbreakingly ordinary world of lasting peace can only be crossed by the most worthy of seekers.

Whereas in “real” life we have the entertainment of work, family and general busyness to distract us from our sleeping demons, in the silence of yoga we have only ourselves, our breathe and our body to lead us directly into the heart of our own darkness. In the midst of the greatest trials in yoga the direction given is to maintain compassionate disregard of the outcome, observe without judgment the passion play of our life and walk the middle way between attachment and aversion. In the midst of our greatest trials we often plead with the universe for deliverance from a savior, yet yoga asks every practitioner to find salvation within and believe in their own ability to save themselves against all odds. In doing so each practitioner gets the chance to discover a part of themselves within that is inalienable, indestructible and eternal. Faith is the ability to believe in something that you not only do not see, but something that seems to be impossible. Yoga teaches the life skills needed to attain mastery over the mind so that when you stand at the foot of any seemingly impossible mountain you will be strong enough to have faith that you will find the way to possibility and reach the summit.

Life is a kind of university where we are each enrolled in various areas of specialization based on our interests and learning needs. Yoga can be understood like the gifted program because it asks you to go deeper into the core issues at hand in this giant teaching facility called life. On the yoga mat lessons are magnified until we find the courageous heart that is able to face them. Yoga is an accelerated vehicle for life learning. When we feel a certain emotion on the yoga mat in a challenging posture it is often a trigger for a repetitive emotional state in our lives. If we feel the same feelings divorced from the typical triggers upon which we normally associate the blame for these reactions the logical conclusion one day will be that it is time to take responsibility for the feelings as our own. It is sometimes easier to befriend the traumas that seem larger than life when they appear in the microcosm of the asana. Instead of the deeply entrenched behavior cycle of years of living being re-enacted yoga offers you a chance at freedom from the past. By focusing on the breathe, the posture and point of attention within you are able to stay in the present moment, cultivate an equanimous mind and break away from damaging behaviors.

The daily practice of asana allows yoga practitioners to experiment within the laboratory of their own bodies. Beginning at the place where a particular movement seems impossible yoga teaches you how to slowly stay with your body over a period of time in a listening, nurturing and loving state of mind until that impossible movement gradually shifts into possibility. Through yoga we learn how to live a more conscious, enlightened life by practicing first on the testing ground of our own bodies. The best scenario is that we learn to listen when it is time to hear, open when we need to receive, bend or strengthen at just the right moment, give when there are those in need and see when we are called upon to bear witness all through a compassionate knowingness within. This calm self-assurance is the spiritual confidence that we gain when through the test case of our own body we progress from disbelief into faith and finally realize our own goals. We can then take that confidence building experience off the mat and into our lives and become better people living healed lives. By accomplishing the impossible physical posture we tap into a part of ourselves that is truly beyond the physical. After we touch that eternal place within we are more likely to believe in ourselves when we face seemingly impossible situations in our lives. Small moments of personal accomplishment give us the ability to develop empirical proof that we are larger and much more powerful than we ever imagined. Yoga gives us the chance to believe in ourselves beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt by providing us with a series of impossible movements and activities that we one day accomplish with grace and ease.

Along the road to the realization of impossible postures yoga teaches us that the real impossibility we strive towards is no mere physical form, but is a state of inner peace that is completely imperturbable. The consciousness of eternal peace is the classically paradoxical comprehension that the real goal is in essence the journey itself. In order to “get” anywhere along the lifelong spiritual path of yoga one of the most basic lessons is to realize there is nowhere really to go. This letting go is the release of attachment and desire that leads to a truly peaceful state of mind. Only when you tune into the place within where you are already happy and content will enjoy the ride of life regardless of where you perceive yourself to be along the road. With a loving heart that is not attached to outcome you will live the joyous life of a yogi and apply your now stronger, calmer mind to any goal and expect to see better results. You will know that your happiness is not dependent of the achievement of the outcome and therefore be truly happy.

Once your self-worth is separated from the outcome of your actions you win your freedom from emotionality blurring your integrity along the way. Yoga asks you to learn that who you are is grander, larger and more connected than you ever dreamed and that you are only yourself when you rest in this higher awareness. When you remain non-attached to the results of your actions you also have more space to think through the process with clarity and be open to the solution when it presents itself. The greatest teaching of yoga is also the greatest paradox of life. If you want something so badly that it makes you a lesser person for wanting it you will also hold yourself apart from your goal by the very intensity of your desire. At the same time you must commit yourself fully to any process in order to get the results you want. Solving the riddle of just how much effort, luck, openness, thoughtfulness and perseverance to put in is the mystery of life. Yoga teaches you how to walk this thin red line between belief and impossibility, goals and attachment and temporality and eternity with grace and ease. Thus, by doing yoga you also learn how to master the game of life.

The daily practice of yoga gives us ample ground to test out the hypothesis of an infinite universe. When you see an accomplished practitioner achieve masterful feats of asana that does not mean you cannot go and accomplish the same thing. Yet it can sometimes be exceedingly frustrating to see someone accomplish a goal or posture that has long eluded you with little to no effort. This is where the real yoga actually begins. If you look at the success of others and think that their greatness only puts you in their shadow you miss an opportunity to ride on the coattails of their success. The Yoga Sutras teach us that we should cultivate attitudes of friendliness towards the virtuous and successful. In other words yoga asks us to retrain our minds to celebrate the success of others and really mean it. We can only do so when we truly understand the inclusive nature of life. Life does not judge us, we do. Life does not create harsh lines of exclusion and failure. We do. The yogic mind relinquishes these judgements and replaces them with the happy acceptance that leads to the realization of greatness. 



Being great does not necessarily mean that others are not as great. If you assume there is a limited amount of success available in the world you will always see life as a competition with a set number of prizes. But in a world of infinities all possibilities eventually find their way into being. When you see someone else’s greatness there is a tendency to think that the same level of greatness is not available for you as though life is a zero sum game. You might wonder, as I did, if there is space in the world for your unique contribution. But just because one person is successful doing exactly what you think you are destined to do it does not mean that you cannot do it too. Instead of operating from a truly expansive view of the world and life where we trust the limitless potential of creation, we more often assume the perspective that tells us there are a finite number of accolades in the game of life. Lucky for us there is no discriminating deity handing out a small number of prizes. The divine spark of the universe is just that--universal and equal in its love for all beings and their dreams. Just because two people dream the same dream does not mean that they cannot both get it sooner or later. 



The path to this endlessly peaceful way of being is straight through one of the more base emotions. From a purely egotistical standpoint when we see the success of others we most often feel negative emotion. It can be envy, jealousy, anger or even depression. When we feel this devastating rush of sensations we direct the desperation of our inner yearning on others and ourselves in a negative way. We create excuses for why that person is better equipped to have the success we desperately want. We invent reasons for why they deserve or do not deserve the things they have achieved. The gulf that stands when we see manifest a dream we have long labored for accomplished by someone else hurts. It hurts because we see a mirror of all that we could be but are not yet. It is not the fault of the successful person who managed to cross the gap. Whether it is a yoga posture or life goal that we see reflected back the teaching of yoga asks us to smile at the image of our greatness and follow to beacon to the source of the light. For if we consciously train ourselves to celebrate the success of those whose greatness we admire we can let these powerful beings be our teachers. In the mirror of success we must retrain our small, scarcity thinking minds to see the potential of who we really are. 



When we see a successful person whose power, grace and beauty is awesome and we feel a muddled mixture of emotions it is the time to actively practice a new way of thinking. This yoga of the mind asks you to carve out new pathways in the neural network of your brain. Out of awe, yearning, fear, doubt and jealousy arise a lovingly inspired view of what we can be. The abyss between where we are and what we want to be is actually the source of all the negative emotion we feel in the presence of other people’s greatness. It is not their greatness we react to, but our own apparent littleness. If in their presence of greatness we choose to focus on all the reasons why we have not been able to be great ourselves, we will only ever be small in our minds and in our lives. Yoga teaches us to remain open to our own greatness and learn from those who set the standard ahead of us. Remaining happy about your own journey can give you the happy realization that coming second can be easier because the path is already laid out before you. To be the first ones to pioneer a new way to be successful is hard, arduous and requires great strength. If you want to follow in the footsteps of the great ones it is often easier to walk along the clearly laid out path before you. So in the presence of people whose accomplishments you consider great drop your ego and learn.

Once you stand of the side of accomplishment noting can take that away from you. It does not detract your achievements when someone else also surmounts the same hurdle. It is not any less awesome to lift up into a handstand when another student does the same thing. If you fear loss of ground gained from others attaining similar results, you are acting from the ego-based fear that assumes there is a limited amount of success in the world. If you learn a challenging yoga posture and someone else also manages to do ti too, it does not make your posture any less valuable. It just means someone else did it too. You could even say that when many people attain the same results it gets easier and easier for even more people to attain those results. Rather than making it less meaningful, it means the impact is greater and further reaching. In a sense when a massive amount of people are able to walk the path laid out ahead of them the unification of desire, goal and ideal is so powerful so that these individuals in some way stand as one. This unity amplifies the original message and makes it stronger. 



While we are all unique and make a vital, unrepeatable contribution to the universe, if you think you are more deserving of a better place because of your attainments then success has actually evaded you. Instead when success is a reflection of a happy inner state and comes with a zen-like non-attachment to the results, success is guaranteed regardless of the outward results. But when you attain success and fear the loss of it you are caught in the scarcity mode of being that assumes there is a limited number of coupons for success available and that the only way anyone else will attain the same results is to steal it from you. But that’s neither true nor realistic. If you believe that you have to protect your assets by creating spheres of influence where your power is the ultimate will, you will create a war between worlds, people and communities that will actually destroy everything you hold dear. The wisdom of yoga teaches you to relax your attachment to your achievements and let go of the notion of your own preciousness just long enough to be generous to your fellow human beings. Only then will you have more than you ever imagined possible. 



Longterm yoga practitioners learn that if you want to be a truly great person you have to master not just the attainment of material success and accomplishment, but the enlightened perspective to remain non-attached and peaceful when it is time to let it all go. The truth is that despite our property laws, trademarking, copyrighting and ownership deeds we do not actually own or control anything. In a sense we have it all on vibrational loan from the energetic world and it could all be gone tomorrow. Instead of ownership, perhaps stewardship is a more enlightened way to navigate through life. Success is a not possession when we attain it. Instead it is an experience that we receive and like all experience it passes. If we try to hold onto it we lose it. If we grasp at it with severe yearning and painful attachment we will never get it. Every experience comes into our life to enrich us and then it leaves. Sometimes we love what we have so much so that we never want it to change. Sometimes we hate what we have so much so that all we want is for it to change. But yoga helps us learn that the reality of life is that everything changes sooner or later. Nothing in the material world lasts forever so the only lasting peace comes from aligning your sense of self with the eternal nature of your being within. The residual feeling of every experience is an echo of love etched into our soul’s memory. This window into eternity is our only real, lasting legacy. 


The promise of inner peace does not come at a cheap price. You cannot beg, borrow or cheat your way along the inner journey. Whenever you strive to create a new way of being it is simply not a matter of flipping a switch. Instead you stand at the mountain of new desire and look ahead to a long and sometimes arduous road to the top. But with years of work, patience and diligence anything is possible. Yet when faced with such adversity most people quit or take the easy, known route to average results. While there is nothing wrong with this method of interacting with life, there is a much more powerful way to actually live your life to its maximum potential. Yoga leads the way through disbelief into an accomplished life.

Within the parameters of a sticky mat yoga practitioners are asked repeatedly to perform challenging movements while uniting their breathe, posture and gaze. Sri T. Krishnamacharya described yoga as the process where the impossible becomes possible and the possible over a long period of time becomes easy. The place where many practitioners fall off the path is when they try for easy straight from impossible. If you experience a movement as impossible and want it to be easy immediately, you will certainly fail because change does not happen so quickly. Instead start with the impossible and allow its difficulty to teach you. Stay in those ugly places where learning happens and soon the impossible starts to show you how it one day might be possible. Almost no one gets it gracefully on the first try. Held within the outward form of every light, free and easy posture is years of difficulty, failure and even pain. When you embark on the inner quest of yoga it is the very process of starting at the bottom of a seemingly impossible mountain and then with slow, steady perseverance climbing the mammoth against insurmountable odds that holds the power of transformation. By facing the unfaceable, conquering the unconquerable and confronting the absolutely terrifying places within you necessarily gain access to an experience of yourself that is beyond the struggle itself. It is the experience of a place within yourself as eternally peaceful, powerful and loving that yoga is actually about. The light, free and easy asana is just a matter of seduction. Yoga teaches that only by transcending the illusory world of limitations can you actually move past these false boundaries in your practice and in your life. Every posture, every movement and every breathe you take along the way redefines the very essence of your being. In a sense yoga is the most basic path of self-empowerment.

When you practice a particularly challenging series of postures you have the opportunity to face and move past numerous obstacles along the inner journey including doubt, fear, pain, hatred, boredom, frustration and egotism. These difficult states of mind often evoke deeply ingrained reactionary patterns such as panic, denial and escapism. Some people even pray for a savior to literally do it for them. But yoga is a path of humility where you only gain the results if you put in the work yourself. There is no salvific deity that will do your postures or your practice for you. There are teachers for guidance and inspiration but they can only help you to the extent that you are willing to unroll your mat and help yourself.

Ashtanga yoga is a dynamic form of hatha yoga that asks you to unroll your mat a staggering six days a week. Sometimes Ashtanga yoga is so demanding that it can be intimidating. When I started practicing Ashtanga Yoga I, like most people, was sore all over and not particularly good at it. Many people assume that because they cannot easily bend their bodies into the pretzel-like positions of the Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series that Ashtanga Yoga is not for them. When I started I also did not have the superhuman strength it asks for nor the Gumbi-limberness that Ashtanga Yoga requires. But I learned it through years of sincere practice. The sole qualification for the practice of Ashtanga Yoga is your love of the practice and your ability to show up on your mat as much as possible. It does not matter what level of posture you perform because the inner work of yoga is fueled by the authentic search for inner peace.

