We Are What We Practice

A few days ago, one of my favorite yoga teachers said something while we were pressing our palms and feet deeply into the earth in Adho Mukha Svanasana, downward facing dog. It was such a simple reminder and yet it struck me as a deeply important instruction. “We are what we practice,” she said.

I took another deep breath and settled more softly into the pose. Yes. We are what we practice, I thought. Then the question arose, what am I practicing? In yoga, I often find myself pushing my body into positions, straining toward something. But what exactly? Each day, I wondered, what am I creating with my habits, my beliefs, my behaviors? The answer was not what I wanted it to be.

But before turning against myself by making a painstaking list of all the things that I am not doing right, I reminded myself of the purpose of the question. The purpose is to realign practices with intentions. To make gentle, but firm corrections.

If my intention is to be kind and loving with others, do I practice this by being kind and loving with myself? Beyond the ways I nourish myself, these daily acts of care, am I kind and loving in my thoughts as well?

Often, it is not our habits of behavior but our habits of mind that can benefit most from realigning our practice with our intention. And it was here that I focused my energy.

Every time that the story that my mind strings together throughout the day did not support my kind and loving intent, I would guide the language to one that did. Thoughts about what was hard become thoughts about the gift in the present circumstances. Worries about how others might be preventing me from having what I want became reminders of all the ways people have helped me get where I am.

I offer this simple reminder and invitation to practice the life you want to live, the person you want to be. In this way, you tap into the deeply joyous person you are, that we all are. That great spark of life that began us can shine bright if we allow it to. In each moment, we are here, luminous.

Connecting to What Matters

Life is filled with distractions, demands, opportunities, and obstacles. Sometimes in the cacophony of all that is happening around us, we loose sight of what truly matters. It is easy enough to start spinning around and around in circles. This motion can create a strange sense of integrity, as if the movement itself keeps everything connected, establishes an orbit to our lives. But, by getting caught up in the spinning, we loose contact with what matters. We cease to be present in our own experience; we become disconnected from the deep wisdom of our bodies. Absent this fundamental connection, we are adrift.

A few days ago, I found out that my dearest friend has cancer. This news sent me into an old orbit, one about illness and isolation, about loneliness and suffering. For almost two days I was spinning in this place, utterly unable to be breathe, to be present for the sadness this news brought and too unable to be present for the immense gratitude I have for this woman, my dear friend, and her radiant life. I lost contact with the joy of life, of love, of friendship. It took Buddhist author, Tara Brach’s reminder to sit still and breathe in order to stop the spiral. Once I reconnected with my body, once I sat in the feelings rather than spinning in the endless stream of negative thoughts, I could finally reconnect to what matters.

As we move into the myriad of summer activities, remember to stay connected to your body, to breathe into your life. From this place, you can open to all of life’s gifts and stay grounded in the face of life’s challenges. From this place, a life of authentic joy is possible.

Fearlessly, Exuberantly You

We are in the full flush of spring and all its celebrations of life. All around us the earth shows itself in a chromatic display of vivacious living. Spring is the time for rebirth and renewal, to nourish oneself and to flower boldly in the world. There is a simultaneity to this, the rooting down and rising up, the grounding and pushing toward the sky.

Flowering is both metaphoric and literal. Just as plants spread their roots while blossoming in luscious, rich hues, you can fortify yourself while bursting forth in a brilliant display of the many gifts inside of you. To draw on your own immense capacity, you need only ask yourself, how can I best nourish myself and my life? What do I want to open myself up to?

Inside of you is sweet nectar. Open fearlessly, exuberantly, yourself, your life and show the world the thrilling color of you.

Living an Authentic, Joyous Life

Outside my friend’s apartment window in Honolulu, there is a rainbow. Hawaii is known for its rainbows, so much so that to mention the unbelievable beauty of the purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red arch is almost trite. Any yet the rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon, a spectrum of light appearing in the sky when the sun strikes moisture in the earth’s atmosphere. Rainbows occur when there is sun and rain, fire and water. Rainbows reflect the complexity of the earth’s elements, the diversity of human experience, the light and dark that surface in each of our lives.

The greatest joy, it is said, comes from being connected to one’s life purpose, to living an authentic life. This does not mean that life is without it storms, its black clouds and torrents of rain. It does mean that with rain and sun, there are rainbows, spectrums of light so spectacular that it is impossible to witness them without gratitude and joy.

Rainbows are a symbol of authenticity, of our connection to our truest selves. When we are coming from that place in us that is most resonant, our decisions are clear, our purpose is true. We are grounded and yet able to cross the expanse of a sky streaked with storm clouds and sunlight.

