It is hard to imagine personal happiness detached or
separate from the happiness of others.  - The Dalai Lama

NAMASTE, Yogis & Friends

On the eve of this holiday of gratitude and generosity, may this email meet you with a light-hearted spirit of appreciation and good fortune.  Indeed, we need only read the front page of any major newspaper to know just how fortunate and blessed we are, despite our daily challenges in the seemingly complex arenas of home, career, finances, relationships, and spiritual aspirations.  Life is full.  Life is demanding.  Life is a precious gift.

Fortunately, the great teachers of yoga and meditation offer us many clues, tools and “maps” to help us navigate our way on this journey called life.  Mostly, I hear them imploring me to slow down, breathe, create space, invite stillness and simply open up, or expand, beyond my habitual – and limiting -- notions of everything and everyone.  “Step outside of the box.”  “Be curious.”  Be willing to greet every moment with a fresh, open and vast mind.  When we slow down enough to really taste and savor each bite of food….to feel each in-breath and each out-breath, and to know it’s coolness, its warmth, its texture….to savor the fine and subtle sensations of opening and expansion in our asana practice, then we are truly living in the spectacular gloriousness (or even the wretchedness) of the all-powerful now.   This moment.  Your life. This breath.  Just as it is.  Perfection.  Delightful.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali tells us that this whole Universe exists so we can experience it, and, ultimately, find liberation from pain and suffering (Sutra II:18).  In his commentary on this Sutra, Christopher Isherwood writes

“…we shall welcome all kinds of experience, both pleasant and painful,
and it will never harm us.  For the Truth lies hidden everywhere,

within every experience and every object of the universe.  Everything
that happens to us, no matter how seemingly trivial, throughout
the day, offers some tiny clue which could lead us toward
wider spiritual knowledge and eventual liberation.”

 Rejoice!  Be thankful!  And just calmly “be.”  For the world is neither for, nor against us.  Therein lies the key to boundless joy and genuine freedom. No matter how challenging life seems, we can always choose to pause, become mindful of our breath, and soften.  It’s never too late to -- as Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chodron says -- “lighten up” and  “let the world speak for itself.” 

May you savor each luminous moment of your holiday and your precious life, with great delight and wondrous, enlightened appreciation.  

Om Shanti (peace),