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.
www.yogajournal.com
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.
www.yogajournal.com
posted by Andrea at 10:43 AM
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