Oh no!

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" William Blake, an exceptional geezer from Lambeth.

If you're gonna do it, do it! You can't be partial you either are or you aren't a yogi or anything else for that matter. Make up your mind and get on with the important work of being you.

"The truth shall set you free. But first of all it will really piss you off!" Anon.

If you ever get bored, irritated or angry try doing some pranayama, just to see if you can change the process of emotionalism. Once a thought becomes an emotion it's more difficult to get back to where you were before it happened.

It's always good to do something different, take a different route to work, set your alarm 30 minutes earlier than normal and do some pranayama. These little acts enable you to wake up out of the robot mind of half-consciousness. I know it's comfortable being a robot sometimes but in the long run it is life negating.

If you are always late try being early, if you are always early try being late. We become identified by our habits and patterns of behaviour which eventually become concretised into our nervous systems until one day we find we cannot move.

The mind is like a blank canvas that we project our thoughts onto, be more choosing in what it is you think about. If you enjoy being an idiot try not being one, if you like to be really clever try being and idiot.

"Disappointment is the beginning of real learning". Anon.

"Work, Love and knowledge are the well springs of our existence" Wilhelm Reich. He was one of Freud's top students who parted company with him over a disagreement on the theory of Libido and sexuality. He wrote many good books on the function of the human being from the point of view of healthy as opposed to neurotic energetic (pranic) fluctuations and what causes them! Read them if you dare.......

"There's more than one way to skin a cat" Anon

"It's my way or the highway" Anon too.

Hari Om.

bored/tired/miserable/lovely

Why is it we (some of us) believe that life 'should' be easier than it is, or indeed harder? It is what it is that's for sure. So how is your life right now happy/sad/neither? Only you know the answer to that.

Sitting still, we empty the mind (sometimes) and we look into the infinite void, hmmmm lovely. As we continue to sit we feel (some of us) the inflow and the out flow of the God given breath. More hmmmmm's follow as we wait, if we wait 'as sure as eggs is eggs' we will find a little feeling creeping in or a little thought for that matter. We observe this thought/feeling, and more hmmmm's appear.

So what are we doing then when all of this is taking place? What messages do our dreams bring us, what about the weather and how we are affected by that? What about it all? Perception is merely the conditioned organising of things that fit or don't fit into our frame of reference. If they don't fit we will usually disregard them as figments of our imagination.

The heart is basically a pump, but according to older wisdom etc, it is also something to do with love and compassion for others and ourselves, is this true? When was the last time you watched a really sad movie or heard some terrible story that made you weep? Is this real or is it something we learned?

What is real? This is the question I keep coming back too. Because the yoga books tell me that it (life) is all an illusion (maya), and because yoga has given me so much I have to take this on board as well, 'in for a penny in for a pound', this idea of illusion then, what does it actually mean?

The ranges of feeling we can go through in a day or in an hour for that matter, are enough to show us that nothing in that realm is permanent, it changes and keeps changing. The multi-fold permutations as to what constitutes the 'now' reality are multi-dimensional, this is a very overwhelming thing to realise.

We live (most of us) in a little narrow band width of reality, we don't necessarily have the time or the inclination (some of us) to be bothered very much to consider if these other dimensions exist, and even if they do, well so what, what are they going to 'give us'? We are unfortunately so caught up in Ceaser's world of finance (work and bill paying etc), and romance (relationships, family stuff, etc) to notice anything outside of these orbits.

We can use the 'idea' of multiple levels of experience in a practical way, indeed as it should be, not some strange esoteric mumbo jumbo to keep you coming back for the next instalment. We do this by going back to the way we move continuously through ranges of feelings and thoughts as we move through different dilemmas and experiences during our day. In other words how we are affected by people places and things as we try to maneuver ourselves through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (life).

We have conditioned ourselves to avoid certain feelings because we don't like them anymore, and as we continue to chop out what some people might call 'negative experiences' we become limited in our range of experience. We are not really afraid of feelings but we are afraid of the memory of past similar feelings whereby we have been made miserable.

