Be My Yoga Valentine
As this year’s Valentine’s Day is upon us, everywhere we look is coming up red and pink, roses and chocolates. These are colors and symbols of love and courtship. Valentine’s Day has been around for almost two thousand years and has been commercialized since the 1800’s, by Miss Esther Howland, a greeting card visionary.
Valentine’s Day can be traced back to Roman times, when a priest named Valentine was beaten and beheaded for marrying young lovers in secret. Emperor Claudius banned marriages during this time, as he thought that single men made better soldiers.
Fools for love, I ask myself. Perhaps we all ask ourselves this at some point, and some of us maybe even more than others.
Why then do people risk their lives for love? Why do even the most levelheaded people, in the face of love, do the craziest of things?
Basically it is because love is the greatest gift and the greatest thing we can do. In studies of terminally ill patients, their greatest regret is that they didn’t love more. This is a well-known fact nowadays.
So, as of today, there could not be a more perfect day to begin, we must all love more. A good way to begin loving more is in our yoga classes. Take all that energy you have and move it into your heart center. Stop thinking about the postures you are doing and experience them from the heart.
The heart center is at the Anahata Chakra, in the center of chest. The physical aspect is our heart and lungs. This is where our spirit resides. We enter our life with our spirit as well we will leave our life with our spririt.
According to Aadil Palkhivala, a master yoga instructor of Purna Yoga, “the babble of the baby and the senility of age both contain the presence of the spirit. It is this spirit that must guide our days, or we will depart life with bitter regret”. In my latest issue of the Yoga Journal’s Teachers’s Newsletter, My Yoga Mentor, there is an excellent article by Aadil Palkhivala, called Love, or Living Without Regret. In it, he states that "the greatest (yoga) practitioners are those who understand how to use asana to enhance their connection with themselves and to open up the heart of love. Becoming a great practitioner is important, being strong and able is important, being healthy and free of pain is important, but nothing counts as much as knowing that we have loved".
So I challenge you, today and from this day forward, in doing your yoga asana practice, to find that love that lives within you and let it shine through your face, during the good, the bad and the ugly, as long as we all shall live.
We do!
Namaste.
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Why Yoga?
As much as we love our yoga classes as part of our fitness regime and to help increase our flexibility, do we ever really stop to consider, why yoga? And sometimes, especially when the going gets tough, our yoga classes may fall off to the wayside. Does this then become a double whammy?
Instead of having to ask ourselves, “Why me?”
Let’s ask ourselves, “Why yoga?”
The main goal of “yoga” is to control the fluctuations of the mind and to gain mastery over the sense organs. This takes a lifetime of practice. If we keep at our yoga practice diligently, this control will begin to happen naturally, over time. We will become more balanced, physically as well as emotionally, just by doing something we enjoy. How great is that?
Equanimity means evenness of mind, especially under stress. And, yes, it is possible. I have been practicing yoga diligently for almost 10 years now and I am beginning to notice the strength of this equanimity. My father, who had been fortunate with good health for all his life, has been recently diagnosed with a serious medical condition. He has been very sick and we now know that he was stricken with an autoimmune disorder that affects his blood vessels. With treatment, it can be controlled and there is an excellent chance that it will go into remission. As a family, we feel very fortunate that it is not something worse.
Instead of losing control and having my imagination hop on the emotional roller coaster, I feel balanced and in control. I have my yoga practice to thank for this. Just because we do not lose our cool, or crack under the stresses of life, does not mean we do not care or that we don’t find things important. We are better able to cope with the curve balls life throws and will be throwing our way.
Enjoy the side effects of your yoga practice, like a stronger body and freer muscles. But when you really need it most, be sure to enjoy your peace of mind. Keep practicing your yoga and when you need it most, it will be there to keep you going, through the good times as well as the trying times. If you find yourself in the middle of a crisis, that is when you need your yoga most. You may have to make yourself do a down-dog or two. If all else fails, you have your dristhis and breathing. You will be doing yoga if you practice a mudra as well (a hand posture).
So yoga.
And pray.
Namaste.