Sometimes one of the first things you experience along the quest of yoga is just how far away you are from your stated intention. Whether it is a peaceful life or a challenging posture yoga works from the inside out and helps you develop the confidence and faith in yourself necessary to accomplish your goals. The postures are hard not because the harder the posture, the deeper the yoga but instead because you grow exponentially when you challenge your borders. The depth of yoga happens in the heart and is irrelevant to physical form. The real yoga always happens on the internal level and it is through devotion and dedication to spiritual practice that the transformation of yoga happens. Ashtanga yoga asks tightness to bend and softness to be strong. It challenges the limits of the mind and the body beyond popular medical notions of safety, possibility and comfort. In doing so practitioners literally expand their consciousness and learn that they can do whatever they set their minds to. But yoga is no magic pill for it is through your own effort that you purify your body and expand your mind. Yoga is as strong as you make it and takes you as deep as you are willing to go.

The experience of your first yoga class feels like embarking on a mysterious adventure into a whole new terrain. As your curiosity peers into the incense-filled hallways lined with Ganesh and Shiva the open-hearted calm beckons you to travel into your own sacred inner realm. The seductive power of yoga is an addictive calling to go deeper into yourself. Once you experience first hand how magical yoga is, all resistance becomes futile.

Regardless of your intention when you plants the first seeds of your lotus flower the transformative power of this ancient spiritual science works on a deep level of your being. Many people start yoga for fitness reasons only to find that yoga changes their lives in ways far beyond the physical. Even if you are not a true believer and only wish to receive the physical health benefits of yoga, merely attending a yoga class regularly will have a lasting impact on your life. The beauty of the physical yoga postures is that you do not actually need to believe in them in order for the healing power of yoga to work. Hatha yoga approaches the transformation of the human spirit from the body first and then works its way subtly through to the mind and soul. The body itself is an avenue to the spiritual that works from the inside out. As you water the seeds of padmasana the full blooming lotus opens in your mind and soul.

Entering the new world of yoga is the first conscious step to live a more peaceful life. The initiatory phase of yoga is your chance to powerful create your life moment to moment and live your highest potential every day. As a neophyte it is important to remember that it is natural to feel overwhelmed when you realize just how demanding spiritual discipline really is. Rather than a recreational activity that you can keep separate from your life, yoga asks you to transform your whole life to abide by yogic principles. If at first you find yourself drawn to the physical display of power in advanced asana you quickly see that the heart of yoga reaches far deeper than the postures themselves. Indeed the asanas are only used to purify the body, practice meditative states of unified consciousness and prepare the physical form to be a home for divinity in the world of mind and matter. The more advanced asanas are not ends in and of themselves. Instead the real work of yoga happens on the inner body and is actually the seed of your own enlightenment beginning to flower.

Like a open invitation to the spiritual path yoga never places commandments on practitioners from above. When you start practicing yoga the body itself becomes more sensitive and then asks you to live a more pure lifestyle. While the moral and ethic codes of a yogic lifestyle ask practitioners to be an instrument of kindness, compassion and healing in the world, the choice to live a peaceful is meant to be a sincere feeling that each practitioners feels for themselves before acting upon it. Practicing asana makes the body more sensitive so that you feel more clearly the impact that unhealthy behavior, negative thoughts and destructive emotions have on you. Yoga never tells you what you can and cannot do. It is a path of liberation not bondage. It is a path of direct knowingness rather than rules and edicts. The practice of yoga itself opens your body and mind to desire wholly a new way of being, living and interacting with yourself and others. It is the heightening of your own awareness that facilitates the transformation. You change not because your teacher tells you to but because yoga opens the door to a new way of being that you choose to walk through with joy, ease and grace. The journey into the lotus heart of yoga is a lifelong spiritual practice that bears flowers in this life and beyond.

Faced with the seemingly insurmountable goal of ultimate enlightenment many new students doubt their ability to ever progress along the arduous path of yoga. They look at their teachers or other accomplished practitioners and wonder how they will ever get from their relative feeling of confusion to the clarity, grace and precision they see in the masterful art form of yoga. Yet small seeds do not doubt whether they will become trees. They trust the natural process of evolution and growth that takes them from seeds to sprouting seedlings to flowering, fruitful trees. With proper nutrients, care and love the flower of your inner lotus is sure to grow to maturity in the fertile soil of your own consciousness. Every accomplished yogi today has benefitted from the guidance of their teachers and been nurtured by the yoga community. Every yoga teacher today has also nourished their own journey with their own dedication and devotion. If you are a new students of yoga remember that you hold the key to the power of yoga. It is in your own heart that the seed of spiritual investigation must take root, watered by the flow of your own consciousness. When you embark on your own operation lotus know that this journey is timeless one that never ends, only deepens. Small treasures abound when you attempt attempt challenging postures that seem impossible that with time, dedication and guidance evolve into possibility.

Yoga teaches you to listen to your own inner voice. It is a process of awakening and attunement that defines personal integrity by the depth of each students’ connection with themselves. Through pain, pleasure, injury, ecstasy and bliss yoga invites practitioners to travel down the rabbit hole of personal discovery so that they may find their wonderland within.

Feeling the inner body deeply allows yoga practitioners a daily window into their own soul. By regularly tuning into this internal level yogis can actually feel the alignment or misalignment of their actions. The body’s wisdom lies in its pervasive truthfulness and the yogi’s wisdom lies in the ability to listen to the body’s sometimes superior sense of self. The body is perhaps the most physical form of the mind and the spirit and in fact outwardly and inwardly tells its story with clarity and precision. Practitioners learn to delineate messages from their inner world from whims of fancy and desire through years of dedicated practice. It is a delicate tightrope to walk the line between healthy guidance and destructive old habits that die hard.

Yoga postures or asanas give practitioners a chance to access the spiritual through the physical. This long, arduous task of internal awakening makes it possible for dedicated practitioners to excavate layers of themselves. Yogis cross the bridge between the physical and the spiritual through a path interlaced with the fire of pain, the release of trust and the freeflow of love. Each physical posture presents a series of tests and challenges that heal the body and train the mind. In the small moments where practitioners make contact with the eternal part of themselves they gain access to a more deeply tuned-in way of living, being and acting. It is in this undulating state where the flow of life actually begins.

Yoga is a sanctuary where you learn to listen to your body. Like a holiday from the limiting, negative thoughts that run on auto-pilot at the back of the mind yoga helps amplify the true nature of your mind and soul within. This heightened faculty of listening allows you to actually hear not only the body but also the mind. When your capacity to listen is at its greatest and most refined you have the ability to listen directly to your soul and seek its constant guidance. At the depths of your being lies a place where you already know all the answers to your deepest questions, a state of being so serene it remains calm even amidst the most terrifying traumas of your life and a mind so vast it encompasses the entire universe both good and bad in a field of love.

While on a daily basis it is often hard to hear the musings of the subtle language of soul, with regular yoga practice it is possible to attune your vibrational sensory perception to follow the messages surface from the deep. All the greatest ideas are in some sense channeled from this soft space within, not generated by a mechanistic world without. The miracle of yoga is that it provides regular people like you and me a way to literally gain access to the sacred inner world of spirit. Without this check-in I would sometimes quite literally be lost. While I do not get it right every time and certainly there are moments when I think I am receiving a deep message only to find that I am just feeding an old negative behavior, yoga helps me get better at listening to, trusting and having faith in the soft, but persistent voice within.

While the tradition of yoga is intensely bound to the sanctity of the teacher-student relationship, the words and guidance of the greatest teachers are meant as sign-posts that lead students to the discovery of their own true voice within. The presence of every yoga master raises the bar for the possibility of a better life for each student and is a starting point where we can begin. The ending point of this age-old tradition, the ultimate goal of eternal peace, must be an individual experience gained through the hard work and good fortune of each practitioner. Years under a teacher’s divine guidance can best give you the gift of finding your highest teacher within. No sacred teacher wants you to do what they say just because they said so or because you read in an ancient scripture. At its best yoga is a non-dogmatic, non-religious path towards self-realization. All yoga is experiential by definition because no one can live your awakening for you. No matter how many times you read it in scriptures or hear it from your teacher nothing is real for you along the path of yoga until you actually feel it in your own body, mind and soul as a call to action. There is no one who can know your own journey better than yourself and no one who can answer the hardest questions of your life but yourself. Teachers and tradition illuminate the path ahead for you, but you have to take each step with your own two feet. Once you dig deep enough and touch the eternal nature within you hold the key to lead yourself out of darkness into your own salvation.

Yoga seeks to unify the practitioner with the deepest level of themselves through a harmonization of body, mind and soul. When the mind is quiet, the body is healthy and the soul is free every living being can experience what is their birth right, that is, a state of boundless happiness, limitless joy and compassionate power. The entire process of yoga is one of remembering who you really are. In the glory of our true nature we trust the innate goodness of our being and learn to listen to the quiet voice of belief that comes from our deepest sense of self. Against a mountain of evidence to the contrary and doubt that cripples generations you have one thing to hold onto, a soft, subtle, but courageous voice that dares to say I think I can.

Yoga at first glance seems only like a really cool way to bend and twist your body while washing and folding your joints. Sometimes the hot bodies of yoga teachers and longterm students entice many to practice in the hopes of getting that almost famous toned, slim yoga body. Yet even though some students find their way into yoga because of the external form of the postures, the heart of yoga is a sincere spiritual investigation of the inner self. The highest potential of yoga practice is a constant connection with the highest source of divinity we can know and experience. If practiced with diligence over many years yoga connects us with an imperturbable, eternally calm place within. But yoga done without the intention of true inner peace uses the body’s outward appearance as a goal in itself and has more in common with sports and fitness than traditional yoga.

While I love sports and fitness and feel that most highly accomplished athletes are deeply spiritual and connected people, I am careful to distinguish yoga from sport. Yoga is not athletics though it asks the body to perform very athletic feats. It is tempting to create an exercise routine based on the techniques of yoga to stretch and strength the body. But the deeper benefits of yoga cannot be distilled and separated from the true intention behind it--the goal of inner peace. The body or the level of physical performance in yoga is never an end in and of itself. In fact yoga actually teaches you how to release attachment and identification with the body, the mind and the emotions. Instead yoga teaches practitioners learn how to identify with the seat of the soul within themselves. It is by challenging and moving past the known limits of the body that practitioners ultimately learn that they are not bound by their physical form. Through facing and transcending mental and emotional boundaries yoga students get first hand experience of their limitless potential for greatness. Yoga is a path of liberation from the material world of mind and matter. It is a door into the inner world and a life devoted to inner peace.

Physical form and posture, although extremely useful along the way, are not the end goal of yoga. It simply does not matter whether your hamstrings are long or your body is toned if you are not able to be a nice person. Alternatively a person practicing the most basic and beginner level of yoga while maintaining a heartfelt devotion to living a more peaceful life is perhaps a very accomplished yogi. Yoga without a foundation in the philosophy of liberation is just stretching. Whenever excited students would bring in photos of contortionists and other extremely bendy people for my teacher, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, to see in Mysore, he would take time to look deeply at the image. Then after a moment of reflection his furrowed brow would raise and Guruji would say, “That not yoga. That only bending. Yoga means self-knowledge”.

When students are enamored with the appearance of a posture it is often actually a deeper inner longing that is expressed. Whereas certain cultural systems deem it unacceptable to pursue spiritual studies under an alternative religious system, it is often acceptable under these same systems to try to exercise, get healthy and feel better. Yoga is a non-denominational, non-religious study of the inner self through daily direct experience. The stated goal for all dedicated practitioners is to know the divinity within on a daily basis. The physical postures and daily practices aim an establishing a basic level of health in the body, peace in the mind and equanimity in the emotions. The body itself is not the stated goal. Instead the body and the mind are two sides of the embodiment of each human spirit on Earth. Yoga practitioners maintain a healthy body in the same way monks sweep the temple grounds--to provide a clean, clear space for spirit to live. It is a mistake to think that the goal of yoga is only to get strong and flexible. Yes, you will get a strong, flexible body if you practice yoga. But if focus exclusively on the lithe form you will miss the real gift of yoga, that is, inner peace. The physical transformation in yoga is not the result of targeted toning techniques but instead occurs when deep psychological and emotional patterns are surpassed. Your body changes as your mind evolves. The yoga body is actually just a by-product of the exponential growth that happens when searching for your true, authentic self. The body only changes when you literally stretch your mind.

When we are born we breathe in, when we die we breathe out. The space between these two breathes holds the entirety of our life experience here on Earth. While the body that houses our spirit passes away, in some ways the light of our soul never stops burning just as the light of the sun never actually stops shining. From our limited perspective we are not able to see the daylight on the other side of the globe after sunset and it can also be hard for us to accept the eternal nature of our soul. In order to gain the perspective necessary to feel the eternal peace at the core of all life you must transcend the mundane and see everything from an elevated vantage point.

Yoga teaches that the way to cross the bridge into these more rarefied states of being is through the vehicle of the breath. Working with the breath while practicing yoga can not only be challenging, but also sometimes frustrating. Only a very accomplished practitioner can successfully coordinate complex movements with their clam, controlled breath. When I first started practicing yoga I was more interested in the end result of the posture than the subtleties of the breath. In fact it took me years before integrating pranayama, or breath control, into my daily ritual. Only after my teacher, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, directly taught me the Ashtanga yoga method of pranayama was I willing to go to this powerful place within. I have now come to understand that without the breath there is in fact no yoga and I am now as inspired by the breath as I am by the postures, if not more. Accomplished postures, acrobatic movements and floating handstands are all just tricks without the steady focus on the breath that is the heart of yoga.