People may avoid getting into a sexual/emotionally charged relationships because maybe they had some bad experiences in the past, leading to an isolated existence of intimacy avoidance. Another way to avoid feeling intimacy is through addictions and behaviour modification, i.e becoming a tyrant or a victim of life and 'acting out' a role, thereby avoiding authentic relating. All of this just to avoid feeling too much!!

But once we '"REAL-ise it is all an illusion and that nothing can really hurt us at the level of ananda then we can move into these experiences more as an experiment.

"Did he just say nothing can hurt us? He must be a nutter!"

We can live in fear of being hurt or live a fearless life and get some experiences of what it is like to truly be alive, it is a choice.

'Fear stops you loving and love stops the fear' Hmmmm.

To stop blaming others and start owning your own issues is another way to 'get real', from a feeling perspective.

Of course you can ignore all of this and just do yoga on a Sunday before you go home and have your Sunday roast!!

Hahahaha !!

Hari Om.

Fire burns!

"I want to do yoga because I am stressed", this is the most common thing I have heard when asking, 'why do you want to do yoga?'. But if we look a bit deeper at this answer we see it is meaningless.

What is stress? What is life without stress? Have you ever not had stress?

The path up the mountain is a treacherous one, we don't know what is coming around the next bend, over the next incline, so we just focus on where we are now.

It seems to me, and I know I have said this before, that we think life should somehow be easy and that everything should flow. I really don't know where this message comes from, but I see victims of it all the time.

Bookshops are full of books from people that have all the answers, 'I can make you thin/rich and happy in 7 days'. Well if you believe that you need therapy, and then when you realise that doesn't work either you may try something else, on and on, until one day................ you go to the market and some one gives you 5 magic beans, ahhh If only this could be true.

We choose our beliefs and as grow older we sort through these different beliefs as we re-formulate a system of ideas that fits our experience. For example, if we have lived in a culture that truly believes that red jelly is the work of the devil, then we will inherit that belief as a truism, and we may never question it for fear of going against the culture we live in that supports that belief, otherwise we would be cast out or rejected. But if we moved to a culture that said that belief was false we would have to (maybe) re-evaluate our belief about red jelly and the devil, hmmmmm.

There is always someone who will tell you what to do. Anthony Storr's book 'Feet of Clay' tells us of the 'Guru' culture and the way it can influence vulnerable minds to become literally 'brainwashed'. The more infamous of these was Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre. He convinced people to poison themselves and die in a mass suicide! Stoor does give some quite extreme examples of this idea of (faith-full) belief as opposed to reasoning and the free ability to question what we are hearing and experiencing within our own body/mind. One thing he points out is that many people have very profound spiritual experiences but not all of them find the need to come out of it and tell the world. He also funnily enough includes Freud and Jung, which is an interesting view on so called modern day psychology as being 'just another belief system.

What am I going on about? I suppose what I am saying is that if you think it should be easy, forget about it, which does not mean that is 'should' be difficult either. But that it will sometimes be difficult and it will sometimes be hard. This is true for the 'crack addict' and the guru, how could it not be? And by 'it' I suppose I am referring to life as we know it captain.

'I think he is trying to confuse us'. Moriarty.

If you find yourself drawn to a particular 'guru' or belief system it is probably because there is something for you to learn in that place. My only question is; Are you happy or not, and if not why not, what is it you think you are lacking? Once you know what that is you'd better move yourself into getting whatever it is fast, why suffer?

Why suffer?! HA!!

' There's room at the top they are telling you still' John Lennon.

Do Shalabhasana Now !!!

Hari Om

against the grain?

If you think you are already fully formed and whole then you may as well go now. If you think you are a work in practise then read on.

Of course we are formed to a point in order to survive through the way we have been conditioned to survive, i.e; birth-education-career/family/home/mortgage etc and many variations on a theme.

Lovely for you if that's enough, you are the lucky one's, but only in certain respects.

If you have been fortunate or unfortunate to have been a restless and discombobulated soul, then you may find yourself doing something like yoga in order to make some deeper sense of it all, perhaps, maybe. This does not necessarily mean that the aforementioned, career, family etc need to have been excluded. Indeed originally the so called spiritual path was for 'older men' who had done all of the material things aforementioned (again) so that they were now ready to look within rather than without.

