The other blog, Life Change For You, is a blog about life change and how to go about it. It has taken a lot of effort and I hope to start being back here and talking about yoga a spirituality more very soon.

I beg you to check back now and again. I really want this blog to be of use to you. If you have comments or suggestions, I encourage you to send them to me. This has to be about you or it isn’t of any use!

Namaste!

P.S. I put out a new meditation CD that is downloadable. It is a guided meditation to help change and deepen your life. Check it out!

I think yoga and success are linked very well.

Why would I say such a thing? I mean isn’t yoga about purity and all that and success is, well, success means stomping on others and winner and loser.

I don’t think so.

Yoga is about learning about yourself, your body, mind and spirit. It is about learning to be a better you. Success is seen as something dirty, but it doesn’t have to be.

Success simply means that you work on something until you consider it successful. I worked on doing a headstand for a month or better, but I finally got to where I could do one. Success!! I felt great about myself and I felt successful.

Success doesn’t have to be evil.

I don’t think success needs to be a bad thing. It doesn’t need to stomp on others. Do you think of yourself as successful? If you do, are you an evil person? Do you not care who gets hurt as long as you get what you want?

I doubt it. If that is true, you need to work on your Yamas and Niyamas!

Yoga and success are great together. Use your training in yoga to give you the perseverance and strength to do the things you want to do!

Namaste!

The store had Christmas music on and it seemed louder than normal. I wondered if they were trying to put everyone in the mood. It wasn’t working; except for one person.

Coming down the aisle toward me was a woman who had to be in her eighties. I have no way or really knowing, but she was dressed as if she still lived in the forties. Her hat, straight out of a Marlene Dietrich movie, was tilted at a jaunty angle.

The music playing was a lively tune. I really can’t remember as this woman took all thoughts of things other than her out of my head. I think it might have been “Here Comes Santa Clause”.

Anyway, this woman comes down the aisle and she is dancing as she pushes her cart. Now don’t think she was crazy or something, she was dancing out of pure joy. She looked at me and smiled and any grumpiness I had in me left. She was the picture of Christmas cheer. I think she was an angel sent to cheer all us shoppers up!

Look for your angel in this holiday season. I’m sure you have one, but you have to look and you have to recognize them when they show up.

Namaste!

Old Man Winter

The cycles of the seasons often go by without our noticing. Oh sure, we feel the heat of summer and the cold of winter, but we rarely think about how the seasons mark the passing of time. They do you know.

Perhaps it is because I am swiftly approaching my sixtieth birthday, I think about this season of winter a little more than others. I know I want to do my yoga this morning before I go out to shovel, just to loosen up a bit, but I am not going to. I need to get it done sooner than that.

I also know that I feel the winters of years gone by in my body, but it still wants to go out and make a snow angel. My mind asks if my body has taken leave of its senses, but my body laughs and chucks a frozen ball of white rememberings and says “it ain’t over yet!”

What is life to you? Is it a heavy burden that seems heavier with each passing season, or is it the adventure you always wanted it to be? The choice is yours to make. You decide if it is the drudgery of the snow shovel or the excitement of the fresh fallen play-stuff of life.

Spiritual living is not about following certain rules or rituals, but about journeying with the Source. Where rules and rituals fail to bring us closer, a loving relationship, based on discovery encourages a loving connection.

Think of a marriage where one party is in total control of the other and decides all the rules of the household. We would call that abuse in many cases. Is that what we expect in our living with the Infinite? I would think not.

Spiritual living is a way of going through life with an open invitation to the Spirit to guide and be a part of your life. Take on the challenge of spiritual life and enjoy its benefits!

Gnome

The world loves to tear this giant down until there is no giant, but a gnome. Something small and maybe even a little on the nasty side. The question then is, which have you allowed to be your inner self.

We all have the choice to be one or the other. What have you chosen to do? If you say that the gnome is the greater part of you, don’t feel alone. I would bet that most people would say the same thing.

Today, decide to push the gnome back and wake the giant. It is what we were created to be. Why not be it?

What is it you want in your spiritual journey? What is it you would like to accomplish? Where would you like to be a year from now?

Not everyone is good at setting goals of any type, let alone spiritual goals. On my other blog, I wrote about this process and you might want to read over the post on setting and achieving goals.

The basic are; spending time to define exactly what you want. Make the goal as specific as possible, something that you can tell when you get there. Make it something you can do and is realistic.

If you don’t set some goals, you are likely to spend your time going no where and accomplishing nothing.

Are you afraid to be that open? I don’t think people think in those terms and yet I think they are afraid. It is scary to be open to leading when you are not sure where that leading will take you. I can tell you from experience that it sometimes feels awful, but it does work out!

I invite you to open yourself to the leading of the spirit. I invite you to spiritual living, not as something different to do now and then, but as a way of life. Let your spirit guide you and see where it takes you.

What do you have to lose? Is your life so perfect now that opening yourself to this way of living will be so terrible? Why not take the chance? Step into greatness and live!

I am reading a great book right no on managing you stress, or your adversity. I won’t go into that too much here, but you can read about it.

The point is, we need to have control over our minds and our bodies. We can’t give in to the whims of our lazy nature. That doesn’t mean we can never break from routine, but we have our own little sacred rituals for a reason. They keep us on track. Too much deviation from our practice, be it yoga, meditation, or whatever, may well mean never getting back to it. Have you ever gone on vacation and broken from your rituals and then found it nearly impossible to start up again?

We need our sacred rituals to keep up going in the right direction. What are you sacred rituals. It doesn’t have to be saying your prayers, reciting the Bhagavad-Gita or fourteen Hail Maries. It can be something as simple as your yoga practice, or watching the sun rise. Find your rituals and embrace them. The make you grow spiritually, mentally, and physically.

Focused

Mindfulness or awareness comes from remaining focused in whatever it is you are doing.We often feel fragmented as we go through our daily lives and this fragmentation comes from our mind jumping from one thing to another. The ancients called this the monkey mind. Sometimes it is called the drunken monkey mind. I can feel so fragmented that I think my monkey is on speed!

To remain focused allows our mind to function at its highest level. It is the point of meditation, to train the mind to focus on one thing at a time. This gives us clarity so that we can pursue our spiritual growth and power. Our world doesn’t like this idea and encourages us to be multi-taskers, but what it is really trying to convince us of is that it is okay to be a little schizophrenic!

Try it tomorrow. Decide that you will focus your mind on only one or two things at the most. If other thoughts come into your mind, just let them fade away for now. You can come back to them later. If you are afraid you will forget what they were, jot them down and then forget them. Just stay focused and see how you feel at the end of the day.