The magic of working with the breath means that when you control the breath you have access to all five koshas, or bodies--physical, mental, emotional energetic and spiritual. Our breath is an action that is controlled by both conscious and unconscious action and therefore gives us access to both the conscious and subconscious mind. The regulation of breathing has an enormous impact on whether we are able to remain calm, healthy and balanced. It is through long, deep inhalation and exhalation that we stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system’s ability to calm down, more commonly known as the Relaxation Response. Nasal breathing deepens the state of relaxation, whereas open mouth breathing sends a signal of distress and panic to the brain. The deep ujjayi breathing taught in Ashtanga yoga stabilizes the heartbeat during strenuous activity, strengthens the cardiovascular system, triggers the Relaxation Response and keeps the mind totally focused within the present moment. Guruji always said that the Ashtanga yoga practice is a breathing practice and that the postures are “just bending”. Keeping your attention on the breath is one of the main points of yoga and without this careful attention to the breath yoga would just be another form of exercise. Yoga brings you into a deeper relationship with yourself by twisting the body into uncomfortable positions and asking you to breathe while you gaze at a single point of attention. The level of complexity necessary at any given moment is enough to stop the mind and create a long pause between the otherwise steady stream of thoughts. The depth of the breath ensures that all the multiple layers of your being are fully present and integrated.

Ashtanga yoga teaches that the equalization of the length of the inhalation and the length of the exhalation is of high importance while practicing. In doing so both sides of the consciousness are balanced. The inhalation can be correlated with receiving, taking in and activity, while the exhalation can be correlated with releasing, giving and restfulness. For postures that are challenging or painful and require greater flexibility it might be useful to focus temporarily on the exhalation. For postures that are challenging but require great strength it might be useful to coordinate the lifting motion with an inhalation in order to maximize the power of the breath.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of the yoga practice is that you are asked to maintain a calm, steady breath while the you move through increasing levels of difficulty. It is hard to remember to breathe when a posture is so hard so that all you want to do is hold your breath. When things are difficult, fearful, painful and frustrating there is a natural tendency to hold the breath. But if you stop breathing you stop your life energy. It is important to keep breathing especially when the postures test your physical and emotional limits. One of the main manifestations of proficiency in a series of postures is not merely the ability to perform them well, but actually the ability to breathe deeply and steadily while holding the postures. When you learn to breathe freely while attempting difficult asanas you are also practicing the kind of deep relaxation that will help you in difficult life situations. Sometimes two long deep breathes can avert an escalation of argumentation between friends or partners. With yoga practice taking a breath to pause the train of torment will feel more and more natural over time both on and off the mat.

If you do your practice with the focus solely on the attainment of asanas you will most likely sacrifice the breath for form. Yet the ends do not justify the means in yoga. More to the contrary, the means in and of themselves are the ends. Yoga is about the journey and the process and if there is not space to allow a deep inhalation and exhalation to be your guide in yoga, there might never be space for you to be calm in your life. The goal of life is not merely to make it as quickly as possible to the last breath, but instead to enjoy the whole glorious ride along the way. If you let go of the need to achieve you will discover that you already have all the peace you really need inside yourself, in between the inhalation and exhalation.

Yoga purifies the mind and body by asking you to develop deep self-knowledge. When you unify with the deepest part of yourself an incontrovertible understanding of not only your own life, but all life takes root. The highlights along the path of yoga are epiphany moments where your higher self is revealed to you in between your breathe, your posture and point of attention. This three-pronged approach is the pinnacle of the Ashtanga Yoga method that I learned from my teacher Sri. K. Pattahbi Jois, whom I called Guruji.

Guruji taught that regular yoga practice cleanses the area around the spiritual heart and removes the six poisons of kama (desire), krodha (anger), moha (delusion), lobha (greed), matsarya (envy) and mada (sloth). He was a firm believer in the benefits of daily practice as the main method for practitioners to experience the benefits of yoga. In order to remove these poisons you have to practice with strong determination in order to change layers of accumulated patterns. This is done through daily practice of all the eight limbs of the Ashtanga yoga path. When this integrated approach to spiritual development is in place the inner fire of purification, called agni in Sanskrit, is ignited and literally burns through unhealthy habits, physical toxins and emotional hang-ups. Studying and memorizing the Yoga Sutras, Sanskrit words or contemporary philosophy alone will not give you peace. Information alone is not knowledge. Guruji always emphasized the necessity of experiencing the true effects of a daily practice within your own practice, body and life. Only in this way can students integrate the wisdom of the sacred, eternal teachings of yoga into daily life and know firsthand the empowering self-knowledge that is the essence of yoga. Yoga transforms people not by demanding change, but by inspiring change from within and it is daily practice that provides the breeding ground for this phenomenal transformation.

Anything really meaningful in life usually comes at the expense of a little hard work and yoga’s great promise of transformation is no different. One thing that most practitioners feel is that yoga is hard and demanding. The reason the exercises, practices and observances are so challenging is because true self knowledge demands it and our attachments to the six poisons are deeply entrenched. Before the brilliant light of absolute existence can be felt there is often a due diligence that needs to be taken through the doldrums of these obstacles. Attachment, anger, delusion, envy, laziness and so many more detrimental states of being must be understood and transcended before we can know lasting peace. We all have a place inside of ourselves that we are not one hundred percent comfortable with. We have all done things that we are not completely proud of. And we have all fears, insecurities and idiosyncracies that we hide from the world. The practice of yoga is a slow retraining of our bodies and minds to make ourselves comfortable with the scary places inside and outside of ourselves. Yoga can be the first step along an arduous path towards unconditional acceptance of all life, including our own.

On many of my trips to Mysore students would often share their elaborate stories of discomfort with Guruji and the majority of the time he would say “Pain good.” The second book of the yoga sutras begins with an axiom that defines a key element of yoga practice as accepting pain as help for purification, known in Sanskrit as “tapah”. The only way that the inner fire of purification, agni, works is if you learn to stay in it and not run away. The natural human response to pain is fear, avoidance and denial, yet yoga uses pain as a method of awakening. By learning to accept pain within the safe space of yoga you learn to create a pause between the stimulus of pain and the response in your body and mind that wants to run away. In that powerful pause you are able to choose your course of action instead of being driven by reactionary patterns from the past. The store of accumulated reactionary patterns amount to what is called in Sanskrit the samskaras and these set ways of being, reacting and running create the negative karma that adversely affects our lives.

So yoga teacher you how to react painful situations as opportunities for growth, expansion and success and thus you learn not to run away. If your tendency is to focus on the problem when it arises yoga retrains your mind to focus on the solution. If you run away from pain yoga teaches you how to accept it and then move through it. While you might not want any type of pain in your life, the truth is that pain is pretty much unavoidable. There will always be a squeaking thing you could do without, a person who aggravates you or a life situation that saddens you. Yoga gives you the unique chance to change your reaction patterns and thereby tap into an eternal, abiding peace. The stability of the dedicated yoga practitioner means that peace is possible to experience regardless of what circumstances arrive at the doorstep. In other words you can lesson the impact of the six poisons and the samskaras by accepting pain and practicing true kriya yoga when pain comes so that you will experience a more peaceful life.

While the acceptance of pain as help for purification is sometimes the most difficult step to take along the journey of yoga it is one that will help you move through pain, suffering and injury into healing, peace and joy. After you maintain a steady yoga practice over a long period of time the immeasurable benefits begin flowing through your life. Yoga gives you direction and pointers to show you how to excavate layers of yourself hidden below dirt, debris and toxins, and in doing so you experience the deep peace that is inherent in your nature. Whenever there is tension, stress and unhappiness it is because the connection to your higher self has been lost in the sea of the six poisions and the samskaras. In order for you to transcend these unhappy states of being and experience the true luminosity of self-realization you must first accept the inevitable pains of life as help for purification. Yoga reconnects you with your inner world so that you can make contact with the indescribable space of ultimate knowingness where transformation happens.

The spark of interest in yoga often ignites an inner obsession that infiltrates every aspect of your life. At first yoga is life and you cannot get enough of it. Yoga reconnects you to long forgotten inner realms and you somehow fall in love with yoga. Yet if your yoga practice evolves into a daily, lifelong relationship it is almost inevitable that at some moment you will get bored with it. The insatiable hunger for as much yoga as possible will shift and change to a space where you will be absolutely full of it. This period of lackluster levels of initiative often comes ironically as a result of your full immersion in the yoga world. While this is a crisis stage where many practitioners quit yoga, change teachers or switch styles of yoga it is actually a place where the yoga practice itself has a unique opportunity to work on the deepest levels of the subconscious if you stay with it.

Anything done repeatedly over a long period of time has the potential to get boring, route and mundane. One of the main reasons why the initial glow of the romance period of yoga fades is because the practice has actually managed to sink down and penetrate a deep layer of consciousness. At this stage boredom is actually an obstacle to spiritual growth not just an annoying thing to face each day on the mat. If you have the courage to move through it just on the other side of boredom is deep and lasting peace, unity with yourself and the strength and determination to live with integrity. Boredom is an important maturing phase of the journey inward and one that is only experienced by a practitioner who has already committed themselves to the daily practice.

Yoga is a process where the impossible becomes possible and the possible eventually becomes easy. If your practice moves to the stage where you are bored it is a result of the intelligent effort you have put into your yoga practice every day. When the specialness of yoga transforms into something that you can do automatically it can be said to be fully integrated. When yoga changes from strange and exotic to normal and ordinary you have succeeded at turning yoga into lifestyle commitment rather than a mere passing fancy. If you tune into the feeling of boredom when it arises it can lead you to the realization that your daily practice has reached a whole new level of awareness within. This usually means that you now have access to a subconscious level. Once you experience this deeper stage of awareness boredom is a natural hurdle to cross as your system gets used to living in a more peaceful state. Boredom itself appears as a kind of itch on the field of your being that seems to crave the initial excitement of the beginning and begs you to scratch it will all types of distractions. This dilemma is like being in a long term relationship with a loving partner and yearning for the uncertainty of flirtation exactly when you begin to really feel the security of trusting your partner with your deepest intimacies. It is when we get everything that we want that the ego kicks in and tells us that we are not satisfied with what we have and that we should search for something more. While desire itself is not bad and in fact leads us to new levels, when unhealthy craving tempts us with actions that may lead us away from a life aligned with our higher purpose the real work of yoga begins. Yoga teaches you how to make peace with your deepest self and feel contentment with the life and body that you have.

Whenever you feel lackadaisical about your yoga practice look for small instances of beauty in each posture and allow every breathe to rekindle the flame of inspiration. Observe your feelings of boredom but do not let them rule your actions and one day you feel a deeper and more lasting sense of peace. Allow curiosity to bring new presence to your practice in each moment. When you the basics of physical practice are established deeply you are more free to explore the subtleties of alignment, breathe, philosophy and inner awareness. Only when you do your yoga practice far past the initial point of infatuation will you know that this relationship has the lasting power to be a lifelong commitment.

One of the greatest tests of any lifelong relationship is the ability to weather some of the inevitable dark storms the make landfall on the coast of our consciousness. As you practice yoga the "truth" about yourself is exposed and it is not always as rosy as imagined. Sometimes facing reality brings about a sharp end to the honeymoon period with yoga. Simply feeling how tight your hamstrings are, how weak your muscles feel, how stiff your back is or how blocked your hip joins are every day for a year can be brutal. Boredom in this case is a coping mechanism that takes you out of facing the sometimes unhappy reality at hand. Another experience that can be very boring to face is a yoga-related injury. Dealing with pain can mean adding in humbling modifications and adjustments to the practice and many people quit at their first difficult injury. While I wish everyone to be injury-free in yoga one of the first steps towards achieving a mature and healthy yoga practice is to have a yoga-related injury and move through it into healing. Remaining excited about yoga even when you are not able to perform cool tricks means that you are willing to go through the full process of transformation. While it can be heartbreakingly boring to let go of all the funky moves that you identify with, injury is a great teacher that you will learn from when you move through it into ultimate healing.

Injury, repetition and simple difficulty naturally bring up boredom and if you move through this state when it arises you will allow yoga to powerfully transform your life far beyond any mere series of postures. When yoga is just as mediocre, mundane and miserable as the rest of your life it really begins to teach you how to make peace with your life. Romantic poet William Blake says that a true test of the human spirit is to find innocence through experience and it is exactly this seemingly impossible state of union that yoga asks you to tap into on the inner spiritual path. Just on the other side of the apparent ordinariness of your experience is actually a much deeper understanding of yourself, your body and your yoga practice. When you can see the beauty of all life shining with the power of creation regardless of time or location yoga has worked its magic through you. Beyond the wow phase of yoga you confront the monotony of doing the same practice everyday and if you stay with your yoga practice through this inevitable period you will one day tap into a limitless wealth of wisdom. You have to do your yoga practice so much so that it is not special anymore so that you can learn to experience a kind of specialness that never fades and a beauty that is truly eternal.

A Guru is a person whose very presence imparts truth and awakening in the disciple. When I traveled to Mysore for the first time at the age of 22 I asked Sri K. Pattabhi Jois where I could find the illusive state of inner peace that all yoga practice seeks to instill. Known as Guruji to his students, he said "You take it practice many years, then Shantih is coming... no problem" and my heart opened to the grace of his teaching. It is my great fortune to consider this amazing man my teacher and I attribute the depth of my personal practice and teaching to the light that Guruji's fire ignited within me.

Sri K. Pattabhi Jois taught Ashtanga yoga for more than 65 years before passing on May 18, 2009. It was the depth and power of Gurujii himself that inspired his students to have faith in themselves and in Ashtanga yoga. The miracle of Jois's life and legacy far exceeds his physical presence and is perhaps the very definition of the word Guru. It is the strength of Jois' very being that made the difference in his teaching and his spirit will live in yoga forever. Speaking in his endearingly broken English, Guruji communicated a transcendental knowledge of yoga despite his lack of full linguistic fluency. It is not what he said but the space that he held that carried forth the ineffable and made realization possible in every student lucky enough to practice under his guidance. While Guruji may have left this Earth he lives in the pulse of Ashtanga yoga in every student and teacher around the world.

Each day of Jois' life marked a relentless devotion to the Ashtanga yoga lineage which he carried with absolute integrity. A humble man born before both world wars, Guruji's lifelong dedication to yoga transformed the lives of countless people around the world. Born in a small village called Kowshika in Southern India on Guru Purnima day, the first full moon of July in 1915 designated as a national holiday in India to honor all Gurus, his life embodied the tradition of the sacred teacher-student relationship. First Jois was a devoted student after discovering yoga at the age of 12 when he saw the man who would become his teacher, Krishnamacharya, give a yoga demonstration at his school. Studying daily for two years he devoted himself to yoga at an early age and ultimately moved to Mysore to continue his education in yoga and Sanskrit Studies. There he flourished as a scholar and yoga teacher. And it was only after Jois taught the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishna Rajendra Wodeyar, that the Yoga Department of the Sanskrit College of Mysore began on March 1, 1937 with the approval and blessing of Krishnamacharya. After 37 years of professorship he earned the tital of Vidwan (professor emeritus of Sanskrit Studies).