Only 'you' know if you are a true seeker, if you are then start looking. But do you know what if anything you are looking for?

It comes back to one essential thing, either you are happy or you are not. If you are not the why not?

Seeking in itself can become an obsessive/addictive trait just adding more baggage to an already overloaded lifestyle. Living one's life going on endless retreats and workshops and not actually changing anything in the 'world' that you live in is a big issue today. Therapies and treatments abound relieving us from our suffering. The thing is 'why are you suffering in the first place, ever wondered?

Perhaps this is why now there is so much apathy and so little interest in politics, why indeed politics itself seems to be so bland and middle of the road. Because we get all our juices and tensions absorbed through all the therapising and politically correctionalising our fire and passion are dampened and we become wet and soppy, and shanti shanti shanti, and the abuse becomes blended in and the greed goes on and we say 'ah well what can we do, ahhhhhhhooooooom'.

'We create neurotic suffering in order to avoid authentic suffering' Freud. (He was a cocaine and nicotine addict apparently) and while we're on the subject Carl Jung had an ongoing mistress for years throughout his life and the whole (more or less) idea of western psychology is based on these 2 guys principle ideas.

"Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" Elton.

'Really?'

I notice I use the word 'really' quite allot, as in 'what do you 'really' think/feel etc, etc. But it's all an illusion, we know that too those of us that have touched the void. We know for sure that what is true in our mind is true until that particular truth is replaced by another (deeper?) more meaningful truth. And so it goes on. So in a sense from that perspective there is only what we believe, and therefore how we behave as a result of that belief, or what we 'choose' to dismiss as the truth and act accordingly.

We know that religion (s) are vast and complex systems, all based on beliefs. In other words you need to believe it to belong to it. There are vast tracts and texts going back thousands of years with varying degrees of proof that such and such a person lived and told us this that or the other, and that if we follow this particular person (God) we may to see and experience what (they) did.

It's not so long ago that people's believed that the Earth was flat, not so long ago when we consider that man has been present on the planet for 10's of thousands of years. In the nineteenth century there is evidence that much of the world believed this to be the case. Now look at us!

We can look at the facts and twist and make them fit our scheme of things if we really try, and anything that doesn't fit into that framework can be rejected as 'probably not being relevant to us'.

As I said yesterday I/we all of us are so clever, we can fit our frame of reference to suit us at anytime. But underlying all of this 'waffle' is there a 'supreme reality'?

It is only by being prepared to go through the different levels of our thinking reality, and on through our feeling reality that we begin to see the multidimensional layers of 'who we are' and 'who we have been' and more importantly (i reckon) 'who we are becoming and or want to be'.

If there are no parameters or templates for an ultimate reality the way we know it, then in a sense we 'choose' it surely. And in this choosing, which we are all doing all the time anyway, we are becoming, either consciously or unconsciously, somebody. As we awaken and go (deeper?) we may choose again, trying to find the template for our own unfolding purpose, then we will not have to worry about happy or unhappy, we will just be us, no conflict, no problem.

The system of yoga is nothing more or less that the instruction or operating manual for your own nervous system.

"don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters" Bob Dylan.

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" Bob Dylan.

Good old Bob :)

Ommmm.

so they say. . . .

We are all really smart and clever and we never want to appear to look stupid. The fool is the hardest card to play, it is the fool who teaches us and reduces us to dust again and again in the cauldron of our own fire filled souls.

Naivety and niceness wont get you anywhere either, you will be stripped bare for a higher purpose later on down the road, but only if you survive.

Who knows really? Who cares really?

Pain is the touchstone of growth, it is indeed. But there are those i think that like to inflict pain, are they just there to teach us, or are they pathological cretins? Who really knows for sure?

You do in your heart we all do in our heart that's for an absolute certainty.

What do you 'really' think and feel about it all?

The comments dried up rather quickly didn't they ?

Inspiration

Yoga practise per se will enlighten you. It doesn't matter which style you choose, if you do it everyday you cannot fail to become enlightened.