Connecting with your life purpose is a process of listening to yourself. What are the things that bring you the greatest joy? Who are you being in those moments? What is the life you want to create for yourself and those you love? What are you willing to do to create this life? What will sustain you in this process?

As we move into spring, remember the rainbow. It is outrageously colorful, at once utterly itself and able to inhabit, with beauty and purpose, the intensity of atmospheric disturbances. It is you living an authentic, joyous life.

The Mysteries of the Human Heart

The heart is a muscle about the size of your fist. Its purpose is to move blood through the body, taking in the de-oxygenated blood through the right atrium and moving oxygenated blood through left ventricle back into the body. It, like all systems in the body, is perfect in its symmetry. As in all aspects of life, there is the in and out, opening and closing, acceptance and rejecting, attachment and release. Rather than situating these oppositional movements in a rigid polemic of good and bad, there is great value in honoring the fluidity of the process.

Around Valentines Day—that strange holiday which honored the martyred Saint Valentine of Rome and during the Middle Ages of Chaucer became associated with romantic love—we tend to focus on what we do and do not have. If we have a lover, we tend to evaluate the romantic-ness of that love (that is its presence and lack). If we do not have a lover then our attention is often on the absence of love. And yet, there is such an abundance of love in the world, in our lives. We have the love of the rain, of our friends and family, of the pink and blue streaked sky at dusk.

And too, within relationships, there is often a tension between closeness and distance, between acceptance of love and fear of its limitations. Here to, we have a unique opportunity to open to the full spectrum of de-oxygenated and oxygenated moments of love, knowing that the blood of it moves throughout our system, that we are fed through its circulation.

Whatever the circumstances of your life, your ways of loving, may this day, this week, this month, open you to the fluidity of love, to its presence in all its forms, to your own breathtaking cycle of vulnerability and connection, contraction and release.

Widening the Margins

At this lip of the new year, we tend to focus on all that we will do better, or right. Often the voice in our head is something like “finally, darn it, I will change this thing about myself, my relationships, my life.” And then we buckle down and get to work. But there is so much more to living, to being, than to seeing our life as work, as labor.

The other day, someone reminded me of the words of Henry David Thoreau in which he speaks to loving a broad margin to his life. There is so much generosity in this image, in the empty space between words and the borders of the page, a generosity to self, a spaciousness.

This year, consider broadening your margin. Cultivate spaciousness. Give yourself the permission of ease.

Some people find spaciousness comes from giving oneself precious moments of quiet and reflection through meditation or writing. Others find a good long run opens their hearts and minds, widens the page. There are those who find the greatest opening comes from spontaneous play, from breaking out in song, dancing an impromptu jig in the living room. I often go to the ocean to breathe in the immensity of our planet, to do cartwheels in celebration of our water world.

What ever it is, where ever you find it, give yourself some time each week to cultivate the joy of spaciousness. Widen the margins to your life.

“There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.”
- Henry David Thoreau

Freedom (or the limits of control)

There is a state of being that we often strive for: being in control. And when we get there, we congratulate one another for reaching this sublime state of order. We’ve got it together. We design perfect plans. We make it happen.

During the holidays, in the cold, damp of winter, with more to do and less daylight to do it in, we often construct elaborate plans with even greater zealousness. There are usually more people involved, so the circle of our control must widen. It is more difficult managing the complexity of other people’s lives, but we plan well, we communicate thoroughly, we are “in control”.

And then something happens. Perhaps something small. Some one changes their mind. Or perhaps the quixotic nature of things presents itself. A flight is cancelled or someone gets snowed in and suddenly all our planning, all our effort and best intentions, come screeching to a halt. It is easy to become disappointed and in this disappoint be reminded of others, of the ways in which people have failed us, life has thwarted us.

But there is another story here. A story about letting go. We can know that we did the best we could to make our desires known, to make something possible. And we can know too that we are not in control. The world and its inhabitants have ways of opening and closing that we can neither predict nor plan are way out of it. But this is good news. What fun would life be for us if we always knew in advance everything that was going to happen?

So take a big, wide, exuberant gulp of air and let go. Take another breath and notice the world around you, the music of the rain, the odd elegance of your thumb, a stranger’s smile. By letting go we allow a sense of ease in our bodies, in our lives, and in our relationships. It is when we are here, in this place of openness, that the world can show up in all its mystery and magic, that the people in our lives are free to be themselves. And they are radiant in that freedom. We all are.