Though he was a Sanskrit scholar Jois remained true to his teaching in yoga and placed practical, direct experience as the highest form learning. He said numerous times that yoga is "99% practice, 1% theory." Throughout his years as a professor Guruji also taught yoga in a small room on the first floor of his modest house in Mysore and encouraged every student to find the personal experience of truth that yoga practice offers. More often than not the group was small and less than enthusiastic. Thankfully Guruji persisted for nearly 30 years before passionate interest developed. He never doubted the method of Asthanga yoga, nor his ability to teach. Instead he persisted against all odds and guarded the sacred jewel of the yoga tradition with reverence. If it were not for his steadfast belief in the validity of Asthanga yoga through these years where he lacked worldly success yoga as we know it today simply would not exist. Only in the early 1970s when his only remaining son Manju Jois traveled Southern India to give Ashtanga yoga demonstrations did the first Americans begin to travel to Mysore and invite Jois to travel, teach and tour. Subsequently both Guruji and his son made their first tour outside of India and arrived to California in 1975 carrying the mantle of Ashtanga yoga. Manju stayed to teach and still currently resides in California and travels the world sharing his good humored presence. Since that serendipitous tour Ashtanga yoga has spread like wildfire around the globe, growing geometrically each year.

Always joyful to see a new student, Guruji carried the torch of Ashtanga yoga while it grew over the last 34 years from a few disinterested students into a flowering, international community of dedicated, passionate practitioners. He lived to see Ashtanga yoga reach more than 30 different countries, transform thousands (if not millions) of yoga practitioners and sprout centers all around the world. The full fruition of his life's work became manifest within his lifetime.

Ashtanga yoga is now one of the most powerful, popular and proven methods of yoga available today. This dynamic flowing series of postures traces its lineage to an ancient sage named Vamana Rishi in the Yoga Korunta. Combining breathe and movement in Vinyasa, Ashtanga yoga purifies the body through the stimulation of internal heat (agni). Used together with the Tristana method specifically taught by Jois, Ashtanga practitioners concentrate their minds by focusing on three things: breathe (ujjayi pranayama), posture (asana) and gaze (dristhi). With more than 65 years of diligent, soulful teaching Guruji maintained the Ashtanga yoga method in its pure form. All authorized and certified Ashtanga yoga teachers must study at the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, India and learn the method directly from Sharath Rangaswamy, Jois's grandson and the current master of the Ashtanga yoga lineage, and Saraswathi Rangaswamy (Jois' daughter). In order to maintain the ancient tradition of Guru Parampara (an unbroken succession of direct teacher to student transmission), Ashtanga yoga demands that you delve deeply within yourself and experience first hand the transformative power of yoga just as Jois himself did before you begin teaching.

Guruji used to say, "Ashtanga yoga is for all people, old people, young people, fat people, skinny people, only not lazy people." That is because Ashtanga yoga is challenging; it asks tightness to bend, softness to be strong and pushes the limits of the mind and the body beyond popular medical notions of safety, possibility and comfort. In doing so practitioners literally expand their consciousness. While containing six series of postures, most practitioners spend their entire lives working on the first or Primary Series of Ashtanga yoga because its level of strength and flexibility is already quite challenging. Sharath Rangaswamy is the only person on Earth who practices the magical Sixth Series of Asthanga yoga and he is the only person truly qualified to carry on the full teaching of Ashtanga yoga. Yet the Primary Series is a complete practice that burns through accumulated toxins within the body and heightens the level of health. Without regular cleansing the body collects toxins from the environment, food and even emotional states that if left unattended can sometimes lead to disease and discomfort later in life. Yet health and comfort can easily return to the body regular, disciplined yoga practice. While it is no magic pill able to cure all ailments, Jois' long, healthy life is a testament to the true power of Ashtanga yoga. Yoga is as strong as you make it and takes you as deep as you are willing to go.

We have the practice of Ashtanga yoga today because of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois's unwavering dedication to sharing his wisdom every student willing to put in the hard work of daily discipline. There is no greater way we can honor Guruji's life than to get on our mats and practice every day. He gave us the gift of Ashtanga yoga and now it is our responsibility to venerate his memory with our own commitment to yoga. If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that Guruji wants us all to take "practice, practice, practice.... then all is coming."

A yoga posture demonstrated by a master level practitioner is often the epitome of grace and ease. Yet when the novice student attempts to mirror these same movements the degree of difficulty is immediately evident. The real test of a yoga practitioner comes when the path ahead is laid out clearly and the student choose whether to commits to each step of the journey regardless of difficulty.

While the inner path is sometimes arduous, long and painful, it is also immensely rewarding, filled with timeless joy and one of the only sources of real, lasting peace. Each practitioner of yoga goes through periods of injury, pain and discomfort but not every practitioner has the dedication, heart and courage to find the light at the end of the tunnel. Those who maintain a relationship with their practice over a number of years begin to understand just how much it takes to make yoga a lifelong practice. There are moments of doubt, intense suffering and emotional turmoil as well as moments of bliss, ecstasy and realization. What commitment to yoga over a lifetime really demands is total devotion.

It is through the practice of dedicating yourself to your yoga practice everyday regardless of pain or pleasure that you learn the meaning of devotion. By traversing the murky jungle of the body and mind through yoga you develop the strength and fortitude of spirit needed to face life with dignity. By devoted yourself totally to the path of yoga you learn what it really means to surrender yourself to something. Before that moment of complete dedication there is always the chance to pull out, draw back or quit. But when you devoted yourself wholly your intention, energy and spirit moves mountains to create the real possibility of transformation. It is through the power of devotion that yoga changes your life.

When I started practicing yoga I was not a naturally strong person but I was deeply inspired by the masterful articulation of handstands and arm balances. For nearly five years I devoted myself entirely to the study of yoga with a special emphasis on the development of strength and steadiness in the body and mind. It is because I lived and died for strength in my yoga practice for a number of years that I now consider myself much stronger. It is because I followed the path of yoga through injury, pain, doubt, discomfort and disillusion all the way through into peace, joy, acceptance and love that I now share what I have learned through teaching. It is yoga that lead me to discover my own inner strength, a quiet voice that was always there though I did not know how to awaken it. When you begin your practice you will learn how ready you are to be truly devoted to yourself and to yoga. When you commit yourself fully to your chosen goal, be it in your yoga practice or in the world, there is nothing that can stop you.

A lifetime commitment to yoga teaches you the power of the deepest level of devotion. Whether you practice six days a week or only two times a week as long as yoga remains in your life over time you will delve deeper into the inner world and know what it means to fully surrender yourself to the path of yoga. When you are able to maintain your attention on your deepest dreams with the type of unwavering focus and heartfelt dedication that yoga teaches you, then you will also know the exhilarating feeling of actualizing your dreams in the world.

Do you ever find yourself holding on so tightly to a desired outcome that you are a filled with anxiety, tension or blind ambition? Have you ever wanted to do a yoga posture so badly so that you are literally obsessing about it and can talk of almost nothing else? This is perhaps the definition of unhealthy attachment at its core. Yet at the same time the driven mind directed at a task at hand is one of the most powerful tools we have to change our lives. So the question then becomes not how to rid ourselves of our desires or our drive but instead how to train our mind to work towards our desires without the unnecessary tension of attachment. For it is often just at the moment when we truly let go that everything we want arrives with ease.

Your state of mind influences every movement you make. Hold on too tightly and there will always be an insatiability at the core of all your actions and no peace within the intensity of your grip. The only reason we ever hold on for dear life to goals, achievements or desires is because we have attached our identity to the material form of the actualization of those dreams. And while there is perhaps nothing more satisfying in life than the experience of moving from a place where your dreams are not yet manifest into the full expression of your dreams, the attainment itself will not make you happy, relaxed or free. Instead only by learning to be happy and free right now will you find happiness and freedom in your life at all. Intense attachment to a particular goal often also creates a pervasive anxiety that only leads to misery, pain and suffering elsewhere in your life. No amount of achievement will satisfy this inner tension if you cannot learn to allow life to flow freely through you by relaxing your attachment to the outcome.

When you care more about your attainment of the goal than the experience of attaining the goal you often place undue value on the goal itself. In doing so you may even think that the ends justify the means. Yet no goal, success or thing is worth sacrificing your peace of mind or your principles along the way. If you enjoy the process rather than remain attached to goal you will find greater freedom and flexibility in your life now. Sometimes even when a long-desired goal is attained a feeling of loneliness, dissatisfaction or loss remains. This strange paradox exists because of an illusory identification in the goals themselves. Real happiness exists right here and now within you and is not dependent on your attainment of anything. If you locate your self-worth in your actions or your ability to do things then you will only hold on too tightly to these things you want to attain. If you locate your sense of self worth as independent of actions, goals or achievements then you are free to enjoy the process of working towards your dreams without unhealthy attachment.

The yoga tradition teaches non-attachment, vairagya in Sanskrit, not so that you walk around in a state of emotional detachment devoid of expression, but instead so that you will know that your deepest sense of self exists outside the realm of things, goals and material success. By practicing releasing attachments you let go of your intense identification with the world of materiality and begin to relax and play with life in a state of joy. The odd thing is that often the moment when you experience the state of vairagya, things that you have literally been slaving for often arrive with little or no effort. Life energy cannot flow when you grip too tightly and when you relax you allow life to flow through you. It is the current of life, not your stressed out state of panic, that delivers the gifts of success, attainment and accomplishment to you.

When I began practicing yoga I naively thought the postures or asanas themselves would lead me to enlightenment and so I held onto the form of the physical postures so tightly that I simply had no peace in my body. Over time I realized that enlightenment is not a state achieved by any posture, nor is it one readily attainable through mere yoga postures. Instead any inner awakening must come from a personal revolution of consciousness where your inner being comes fully alive. Once attachment even to the form of yoga itself softens then the energy of life flows through the body during practice. Until that moment of release the outward manifestations of effortful attachment can be seen in the tension in practitioners’ jaws, the white knuckles of a hand bound too tightly in challenging asanas, the self-inflicted injury of pushing too hard past sensitive knees, over-engaged fingers reaching into space with a latent aggression or a spine that breaks but does not bend. When you literally relax into an acceptance and a knowingness of your deepest sense of self then you move into a subtlety of movement that is the embodiment of grace. As you release your attachment to perfection then you will know what it means to be perfect as you are.

Whenever you try to “make” something happen it is often a good indication that you are overly attached to the outcome. If you notice that you are holding onto a relationship, a goal or even a yoga posture with a iron fist begin the hard work of practicing non-attachment and let it go no matter how much it hurts. In a sense the pain that you experience when you accept the possibility of your desires and dreams not working out exactly as you planned them is the pain that leads to purification. Rather than using excessive force to beat your body, other people or situations into submission release your attachment and allow what life wants to happen to be. Accept reality even when it hurts and you will begin to know a place inside yourself beyond the hurt. A new way of being begins when you finally stop trying to control the events of life with blood, sweat and tears. The practice of non-attachment leads you to a deep expression of faith and trust in the good of the universe and in life itself because if you let go of your control you must trust life to have your greatest good at its heart. For only if you doubt your connection to the love that is the source of life will you feel a need to hold on with effort to the outcome of your life.

It’s not to say that all you have to do is sit in your room and release attachments to outcome and then things will arrive on your doorstep and you will magically be floating up into handstands. The truth is that you have to practice and you have to show up for life. The truth is also that you have to exert much less effort and strain than you might otherwise think to get the results you want. In the tradition of Buddhism there is a concept called Right Effort that yoga practitioners would do well to integrate into their practice. It is the sixth of the eight paths in the Noble Eightfold Path and teaches practitioners to release what is unskillful in exchange for that which is skillful. You could understand effort done with unhealthy attachment as unskillful means to achieve a desired result, evidenced by the tension, pain, injury and misery that often accompany unskillful action. By contrast you could take right effort to mean the perfect balance between activation and release, direction and allowing, motivation and faith, and desire and acceptance. Right effort is enlightened action in the body and mind and anxiety, stress or holding with an iron fist are simply not part of this sacred path. As B.K.S. Iyengar says, “You have to put your intelligence in your body”. Through the practice of non-attachment yoga practitioners engage in right effort by bringing the mind, body and spirit into balance.

Relax into the postures you find most challenging and invite the joy of movement into your being. Practice until the attachment to form vanishes and transcend your physicality by reaching a deeper understanding of yourself. Trade the effortful for the graceful and allow life to live itself powerfully through you.

You will see in others what you see in yourself. All of the insecurities you see in others are really the ones you have within reflected back at you. A Course in Miracles states that you cannot give to another what you have not known yourself. But is this true with love? Or does love play by other rules? When we ask others for unconditional love does that mean we are capable of it ourselves? In the total acceptance of our imperfections we find a grace beyond measure and a joy in the otherwise confusing panorama of humanity. Yet if we are only able to love another person to the extent that we are able to love ourselves our capacity to give might find a dead end in the caverns of our self-loathing and the doldrums of low self-esteem. One of the first and exceedingly difficult lessons in life is to learn how to love ourselves fully--foibles, faults and all.

Love and the search for it can sometimes take up a large portion of our mental, emotional and physical space that it can be possible to devote entire lives to the pursuit of love, be it returned or unrequited. Without someone to love we feel incomplete and lonely. With someone to love we are tested through and through. All human beings need relationships to know themselves truly. For when you share your life with someone there is an intimacy that bears the truth and honesty of the soul beyond any theoretical explanation. It is in the mirror of your deepest love where you can see yourself most clearly. Love is a desire everyone harbors. There is a sleeping romantic in every cynic, a broken heart in every hardened facade and a secret yearning in even the most independent minds. We all yearn for the gift of being together in a safe space where we can let our guards completely down and open our hearts with ease and grace.