If you don't have the tenacity for internal tension production and expansion you may get an inflated ego, in this case you become someone that 'thinks' you know it all and you will set about telling everyone how great you are and how much you know.

The world needs all sorts of people to teach and learn from.

What are you doing? Why are you doing it?

Yoga practise per se will take you beyond the 'need' to know anything at all. It brings you to the perfect moment, now, and leaves you there to decide what it is you are supposed to do next.

The body is a storehouse of information, through feeling and moving deeper into the different layers of experience you can let go of it all. All of your conditioning is worthless in comparison to the shining presence of now.

'God save us from the expert, 'specialists', Zen mind is a beginners mind.' Me

Om nama shiva

Awakening

For various reasons I have been unable to do sun salutations in any serious way for the last three years or so. One of the reasons was a cartilage problem in both elbows. For some reason recently I have been able to do the sun salutation again. By saying, in a serious way, I mean at least 8 rounds minimum.

It's like the old saying 'you don't know what you've got till it' gone' in reverse. I never missed it until I got it back in this case.

The problem in relying on 'going to classes' is that you miss out on all the fun in challenging yourself to practise at home, when it is the last thing you (as the ego) wants to do. It's as if the 'ego' is going to go slowly and without protest to it's own demise, hardly likely!

I can feel in my own mind a kind of resistance to that dreaded word 'ego' as being the cause of all that's wrong, but unfortunately, for me at least it is the thing that's wrong. It's wrong in the sense that it keeps me in my neurotic routine, it keeps me asleep and away from feelings. That's what I'm trying to say, I don't want to get into a big debate about what the ego is or isn't, but I reckon you know what I mean, especially if you've been practising for a while now.

One of the biggest wake up calls I had regarding yoga was when one of my teachers asked me if I was inspired by my own practise. I struggled for an answer and it made me realise I wasn't. I was at the time practising at home quite allot but it was a miserable task of struggle against inertia and apathy, know what I mean?:}

The thing is this question led me to get on with it and to stop relying on teachers etc so much to get me through my resistance to waking up! This event occurred after 5 years or so of regular practice of three to four 2 hour classes per week. But this is me, it's not you, you have to, we all have to, work out what is best for us. This really does require you making an effort to wake up.

The sun salutation is a series of moves that in a lot of cases if you go to gym classes is rushed through as a kind of warm up. That is ok I guess and i do it like that too. But the thing is once you look at the sun salutation bit by bit and go slower it becomes a very big experience in waking up the brain and nervous system. Each movement requires a full breath and full presence, each round brings newer awareness and energy, which in a sense are one and the same thing!

Try it!

Ommmmz

As within so without.

As one's inner world changes so too must the outer world change, I believe this is the case. Whatever our conditioning, whatever our beliefs, prejudices or habits as time moves by and we continue to enhance our inner seeing we come more and more to the truth of the matter.

We have an inherent knowing, we have that as our birthright, and from the very beginning it begins to get twisted, not necessarily on purpose, but almost by default the world we are born into will have it's prejudices, ideals and habits, if we are born into them we cannot help but be shaped by them.

As common psychology will attest we generally either rebel against or conform too our situation, a bit of rebellion and/or a bit of compromise helps us find our way into becoming who/what we are.

As we grow older we may have to re-negotiate some of our cherished beliefs as circumstances shake us up and break us down, this is life teaching us as the saying goes.

But what are we doing when we read in the yoga texts that 'all is maya'? As we go deeper into the very heart of ourselves and our deeper questions into the infinite void we must surely shudder when no clear and definite answers are returned to us from the silence. We can laugh out loud at at that or we may weep, still no answer will come.

Then we return to our thoughts, beliefs and ideals. We look around us and once again question (or not) the nature of our being, the nature of what we are 'really' doing with this precious gift called life.

It is only when we turn once more to the inner world that we are making ourselves more familiar with through our continuing practise that we can perhaps learn to drop the 'need' to know anything at all. What if there are no answers? What if there is no rhyme or reason to existence? What are we to do then?

When the mind is quiet and the heart and breath are one we are at peace, isn't that enough?

Ommmmzz