Life's greatest tests are perhaps not in the grand battles of religion, morality or politics but instead in small acts of kindness, compassion and generosity. Sometimes the best expression of a person's character is whether they're willing to share their piece of the pie or not. It's easy to stand aloof from a situation and proclaim absolute right and wrong, but harder still to stand in the midst of need and distress and choose a caring course of action. When we stand in relationship we know first hand how hard it is to love another person and simultaneously how fulfilling. It is a powerful choice to maintain healthy self awareness while giving yourself freely.

Love is not abuse though often we abuse those we love with careless words and selfish actions. Love is not hierarchical power though its feeling is powerful when shared. Love is not smothering though it flows from an inexhaustible source within. Love is an action verb, yet sometimes needs no action to be expressed. Love is a tenderness that must be cared for, tended to and nurtured lest it forget how to grow. More than anything love is our deepest, truest nature whose real miracle is that we need each other to express, feel and share our love in the world.

From Top Chef to Judge Judy’s Courtroom Theater to the Tragedy of Tosca drama sells. At its best drama entertains, teaches and makes people laugh. At its worst it brings out division, hurtfulness and hatred. Yet human beings are somewhat enthralled with the ups and downs of their own emotions. You might even venture to say that we are addicted to them. It is all too easy to get dragged down into the habit pattern of the mind’s sometimes sordid past when emotions flare and all too hard to choose the higher, more peaceful ground above. There is truth to the notion that our inner world is a kind of jungle in need of healing. Freud and Jung sprouted a whole field of study dedicated to untying with the knotty landscape of our inner world.

Yet the choice to practice yoga is a chance to step outside the realm of our penchant for tears and venom. It is no coincidence that the opening mantra of Ashtanga yoga includes the invocation of a jungle doctor to clear out the poisons held within the mind. Drama as a permanent state of being can be toxic.

Yoga at its best represents an invitation to live a life of inner peace. In such a world peace and empathy take precedence over drama and grievance. When you learn to maintain your composure even when you feel under attack you have learned one of life’s hardest lessons. That is, that drama cannot be solved with more drama. Instead only a peaceful, caring response heals the wounds of the past. Peace, compassion and wisdom have to supplant righteousness, justification and narcissism as the highest priority in any given situation. There is a vigilance and due diligence that you must learn in order to accept the invitation to life without getting caught in the juiciness of humanity. By training the mind to focus on chosen points of attention you develop the strength of character necessary to break the deepest, most restrictive patterns in your life. In doing so you become a true player in the magical game of life.

Yet be clear in understanding that there is nothing wrong with drama itself. Understood as a play in the field of life it can be entertaining and amusing. When given the full weight and importance of your attention emotionality is heavy, binding and tragic. One of the great paradoxes of life is that the muddy waters of human drama contain the seed for ultimate awakening. Never is there a moment when your heart aches for peace more than when you are under emotional or physical attack. Never is there a moment when you yearn for freedom more than when you feel most constricted and bound. So in a sense the very presence of drama in any form in your life is a request for peace and a signal asking for reconciliation. Every situation no matter how filled with immaturity or insanity has the potential to enlighten your consciousness to a new level of being.

Sometimes in moments of great need, intensity or doubt I feel like the world responds to me with a guidance that I can almost read in everything around me from plants to clouds to situations as though all of life really is not separate from me and really conspires to lead me towards new realizations. When time slows down long enough to break the pattern of the past, then clarity, connection, wisdom and grace arrive to trumpet the dawn of a new day. With daily spiritual practice your inner world relaxes into the beauty of life, whole, complete and totally at peace.

How you think, feel and act influences the kind of interactions you have in the world. While there might not always be an easy causal relationship between thought, action and experience, if you dig deep enough the connection is almost always evident. There is an ancient Zen parable that tells of a young monk-in-training who searches the world for a true master and a peaceful place, but finds only angry, unhappy people everywhere he goes. After roaming through many towns the young aspirant meets a Zen teacher in disguise who asks the traveler what he has experienced during his journey. When the teacher hears the report of anger and misery from the young monk, he replies, “I think that you will only find more of the same anger and unhappiness where you go.” The would-be student neither recognizes the teacher nor the teaching and leaves angry and unhappy himself.

The young monk who sees anger and unhappiness everywhere himself actually carries the anger and unhappiness within himself. Whatever and wherever you are on the inner plane translates to the physical world through experiences and interactions. If you decide that the world is a dangerous place you will see evidence of your choice everywhere you look. But if you decide that the world is a peaceful place then you will literally see evidence all around that the world is peaceful. It would make sense then to gain control over the mind and its many layers of emotion and thought. With careful direction of the mind there is nothing that a person cannot achieve. Yet with out such direction one often experiences a tumultuous turn down a havoc-ridden highway.

If you carry the seed of anger or unhappiness inside yourself you literally attract experiences that match your internal vibration. Thoughts and emotional states have the magnitude of gravity in that they literally bring situations into being. If you are not aligned with peace and happiness on an internal level then there is really no way you will experience it truly in your life. It augurs well for everyone to pay careful attention to the emotional baggage and unquestioned assumptions lying dormant within. The yoga practice gives us a chance to see ourselves clearly under the mirror of self awareness. It is often through an injury, a challenging relationship with a teacher or other hard circumstances that students of yoga learn the most about their tough emotions and inner judgments. One of the most transformational aspects of a daily committed yoga practice occurs when you come face to face the ugly inner reality that you’ve been carrying around inside. It is only then that you can literally move through it, not by fighting, fixing or talking the problem away. But by accepting, breathing and just being with whatever you’re going through.

Seeing deeply held emotional patterns in the clear light of consciousness dissipates the ghostly power these largely subconscious reactions have over your life. Imagine that you’re the young monk in search of inner peace and all you experience in the world is a series of conflicts. At some moment your daily practice will direct the finger that you’ve been pointing at the world towards yourself. If the law of attraction states that like unto itself is drawn, then the best thing you can do for changing your life experience is seeing exactly what you’re really like on the inside. You can’t bring lasting peace to the world if you’re angry inside. You can’t share true love while your heart is filled with hatred. And you can’t live in truth if your mind is riddled with delusion.

Every argument with your partner, every honk in a traffic jam and every annoying TV host gives you the chance to check in with yourself to see where you really stand on the inner plane of reality. It’s easy to postulate the choice of peace over war, but in the midst of a heated stand-off we are often more interested in being right than in being peaceful. Whenever you care more about the validity of your argument over the connection with the person you’re with, the hard truth of the matter is that you would rather be right than be at peace.

Some of the hardest words to utter in the midst of a disagreement are “You’re right” and “You have a point.” I don’t know what it is about acknowledging someone else’s point of view that is so terrifying to us. It seems like any alternative threatens to unearth the core of our identity. As such it’s hard not to segregate the world into an “us versus them” paradigm that sections off people who are like you from people who are not like you. It’s easy to judge others, blame them and make them wrong, but harder to point the finger at yourself, take responsibility and see the solution. Yet yoga asks you to do just that.

When you begin the path of yoga you begin the path of self-inquiry. In such a field there is no room for the justifications of fear driven emotions. Instead there is only the realization that all spiritual teaching seeks to give, that is, that we are all truly one. It is the experience of oneness that inspires conscious action, compassionate dialogue and mutual understanding. It is this perspective that truly creates peace. A Course in Miracles says that the best defense is to drop all attack and in such a way do we create a bond of unity between all beings.

It takes a great mind to see unity where there is division. It takes a truly enlightened perspective to see peace where there is war. It takes immeasurable courage to see healing where there is hurt. It takes a noble spirit to see hope where there is despair. And it takes limitless power to see love where there is hate. Whatever you see in others reflects clearly what you see most in yourself. The world and its multifarious people are your greatest mirror.

Can there be any doubt that we are in the midst of great change? From the historic campaigns waged by both American political parties to the rise of China as a superpower to the generational shifts in the workforce to catastrophic weather patterns to changes in the face of yoga, everywhere you look the tides are turning in some form or another. When Shiva as the great destroyer dances on the small ego we all have, it is change itself embodied the great equalizer of the Hindu deities. Resist change and you resist the law of life. Fight it and you will only hurt yourself. No matter how angry you are at the present, how sweet your nostalgia is for the past or how hard you try to deny the inevitability of change, you simply cannot stop the powerful thrust forward that defines life.

Things change. Even the things that you want most to stay the same. No amount of fighting, denying, sarcasm, depression, resistance or maneuvering will stop life from delivering you into the future. Bodies grow old, generations shift, leaders evolve, technology becomes obsolete.The acceleration of the rate of change in the last decades is perhaps even more shocking to us all. There is nothing more frustrating than buying a computer only to find that it is a dinosaur one year and three thousand dollars later.

Change is the inevitable reality everywhere you turn and resistance, anger and frustration are evident in almost equal measure. Yet in the midst of such seemingly devastating circumstances you have a unique change to dig deeper into the teachings of yoga and ultimately into yourself. The basic teaching of yoga is to cultivate strength and steadiness of mind alongside the flexibility of spirit that allows you to move through the most challenging situations with wisdom. Perhaps the evidence that our world is changing with increasing rapidity can be found in so many people’s interest in yoga. Amidst a sea of change-induced stress we are all searching for peace in one form or another.

Yet yoga never offers a definite answer that ends the inner search. Instead its peace comes from reflecting the truth of the inner state of your being and it is in the realization of your highest self that you find a way to literally roll with the punches of life. The holy grail of one era is the bygone relic of another and how you deal with it is perhaps the greatest test of the success of your spiritual pursuits. Your response to change reveals your basic notion of yourself.

I for one can be quite resistant to change at first and then after some period of time I surrender to the power of life that is greater than myself and jump in with full force. There is no dream of the past that can be preserved forever. Vision is a living, breathing thing whose very inspiration depends on spontaneity and a museum of dreams is not the future. In a Darwinian sense the ability of a species to adapt to its changing environment is the hallmark of species survival. The Earth, along with everything else, has been changing since its birth and it will continue to change along with everything else. It is the flexible, strong mind of a dedicated yoga practitioner that will have the humility to let go of the past when appropriate, move forward when necessary and accept the bell of change when it rings.

We are all in our own processes of transition, release and surrender, yet in the midst of such intensity there is a reflection of hope amidst a sea of doubt and disbelief. You will see in the world what you have cultivated within yourself. Yoga teaches you to have faith in your own ability to change and grow, to know and evolve your own values and literally to become the change you want to see in the world. Accordingly what change you can believe in is a direct reflection of your own strength and grace.

When we begin practicing yoga the deepest part of our consciousness asks for clarity, awakening and truth. What is sometimes the first step in taking positive steps towards the peace that we all yearn for is a recognition of exactly how deeply we are entrenched within our ways of warfare. Yoga for example can sometimes be riddled with fierce competition. You might find yourself competing with a new yoga practitioner in your daily class who is naturally very flexible. Or you might find yourself competing with yourself and comparing your body in a negative light with the way it was last year, last week or yesterday. Yet still you might be competing with your friends and peers. All of this is totally normal because it is totally and completely part of being human.

Ashtanga Yoga you could even say creates a fertile ground for the competitor's mind because the postures are taught sequentially based on proficiency. It is even tempting to judge a person’s spiritual development by the amount of postures they’re doing. Yet the real yoga happens within. It really does not matter how good your lotus position is, how many handstands you can do or how deep your backbends are if you’re unconscious about the way you treat other people, beings and yourself. Similarly it is often the insurmountable challenge of the six series of Ashtanga Yoga that teaches the most competitive practitioners a very deep and hard lesson--humility. There will always be someone stronger, more flexible, younger and more knowledgeable than you. There will always be someone doing more yoga postures than you. You will never get it done and you will never be the best forever if at all. And that is a good thing because it teaches you to learn that although you bring great gifts to the yoga practice and to life, you are not entitled to set yourself on a pedestal high above, away and apart from your fellow human beings. Paradoxically we are all both absolutely unique and totally equal on some level.

The learning that happens within the field of yoga asks you to embrace both the part of yourself that has a vital contribution to the flow of life and the part of you that is connected to all sentient beings. If you think you’re going to beat one of your fellow teammate at the game of life, think again because life is not an Olympic sport with gold, silver and bronze metals. There is no judge waiting at the finish line to rate your performance, except maybe yourself. The reason why there can be no competition in the deepest sense of life is because the parameters by which life is truly measured are infinite.

Yoga teaches you to ask whether each and every one of your actions answers to highest truths of life. There can be no real competition because time has no real meaning in the field of learning in which yoga takes place. Yoga itself is eternal and universal.

Yoga has an almost addictive quality to it. If you start doing yoga, it starts doing you too. The search for knowledge, wisdom and truth morph into numerous shapes and forms along the inner journey. When you enter the world of yoga sometimes you'll even find a whole Indian performance awaiting you: harmonium, chanting, flowers, pujas, small women demonstrating yoga postures, deities blessing you, henna painting and vegetarians--it's a Bollywood show that draws you in.

The experience of yoga is intricately tied to an experience of culture and a new culture is sometimes so exciting that you can develop a kind of fascination with it. When you interact with the yoga world be careful not to sell your Western soul for cross cultural eye candy. Yet it must be acknowledged that there is something real about welcoming the powerfully transformative elements of the authentic yoga tradition into our practice and our lives. The question is then, what exactly are the truly authentic elements of this 5,000 year old tradition called yoga? What knowledge, wisdom and teaching are available for you to integrate into your life right here and now?

Living in the global marketplace, we are all entrenched within our given paradigm. No matter how much henna you paint on your body, how much Sanskrit you study, nor how many sarees you wear you will never be Indian and you will never be as culturally complete in your yoga as our teachers in India. You can, however, find elements of another tradition that speak to you in ways beyond society. You can also integrate, learn and grow from the Far Eastern world from which yoga originates. You can have a truly authentic yoga practice and you can authentically put your heart into what you do, whether its chanting, henna painting, Indian music, yoga or being a vegetarian. It just won't come as part and parcel of your environment in the same way as it does in India, for better or worse. You will have to make a conscious choice to integrate portions of the yoga world, now a five billion dollar annual industry in the U.S. alone, into your life. In other words you can make it yours if you want to.

Sanskrit to yoga practitioners represents authenticity, connection to an ancient past that gives us a taste of real long term history. It is also one way for the Western mind to begin learning about the yogic tradition. The first time I attended a guided group yoga class I was awed by the chanting and repetition of this very old language. To be honest with you, I still am. After years of searching I can say that the Sanskrit language, chanting and the Yoga Sutras are an intimate part of my spiritual life. Most traditional yoga classes use Sanskrit chants to invoke the specific tradition and offer blessings. Although it's new and different for most of us when we first experience it, in relation to the yoga tradition, Sanskrit chanting, OM and the Yoga Sutras are as simple and ordinary as hearing the Bible quoted in a Catholic church or hearing the Latin language used in a church choir, punctuated with Amen. Yet studying Sanskrit can help place your experience of yoga within the historical reality of its past, present and future.

Sometimes I wonder how much our fascination with yoga is just another form of occidental mystery taking us by the heels of our own imagination. People are in love with what they're not. And lithe, flexible, super strong, Sanskrit chanting, henna painting, auming, deep breathing meditators most of us here in the Western world simply are not. But we love it and the Japanese love American baseball and Indian families love Domino's Pizza for their special Friday night dinner. The truth about globalization is that it allows the best of each culture to reach across the world with a quick double click. When you can watch a yoga master on youtube, trade mutual funds for your retirement, google your way to enlightened dialogue and get a pedicure all in the same day, you have to ask what is' real and begin your own search into lasting meaning. What is authentic and what is just a sound byte of another culture? Don't just buy into the myths and iconographies of someone else's heritage for the sake of their difference. If you dig deep enough what you might unearth in these ancient traditions of the Far East is a way to honestly connect with a part of yourself that was always there in the first place.

There is no "need" to learn Sanskrit, chanting, paint yourself in weird symbols, be vegetarian, twist yourself into strange postures, meditate or breathe deeply--unless of course you're drawn to it. If it happens naturally in your life and if your desire comes from a balanced and genuine place inside yourself, then the situations, teachers and events in your life will lead you effortlessly toward the path of yoga. I once had a friend say to me that you don't choose yoga, it chooses you, grabs you by the head and draws you in. Along the way remember that it is not the accoutrements of yoga that make it holy, it is the space inside your own heart that creates an opening to the divine.

There is a point in every marathon where no runner quits and there is another point where the majority drop out. The quitting point is painstakingly close to the finish line and, when measured in terms of percentage points, sits at approximately the last five percent of the race. The drop outs' hurdle is the last stretch of the race where the end remains hidden from view. It is here where athletes have been working for a long time that all the major mental and physical obstacles set in. Doubt, anxiety, disbelief, exhaustion, dehydration, hunger, the feeling of no end in sight and physiological stress compromise rational thought and convince many to throw in the towel. Just as night is somehow darkest just before dawn breaks, so too is the race toughest right before it ends. Absolutely no one quits when the finish line is in clear sight. Whatever mental, emotional or physical pain may exist dissipates because the finish line represents an end to the torture. When circumstance is both finite and clearly defined the capacity for human endurance grows dramatically. Not knowing is what drives us nuts.

Whether you're a yoga practitioner, an avid meditator or a business executive it augurs well for your long term success to bear in mind the drop outs' hurdle when faced with challenges. You never know when all your hard work and dedication will pay off and you cannot force life into giving you what you want exactly when you want it. Complaining, comparing yourself to others, making excuses or finding something juicy to escape into will not get you what you want. The only thing left to do is to focus on your technique, dig deeper into your stores of internal strength, steady your mind and surrender. Different than giving up, surrendering in the context of a daily spiritual practice is the equivalent of having faith. Literally meaning the process by which you give up the false notion that you can control anything, the ability to surrender opens a doorway into letting go and letting a higher power take over. It is this type of faith that carries runners out of the dark zone of quitting into the power of the finish line being in sight and it is this type of faith that will carry you through doubt, fear, disbelief and anxiety into true power. It takes a steady, practiced mind to feel the obstacles pounding on the inner door of the mind and remain calmly committed to a better outcome with the knowledge that sooner or later everything changes and sooner or later the end will be in sight.

Spiritual practice is merely a reflection of your attitude towards life. If you make it through to the end of a seemingly insurmountable situation you have greater stores of strength and confidence the next time something similar happens. Patients of long term illnesses under going holistic treatment often display what Paul Pritchford calls in his book Healing with Whole Foods a "healing crisis". This stage of the game is analogous to the drop outs hurdle in the marathon race towards health. Patients in the midst of a "healing crisis" will usually see a virulent resurgence of all their old pains, injuries, negative emotions, destructive behaviors and symptoms only to purge them from their system completely if the healing program is followed to the end. Those who withdraw from the treatment at this point remain unhealthy and those who make it through often, although of course not always, experience healing. Just before it gets better it usually gets much worse. Those who develop the bravery and fortitude it takes to see the good, the bad and the ugly about themselves are the ones who make it through to the finish line.

A daily yoga practice is riddled with ample opportunity to practice staying through the darkest point of your journey. From postures that have eluded you from the beginning to new postures that create new pains and disbelief, yoga's greatest gift is the real world passage from the impossible to the possible and then from the possible to the easy. Fortunately this path is often walked on the treacherous road of physical pain. One of the best tests of character that exists is how you respond to your body's signals of distress, for it is often also how you will respond to life's signals of distress. Do you quit the moment something even remotely hurts? Or do you lean in and hammer through? Would you be able to allow a higher awareness to teach and guide you? Learning to distinguish different types of intense sensation in your body will help you work with the pain that is an inevitable reality of life, both in and out of the yoga world. The key is to walk the middle way between forcing yourself into injury and shying away from challenge while remaining aware, alert and alive.

Psychological barriers present similar tests. Sometimes when approaching a certain posture you will feel no pain but you will not be able to perform the asana. For example, I unsuccessfully attempted to balance in a headstand for the first eight months of my yoga practice. Every time my legs came tumbling towards the floor I beat myself up with my apparent inadequacy. What I didn't know at the time is that every moment where you fall out of a posture is where the body and the mind learn how to be in that very same posture. When you fail you learn a priceless and unforgettable lesson. There are days where it really feels like it's never going to get better and perhaps might even worse. It is ironically often right before a big breakthrough in your practice that an injury surfaces, that you start to get tired of practicing or that you begin to doubt the method of your practice. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ani Pema Chodron says that progress along the spiritual path never feels like progress. When it feels hard, when you doubt whether you're really doing anything at all, and when you feel like you're going crazy is when you're actually growing, learning and evolving. Life delivers five steps forward and five steps back, then five steps forward and four and a half steps back. Happiness is merely a recognition and a celebration of that small half step forward gained after years of back and forth vacillation. No matter how convoluted your path may seem faith carries you through to the finish line every time.

Is each individual on Earth responsible for their own life experience? Or are other people to blame when they are angry, tired, tedious, envious, rude, selfish and just down right mean? How do you make space for other people's roll through the rollercoaster ride of life when it bumps right up against your happy day at the park?

The truth is that you really are responsible for your own experience and that you cannot control the way other people treat you no matter how hard you try. It's easier to sit back and judge reality by saying that people should treat you a certain way and that they're wrong whenever they don't. However as long as you sing the tune of should or shouldn't you set yourself up on a righteous path towards the vain attempt to change other people. When you want someone in your life to act differently than they are, you create resistance to them and the way they are acting. The old statement that the more you try to change it, the more it stays the same hits you square in the face. The more you tell yourself that your friend shouldn't speak to in that way and get angry and frustrated about it, the more your friend continues to speak to you in exactly that way. You could in fact spend the rest of your life issuing moral dictums about the way other people should or shouldn't treat you. That would be an awful waste of the rest of your life, especially since you have absolutely no control over the way other people act.

The only thing you have any control over is yourself. You have the power to change your actions, reactions, thoughts and emotions. In fact the only real source of transformation lies in the ability to manage your inner world. Much as you would manage your choice of food at a deli counter by scanning the possible choices and choosing what suits you based on your likes and dislikes, you can manage the full scope of your thoughts by choosing consistently better feeling thoughts about yourself, your life and all the beings in your life. It is how you think, feel and act on a moment to moment and day to day basis that amounts to what's often called your vibration. What you think right now shapes your experience of reality.

What's often called the "Law of Attraction" is the organizational rule of the universe and it's what orders your experience of reality in response to your vibration. It works in a similar manner as when you're asked not to think about the pink elephant and all you see in your mind is that very pink elephant. Dealing and interacting with family, friends and coworkers is just the same. When you stand in front of a loved one and think that they shouldn't be so selfish, hurtful and ignorant all you see in them is evidence of their egocentric, stupid, heartbreaking behavior. Now you might say that it's really true that they are acting in this way. Yet another person standing in the exact same situation might not be bothered at all. At some moment the finger that points at other people has to turn and point back an its owner. The teaching of Abraham which comes through Esther and Jerry Hicks states that "you cannot restore someone to their Connection with Source by belittling them or by punishing them, or by being disgusted with them. It is only through love that you can return anyone to love."

As long as you remain committed to complaining about other people, fighting with politicians or reacting in outrage at a traffic jams, you remain committed to a helpless struggle of trying to change other people and outside situations. Setting the tone of your thoughts, feelings and actions to the tune of what's wrong with the world simply gets you more of what's wrong. Just as you sort through the junk mail in your inbox to search for the good news from colleagues and friends so too must you manage your inner vibrational world to search for better feeling thoughts and emotions about your friends, colleagues and family members. No thought is absolutely, incontrovertibly true and no emotion is permanent. Every person on Earth has the power to bring you immense joy and immense pain and you hold the key to deciding which it will be.

If you believe everything you read online, hear on the radio or see on TV, then you’re probably convinced that we really are headed straight down the proverbial toilet bowl. But think again. Nothing you read, hear or see is absolutely true. News, although an attempt an objectivity, is nevertheless an account given by a person, just as history is a story told by the survivors. Many pioneering thinkers and coaches suggest taking a "news fast" for a week to ten days as part of a mental detoxification program.

It's no wonder because everywhere you look there seems to be something new to fear. Whether it’s anti-depressants in the public water supply, petrochemicals used for fertilizer in vegetables, the ominous threat of rising sea levels, seven-legged frogs, the catastrophic storm that will kill us all, intoxicated spring break drivers, terrorists living in your own back yard, the collapse of the American economy, the subprime credit crisis or iatrogenic germs thriving in an antibiotic stew, there’s enough threatening information circulating on the average news network to drive any sane person into an agoraphobic outbreak. But huddling in-doors with shaking knees after reading the doom and gloom predictions of Reuters online won’t stop the fear from finding you.

Fear, created by the mind, fed by your thoughts and brought into being by your willing belief, has a tenuous home where more powerful vibrations (like love, joy and beauty) really belong. If you’re in the habit of fearing life then you will simply find new things to fear once you stop watching the news. While the media industry certainly feeds a particular reflex in the human organism, it did not create this reflex itself. Instead it merely does what any good business model does, that is, it goes where the money or the success is. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Responsibility lies not in an abstract notion of an industry, corporation or network, but instead within each person who individually continues to perpetuate false notions of fear every day. A Course in Miracles says that "no one who lives in fear is really alive". With every trepidation taken away from strength the cowering darkness within grows. Practice fear every day and it becomes a way of life. Practice it for an entire lifetime and it defines the state of your soul.

This is good news, for as long as fear is created by something outside yourself you will remain powerless to do anything about it. When the creation of something rests within your sphere of control you have unlimited potential to change it. So begin your work immediately by addressing each fear, conscious and unconscious, spoken and unspoken with a tenacious commitment to excavate the truth. Use the faculty of your mind to question, dissect, analyze and deconstruct the entire edifice of fear until it no longer exists. One by one search out each thought that unsettles you, disturbs you and drives you away from living your life. Once you have these thoughts within your grip, begin the slow, steady process of awakening. There is nothing more powerful than your own awareness. There is nothing that your inner light cannot reveal. Don’t believe anything external that says it is incontrovertibly real, for reality is what you make it. Your thoughts have no independent meaning other than what you choose to give them. You hold the key to a brave new world, free from fear, waiting just around the corner from the shadow of doubt.

This year's political season in the U.S. highlights some of the most monumental achievements and pitfalls of the past century and inspires a renewal of the dream of peace, hope and change. Yet in such an atmosphere we must also ask ourselves where the realization of such broad specturm dreams is to be found if these ideals are really to be more than just a dream after all is said and done. We know now that the ultimate resolution of the seemingly eternal problems of humanity is not to be found in a battle between nations fought with weapons of mass destruction, nor in a war of words among politicians, nor in the battle of the sexes. So where and to whom do we turn to answer the most difficult questions of our lives?

The very heart of the spiritual path is a search for inner peace and when you practice your daily discipline you help translate your individual realization to the larger whole. Society is comprised of its members just as your body is composed of its cells. When you take responsibility for your actions, words and deeds you build a gateway towards the slow, steady realization of true peace one breathe at a time. If a united global consciousness is to succeed each person on Earth must live, act, feel and think with the highest level of awareness possible at each moment. That means you and me too. If you cannot live for one full week without letting your anger get the best of you, then how can you expect whole nations to remain peaceful for any length of time? Simply put, your state of mind matters to everyone.

It seems that there have always been wars between nations, lover’s spats and family feuds as long as humanity has been on Earth. Where humans go, drama is soon to follow. Yet underneath the soap opera emotional rollercoaster is the enduring dream of final and lasting peace. Sometimes it is those who are the most deeply entrenched within the drama of their own lives that most desperately search for salvation. For centuries humanity has turned to organized religion to answer the deeper questions, yearnings and aspirations of life. Now the search for spirituality takes prominence in the public domain and your participation in activities like yoga and meditation heralds a major spiritual revitalization of society.

Living life on the spiritual path allows you to tap into the magical underlayer of existence and it is in this space that the dream of unity and peace exists. The real fabric that hope is made of comes not in careless absent-mindedness but in patient, heartfelt dedication day after day, week after week and year after year. Practicing yoga is not some panacea for all your personal problems and certainly not the ills of the world, however, if you practice yoga you may just find a way to live a more peaceful and meaningful life before your time here is over. What unique and valuable contribution you make to the world is not always measured in terms of grandness, but sometimes in terms of how many smiles you share each day.

Have you ever walked into a string of extremely unfortunate events? Imagine that your partner leaves you for a younger, prettier, wealthier, funnier version of yourself the moment you feel deeply insecure about your body. Then the government slams you with $4,000 of extra taxes to paid right after you quit your job. And in your yoga practice you injure your hamstring right after your shoulder finally started to get back into shape. There are often weeks, months or even years that may have you wondering what the Divine plan for your life is really all about anyway.

Yet your darkest moments offer the greatest potential for growth. In the stormy clouds of life’s inevitable series of setbacks you will find the silver lining of your soul. It isn’t when everything in your life clicks along in an upbeat winning streak that you ask the toughest questions of your life. The search for meaning walks hand in hand with the reality of struggle. When it’s cheap, free and easy, it’s can also be meaningless, light and unbearable. Sometimes people fundamentally reevaluate their life’s purpose, direction and drive after a life-threatening illness. Others do so after a momentous or inspirational meeting with a person, mentor or role model. Many have also voluntarily chosen to face the deluge of bad news that arrives at their doorstep through the power of yoga.

Eckhart Tolle says that every single person interested in spirituality today has suffered and it is the suffering that created their interest in the deeper dimension of life. So it is that yoga as a spiritual path offers a unique kind of salvation, one that promises not to remove you from your suffering but one that teaches you how to love, live with and accept the reality of life as it really is, good and bad days just the same. You see, the bad news comes knocking at your door and threatens to pull you under a permanent shadow of depression, anger or defeat completely uninvited. If you run from it, fight it or try to escape, you’re doomed to fail someday. Every person on Earth has a day that’s better off spent in bed no matter how cheerful, sunny and bright their disposition might be. The glitteratti, celebrity and royalty all have bad hair days. Yogis, priests and saints get angry. And there’s nothing with that. Inner peace is more a discipline of the mind than mere good luck. With the power of yoga you see the truth of life, that is, that there is nowhere to run, no place to hide, and no one to save you. All that’s left to do is begin walking along the slow, steady spiritual path, the path of freedom, truth and lasting peace.

It is when life tests you by offering the challenge of hardship that you know exactly what you’re made of. Strength and steadiness of character are defined not in moments of ease, but in moments of great duress. In the context of yoga, it is not what comes naturally and effortlessly to you that holds the greatest power of transformation. That which is far from your sense of normal has the ability to make you a new person for it is in these moments that you will have a mirror with which to see yourself clearly. Much of my personal journey in yoga has been about developing strength and steadiness both of the body and mind. At moments of great challenge, my first inclination is to quit, give up and grow melancholic and self-pitying. One of yoga’s greatest gifts to me is the awareness that exactly when I want to throw in the towel is exactly when I need to push through, not harshly with unnecessary crass force, but from the core of my being, gently, powerfully and with exactly the right amount of strength and grace.

Emotional vulnerability seems to snowball at all the most inappropriate moments. When you're feeling down the most insignificant comment can send you deeper into the darkness. On days when you feel torn open by life, your heart is raw, exposed, and injured. In this space everything hurts. Is it just chance and coincidence that dishes up misery for no reason or is there some hidden cosmic force that answers to a pecking order higher than your melancholic feelings?

I find myself constantly at odds with the ever-changing screen of my own own feelings. They get hurt too easily when I least expect it only to toughen at moments when softness would better solve the snag. On a good day the years of yoga and the spiritual life pay off in the form of emotional distance, higher perspective and grace. On other days there is the all too familiar taste of sensitivity and reactionary words on my tongue. It would be easy to cast the so-called negative emotions as antagonists to a peaceful life and begin searching for a solution, a quick fix or a lasting medicine to correct the problem. However, starting a war with your emotional world won't lead you to a clean, clear mathematical proof for a true answer. For emotions themselves are neither good nor bad, but simply are what they are.

Whenever your thought process holds judgments about what you're experiencing in the emotional realm, you create patterns of action in your life that hold these emotions around you. For example if you wage a war against sadness with excessive activity, a majority of your life energy nevertheless remains rooted in exactly that which you seek to fight. Similarly if you think that anger is good and can create results in the world, then you will seek to fuel this fiery tempest when it arises. Regardless of how much work you do to train your mind to be in particular way, you cannot control your emotions with brute force. For the emotions belong to the sphere of nature and will arrive in waves and raging torrents in situations where you would otherwise prefer a dry spell. Just as weather patterns change, feelings pass and new ones come to take their place. A more honest parameter for navigating the emotional world is the compass of increased awareness, wisdom and acceptance.

One of the highest perspectives achieved along the spiritual path is an acceptance of the prevalence, persistence and temporal nature of emotions. In this sphere beyond right and wrong, you are the witness to what arises yet not drawn into fighting for or against any particular way of being. Emotions range from strong, heavy and tough to light, airy and free. Your role in steering the ship of your consciousness through the sea of feelings starts with the clear light of objective observation, that is, stopping the fight with yourself and your emotions. Your daily devotion to your practice opens a door to cultivating the kind of higher awareness that will guide you through the maze of your life.

Food is not who you are. It is a way you communicate with the world. You express things through food, through eating, like you do through any art form, but it nevertheless is not who you are at your deepest essence. Your eating habits are merely habits, not your life or your vitality, though they may seriously enhance your life, your energy levels and your overall health.

There is so much attention given to diet and exercise as the solution to every health worry. There are at least a dozen new diets promising to make you forever young, cancer-free, heart healthy, thin,vibrant and closer to God. Yet what lies at the core of every extreme diet is a fundamental rejection of who you are in the present moment. While you might do well to work with the part of yourself that still hungers for a Supersize Big Mac, thinking that the epicurean in you is bad, evil or unworthy creates unhealthy thought patterns that last for lifetimes. What all crash dieting misses is that when you reject a part of yourself along the way, even when you finally arrive at the goal of skinny body with perfect blood sugar and cholesterol levels, you are not fully happy.

Health and happiness are part and parcel of a total life perspective that includes genuine gratitude for the gift of life. In order to be deeply happy in a lasting way, you will need to develop a high degree of tolerance for the multitude of selves that you are. There is a part of you that loves culinary indulgence and another part that enjoys living a very pure life. In a truly integrated existence, there is no separation between these apparent extremes. You as a being in fact already contain them within you. The work of creating a yogic diet begins with accepting who you, what your basic likes and dislikes are and working with yourself in a patient, persistent and kind-hearted manner.

Solutions to your health problems that have at their basis a fundamental rejection of your basic worthiness do not lead to long term success or sustainability. Extreme crash diets can only last so long before you fall off the wagon. The truth about food is that the only diet that instills lasting change is one that embraces both who you are and who you want to be in the same loving light.

Unless you address some of the basic beliefs you hold about yourself, merely changing what goes into your mouth won’t make you happy for the long haul. The inner world of your mind directs the physical world of your body. You hold certain thought patterns about food, life and self-esteem. The thoughts you keep in the hidden realms of your subconscious mind play a crucial role in your overall level of health. All food choices are reflections about your level of self-love, self-acceptance and self-appreciation. If you do not work on loving and appreciating your life, then no diet will make a deep impact in your sense of joyful living. If you want to begin working of your health, then begin to a dress the silently held judgments you have about yourself.

Health in a word is balance; it is a dynamic equilibrium that holds food, health, emotions, thoughts, your body, work, love, relationships and fun in a teetering sphere. When all these aspects dangle in harmony, you are filled with an effortless happiness and peace of mind that emanates forth from you. It’s a magnetic glow that’s unmistakable.

Have you every noticed how noisy we all are? In the last twenty years, we have invented and now need iPods, iPhones, CDs, portable DVD players, louder motorcycles, super jet engines, walkie-talkies, reality TV shows, music videos and Starbucks.

Silence is like a dirty word in the modern vocabulary. When you sit with another person there is an almost irresistible urge to speak. Sometimes you converse about important subjects and sometimes you just talk. This meaningless, friendly chit-chat about light-hearted matters is a kind of social sport. Imagine the awkwardness of a first date where you sit together without this lively banter--a boring disaster.

Modern, or shall we say post-modern, life has a soundtrack. Make a playlist for a long drive, flight or walk. Throw a party, hire a DJ. Go to a yoga class, move to spiritual tunes. At least, this is what you are conditioned to expect when you live in a world ruled by constant audio-visual plug-ins. SoHo in Manhattan is a larger-than-life-size Website advertisement for sleek, urban living. Yet there's nothing inherently wrong with reaching for the TV, the iPod, the computer, or your own chatter to fill in the blank space of your life. Ask anyone who knows me well and they'll happily tell you that I enjoy chit-chat, computers and my iPod. However, it's the automatic nature with which society conditions and cultures you to expect a sensory experience in every moment that is where the danger signals fire.

What is so unbearable about the entertainment vacuum left when you turn the TV off anyway? Oh silence. There is it again. As if you thought it would finally bugger off and go away. It's always waiting like a powerful undercurrent of your life--this immense silence underneath all the white city noise. The quiet space of your own mind will never leave you. Yet, you're afraid because at first glance your mind is not so quiet after all the external stimuli are turned off. It's a claustrophobic, tight and unprocessed maelstrom of leftover thoughts that haven't been heard for a long time. Silence demands that you listen, experience and feel the undigested hunk of your own stuff. Silence demands that you pay attention to yourself. Scary stuff indeed, better run.

But, perhaps there is a way to be enjoy the soundless quiet if you learn to accept facing the inner reaches of your own mind? Practice the Mysore Style Ashtanga Yoga method and the class epitomizes the kind of deep inner world that's only tangible in the protected sphere of silence. In the space of your own breathe, your own body, your own practice, you build a relationship with yourself that stays with you even in the deepest and most profound silences. One of the great ironies of the human race is that we spend our entire lives running from ourselves. This tragedy when seen in spiritual terms is heartbreakingly futile. You can never ultimately escape yourself. You can never really be anyone other than who you are. You can never get away from your fundamental nature forever. And yet you run.

The mind enjoys putting on a melodramatic show. From the thick plot of stress, anger, pain and loss, it proclaims that we are "just fine", "coping quite well" or "not really bothered at all". The body, by contrast, doesn't lie for very long if at all. Its simple proximity to nature cannot go on with show forever. If stresses like lies are present, the body will hold it in the belly for a period of time and then, after a critical turning point, it will give up, give in and collapse. Some of you may be all of familiar with this state of your body.

If you want a gauge with which to measure yourself in various situations, tune into your body. Like a reliable tool that you carry with you all your life, it perfectly tests your emotional state at any given time. If you're about to leave or enter a new life situation, such as a job or relationship, use the body as a testing instrument. Imagine the scenario you are about to face while checking in to the internal world of your body. Feel your heartbeat, your blood pressure, your muscles, your breathe, your joints, your digestion, your organs, or your energy. Be real and honest with yourself about what you experience. Look deeply and you will be able to see almost instantaneously whether there is an opening or a contraction, relaxation or tension, freedom or constriction, etc. If the proposed direction is dissonant with your true life path, signs of closure and tension often appear. Sometimes the only sign we get that a decision is counterproductive to our most enlightened course of action is a vague sense of disease.

The mind, home of the great trickster ego, weaves a patchwork defense, forming intricate patterns of rationalization, excuse, justification, righteousness, depression and everything else it can grab onto. Underneath the thin veneer of this powerless power, the body suffers and takes the shape of personality. It is the mind-made sense of self-created right and wrong that compartmentalizes reality. Yet no absolute right or wrong can point at the deepest truth there is. Instead, there is another way of being with reality, one that is both soft and strong.

The pathway to an integrated life experience lies in the realm where the mind and the body are friends, working and playing together. Within the paradigm based on listening, asking and co-creating, body and mind work with each other, listening when it's appropriate to listen, asking when it's time to take action and working synergistically in every moment possible.

The Buddha said that it is the sensuous connection to the present moment that sets you free from the illusion of the external world. Awareness of the body is a field of knowingness in which you grow. The hidden key to consciousness lies through not against, around or avoiding the body. The wisdom of the body often lies just under the radar of your busy thoughts, remaining steadfast in its truthfulness. If choppy ocean of your mind settles down, there is no truth you cannot feel just under the surface of your skin.

Living in North America, we are part of a society that exports the flashy famousness of the newly discovered. We are collectively in a rush to unearth the next hidden secret and produce our very own million-dollar invention. This makes us brilliant innovators, forward thinking dreamers and daringly ambitious artists, and yet simultaneously, history-deprived, beauty-obsessed shopaholics haunting soulless strip malls sipping mass produced lattes. Is it no wonder then that we as nation seem to be in search of spirit? What else is left for America to invent than an authentic self in the midst of such rampant materialism?

Consumption extends beyond the exterior to the inner reality. As you watch television, listen to the radio, and read the newspaper you engage in a kind of latent consumerism. it is here that you not only take in new products, but where you also digest entire paradigms of thought. Behind every TV show is a kind of think tank targeting often unspoken cultural assumptions and ideals. When you watch, your mind processes these thoughts. when you read a book (or even an article like this one), listen to music, or watch a performance, you are transported deep into the mind of the artist at work and you consume the images, thoughts and choices that define the creator's state of mind.

Often we consume things in a dim-witted, distracted state of awareness, choosing movies or novels based on convenience or silly advertisements, sometimes repeating statements without giving them much thought. Until, that is, a critical moment of self awareness, a kind of rebirth through the wormhole of self consciousness. Here, the Yoga Sutras give us a fifth bandha called "citta bandha" or mind control. This I take to mean that we are responsible for each and every thought we think every moment of every day. We must search inside and see if the thoughts, beliefs and emotions that comprise our inner world are really valid or not if we are truly to participate in our ultimate realization.

Every image, word, sound, person and product you allow to enter you world reverberates deep into your psychic space. Think before you shop, read a novel, or watch a movie, for these are precious hours of your life that you give to another person's perspective. And in this way, you can begin to exercise the "citta bandha" in your daily life and develop your own strength and steadiness of mind.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying consumerism is bad. I'm American, female, fashion conscious and addicted to my daily dose of soy chai; briefly, I love to shop and I love America. It's just that consumerism without consciousness breeds a kind of insidious social irresponsibility that is as unforgivable as neglecting a child. Except the victim of the arrested development that occurs from the crime of unconscious consumption is your own mind, trapping you in a jail of juvenile emotions and unquestioned thoughts--the very antithesis of citta bandha.

Our life is short, yet a real sense of time eludes us. It is more common to get hooked on the world of sensory pleasure than to live a spiritual life. E-bay, appointments and shopping consume the grasping mind. Television seems calmer than silence. Pain and loss are more addictive than gratitude and joy.

What's stopping you from simply rejoicing in this very moment? Surfacing from the past like a sleeping giant, it is often past hurt, drama, pain, sadness, or anger that hasn't found its way out of your system. Sometimes these patterns seem larger than life and you spend months, years and even lifetimes running from them. Yet that is never actually true, for you are stronger than you know. The thick patterns of past hurt are enticing temptations and, when you react to them, it is a moment of weakness rather than strength. Daily discipline is a slow, steady and methodical way to retrain the habit pattern of your mind. When you commit yourself to daily practice, your yoga has the opportunity to live through you. It is through your dedication that you will find real and lasting peace. Great stores of strength reside deep within you now; yoga is how you can experience, practice and expand your hidden strength.

Each human being holds the potential of a great and beautiful unfolding, a delicate dance whose musicality graces the halls of Earth with powerful presence. Your life energy is vibrant and alive, full of the desire to flower. Yet your seeds must be watered well to grow in a healthy way. When you practice, you water the seeds of consciousness. In this gentle, yet powerful way, you honor the preciousness of your life. Your presence here and now is as magnificent and ephemeral as the tender opening of rose petals in the morning light. In terms of spiritual practice, time is truly of the essence.

Tibetan Lama Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche teaches that a human birth is as rare as a twinkling star in the noonday sky. Look up in the sky tomorrow and see if you can find one. I have never seen anything but the sun.

Awakening and enlightenment are two of the most objectified and misunderstood signposts along the spiritual path. Often construed as something outside yourself, many true and genuine seekers mistake the process of gaining spiritual insight as a process of looking for the missing element in their own being. Yet awakening cannot occur to anything outside the realm of what already exists in your own being. Or else, by definition, it would not be awakening.

Do not think that the spiritual journey is one in which you will finally at long last gain access to a realm that you have otherwise been forbidden to enter. Allow yourself to understand the process of your awakening as more like making friends with an aspect of yourself that has always been with you, but that you simply have been unaware of until now. It is not that this is a new part of yourself, although it may surely seem new or be experienced as such. It is instead a part of yourself so natural and so totally you, yet so far away from what you have previously known. Not because it is not of you, but because it has simply not been awakened until the moment it is.

In a perfectionistic sort of way, you may believe that enlightenment is a kind of place where you will one day arrive if you do all the right things, a conceptual heaven that hangs in the mist like a prize for a good day's work. This too is not the case although you work patiently and persistently. In your search you may look to your teachers for inspiration; yet each being is different and you must find your own way. The greatest teachers know and respect the differences apparent in their students and their peers, leading with compassion, integrity and humility.

In the teachings of the Buddha, it is said that the process of taking refuge is a process that links you to the ability to have faith in the quality of enlightenment that is evident in your own everyday wisdom. While the greatest spiritual teachers inspire you, it is in the light of your own consciousness that you find a real and lasting inner peace.

There is often the temptation to search outside for what you must find within. There is the fascination of eastern culture, the dream of gods and goddesses outside your culture, and the captivating illusion of escape. And there is also the possibility to awaken to a new world as you are in the here and now. William blake writes of this process, "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour." The road is always to paved to lead you back home again.

Confrontation is a grey zone on the spiritual path. Should you fight your way out of a defeatist victim-mentality? Or should you take a few breathes to ventilate your hostility before taking your inner rage out on your fellow freeway drivers? When is it appropriate to stick up for yourself & when is it time to quietly wait out the storm?

Anger, whether my own or someone else's, has always been challenging for me. I remember the shock of experiencing the seething kind of backlash that years of unexpressed boundaries can bring about, and then, realizing that my anger was just that: mine. No matter how awful the situation, how many friends agree, how righteous you are, how indignant or cynical you become, no matter how grand and tragic the loss, whatever emotions you feel are always your responsibility. You always have a choice about how you respond to life.

The basic teaching of spiritual practice is to find yourself in the midst of your greatest challenge and stay. In moments where you find anger arising, try closing your eyes, reconnecting with your breathe & staying with the experience of you. See how it goes. What does this do? It at least breaks the cycle of adding fuel to the fire in the midst of a full-blown blaze. It at least gives you a little pause in an otherwise very sticky situation. It at least gives you an extra moment to find the strength to choose an enlightened action over the pattern of aggressively acting out, escaping into pleasure, or numbing-out in denial.

There is magic in staying with what Tibetan teacher Pema Chodron calls "the places that scare you". For in those truly empowering moments you bear witness to the law of impermanence. Whatever aries in your experience, no matter how solid and sticky, will change. All emotions flow if we don't hold onto them. Sooner or later, the seemingly solid righteousness of anger yields and gives way to the soft, forgiveness of peace and understanding. The greatest storm will pass and the sun will rise again another day.

Albert einstein says that you cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it. And so it is. Anger cannot create peace. Itching the scab that started the whole conflagration won't end it. A middle way exists for this tempting emotion as well. The powerful choice to stay gives you the opportunity to create the space of transformation in your life today.

It's easy to seem peaceful in the quiet cave of your own mind. It's much harder to face the test of integrating your learning with your life. No matter how peacefully you might leave your daily meditation or yoga practice, there is nothing like a seemingly callous or thoughtless comment from a friend to trigger the stickiest habitual patterns.

Know that in moments when your emotions seem larger that you, there is the real meat of personal transformation. If you practice regularly you will see that no emotion, no thought pattern, no physical condition has power over you. If you run or fight, you create more of the suffering that you desperately want to escape. What you work with in each yoga practice or meditation is the strength it takes to maintain your equanimity in the face of the vicissitudes of life.

It is easy to write and read about these things and harder yet to live them. You might find yourself having days of constant connection and then days of reactivity where you are embroiled in the messiness of interpersonal relations. You mind find yourself sometimes reaching a state where your presence is a gift to those around you and then moments later acting out a juvenile pattern. It's all part of a greater process.

If you feel drawn to the deep inner work of yoga, begin it now. Who you are matters to everyone in your life, to your loved ones, to the people at the coffee shops, at the airports, and in the traffic jams.

Your realization matters on so many levels. There is a world of deep connection and joy available to you right now. It starts with your experience and never ends. It is infinite. Just like you. Just like our connections.

You create your reality by the thoughts that you think. Your attention is itself responsible for your life experience. No matter how awful the traffic jam is, how loud your neighbors are, how inconsiderate people may seem, how delayed the airplane is, you are the one who is in control of your reality.

Regardless of what type of experience finds its way into your life, you always have power over your reaction to reality. In doing so, you are the true master of your own fate. Think that life is awful and it is...for you. Think that people are careless, blind and ignorant and they will be...to you. The power of positive thinking is a common topic of conversation, books and seminars in our post-new age, twenty-first century world. Most of us agree that it’s a good idea to concentrate our thoughts towards a positive goal, rather than lull around in the doldrums of complaint and whine. The real question lies not in the debate about whether we can create our own reality or not, but rather in the how.

Enter the five thousand year old tradition of which you take part when you practice yoga. Yoga is a true science of the mind where you actively practice choosing a peaceful response to distressful situations, thus giving you the tools for creating your reality in each moment. When you practice yoga, you watch your mind’s reaction to touching the borders of your physical reality. Your inner dialogue in postures that seem impossible to you parallels your reaction to life situations that push the boundary of your comfortability. Pushing these limits brings up fear, anger, sadness, frustration, and numerous other insidious emotions.

It is easy to let your mind spin away into these temptations, however, with regular practice you will have the strength to remain calm, focused and aware. It’s like the difference between scratching an itch automatically and feeling the itch, then choosing not to scratch. As you remain calm, you are able to choose a peaceful response to your experience and thereby create your own reality. Wayne Dyer says that it is always possible to stop any life experience and say to yourself, “I can choose peace over this.” Yoga gives you a forum to practice saying to yourself that you acutally can choose peace over the patterns that you’re practiced in the past. You finally have the strength to stop scratching those pesky itches.

Your thoughts are crystal clear in between your breath, posture, and drishti. With no one else to blame, no where else to run, nothing left to do, start where you are, in the center of your created life experience and begin the dedicated, devotional path towards creating a peaceful life in the present moment. One breath at a time.

by Kino MacGregor

Yoga inspires us, moves us beyond our normal boundaries, and asks us to dedicate ourselves in new ways. Even if you are just beginning your yoga experience, you already know the unmistakable peace left in your body after an amazing session. If you are lucky enough to have a regular yoga practice already, then you have committed yourself on at least some level to the path of personal discovery.

In every yoga class, you renew your commitment to be present with ourselves. When you choose to create the time and space to practice yoga, you powerfully create the life that you want. Each breathe reaffirms your unwavering dedication to your own evolution.

Modern life is filled with so much sensory stimulus; there is an inundation of advertisements and vacation escapes. Parking is a impossible, traffic is hard and long, the alarm clock is frozen, the IRS is waiting. It is a victory to even attend a class. In the quiet space of a yoga class, you experience another kind of holiday, one that transports you from the mundane world of mental chatter and white noise to the quiet space of honesty and intimacy that you hold within.

In each class that you attend, you make a statement to yourself that you are more committed to living a life of inner peace than to lapsing back into your old patterns of numbness, anger or denial.

Just creating an hour to listen to your body sends a signal to your entire life system that what you stand for is a life that includes a deeper sense of yourself. There is always the temptation to stay in bed and procrastinate. And there is always your life waiting for you to live it.

Creativity is not only for artists. You can create your life now. A student once said to me that before she did yoga, she didn’t have time for anything and that now that she practices yoga, she has time for everything. What changed? Commitment and dedication to another level of herself.

It is not that once you begin doing yoga, your life magically falls into place. Instead, with access to your inherent strength, you commit in each moment to discovering the full potential of your lives. There will always be things that get in the way of your ideas. There will always be details to sort out. Thus, it is in every moment that you make a choice about how you live, what you stand for and how you negotiate this small time you have on earth. The fabric of your lives unfolds through the series of seemingly insignificant decisions, actions and choices you make each day. What new stores of strength will you unearth during your next yoga practice? What space will you create today?

by Kino MacGregor

It is said that the Buddha’s definition of truth is "what works." His pithy statement points toward one of the essential teachings about truth also contained within the path of yoga: impermanence. Knowledge and information come into our consciousness at an appropriate time, enhance our being and when we’ve integrated the lesson, it passes. The intelligence to accept the impermanence of all experience is the seat of true knowingness.

Great joy can arise when we experience new layers of truth. It can be so enticing that there is the temptation to hold onto it in attachment and perhaps proselytize to others. We often identify with what we know. Every time you say that "this is the way things should be done", you close yourself down to the possibility of a new, perhaps more evolved, efficient or friendly way of being. You also distance yourself from those who do not know, increasing division along lines of right and wrong. Even in the world of yoga, we sometimes find ourselves debating about the “right” method.

If we look again at the Buddha’s definition of truth as "what works", we see that what works constantly changes. Hence, we already have the basis for a relaxed, open understanding of reality. What works one day will not necessarily work for every day that follows, even what seems perfect will one day pass away and what’s absolutely suited to you in a particular moment changes - try to hold onto it and a small part of you dies inside and remains caught in the past!

Throughout our journey in yoga, we have met many inspirational teachers. One of the most evolved states of yoga involves being both open to new information and ready to simultaneously let it go when the cycle is finished, that is, non-attachment even to the very knowledge which enlightens our lives. Even the great truths of Western science are merely hypotheses that are meant to be true for a given period of time, until refuted. Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi gives us the phrase "Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind" (the title of his influential book) to explain that in the expert’s point of view there are no new possibilities for learning, while the beginner’s experience holds all things possible.

In terms of your practice, if you “know” that your shoulder is weak, how will you approach certain postures? If you "know" that a particular teacher is good (or bad) how will you feel in the class? What would happen if you walked into every situation with a beginner’s mind?

Knowledge in its highest sense satisfies our hunger for the spiritual, elevating us beyond our daily identification with our small self. Knowledge belongs to no one, but can be felt, experienced and uncovered by all - be open to it.

by Kino MacGregor

If you’re looking for a sense of ease, grace and effortlessness in your practice, the key lies in finding a sense of spaciousness in your mind. There is a way to practice and to be with your body to create the kind of neurological and structural foundations for a complete sense of openness. There is a way to literally get more flexible without collapsing the core stabilizing patterns of the body. In this way you may learn to practice all types of yoga with an inner awareness that has relaxation as its basis.

Openness in the body relates to acceptance as a state of mind. Acceptance takes in reality in totality and sees without delusion what’s possible and available in the given moment and works with that. Only when we relax the high standards around ourselves, our lives and our practice can we open to that level where apparent set-backs transform into moments for deeper learning. In each moment you are always evolving.

The first step along the path toward allowing more openness into your life is to search out all the places where you’re closed down. Explore the ways in which you experience yourself being contracted, aggressive, tight or tense. Then without trying to change anything about yourself, observe what you see clearly, the location and source of your habitual patterns and your reaction to your observations, all the while practice accepting exactly where you are. Before you can accept the world outside for its apparent shortcoming, you must first practice accepting and being open to your own. Then your body and mind relaxes.

Remaining open in a relaxed field of being is one of the greatest tests of the human spirit. A true state of openness gives birth to new life in each moment, accepting what is as it is. A true state of openness has both dynamic flexibility and a solid foundation.