Well anyway . . . . . .

So whatever reason you do yoga, will be or should be clear to you. You do know why you are investing so much time and energy into this thing don't you?

"I do yoga because ................. ermmmmmmmm ahhhhhhhh?"

If we unravel the 'secret of the kundalini', it merely means that through the various practises, Asana, pranayama, kriya's etc, what you are actually doing is waking up the dormant parts of the brain. I know to all of you super yogi's this may sound a bit simplistic, but I say why shouldn't it be?

There is another moot point to this fundamental idea of activating dormant grey matter, and that is that some believe that the human brain is already 100% per cent active. But in a way it doesn't matter does it. You may have a computer that is 100% per cent active, but it doesn't mean that you are getting maximum benefit from it does it ?! Hence we do yoga, we do if we are yogic at least. And I have said before that if you are not yogically oriented then you really should be off some other place not here criticising me!

If you are sitting around not happy then you may need to ask yourself, what's up? You may do this and find that no new answers are forthcoming, so you press on and hope for the best. If you do some pranayama and or some asana and a bit of meditation you are then using the brain mind and body together to process these existential questions through your nervous system, rather than just letting them rattle around in your cranium. Don't be pushy, wait a bit, relax (if you can) and keep breathing.

Personally I feel that tiredness is the root cause of a lot of illness. Chronic fatigue is rampant in our culture.

Proper rest is a requirement, eating well and sensibly is a requirement, getting some exercise is a requirement for proper health. Until these are taken care of forget about all of the esoteric stuff. You can Asana and pranayama all day long but until you engage the mind with the body you are just perpetuating the problem of the split between who you think you are and who you really are.

But hey thank God this is just my opinion !!!

'The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect upon itself' anon.

Hari Hari

The yes/no interlude

My journey so far has led me to realise that I am who I am, and that who I am is conditioned by all of the experiences I have had so far in this life. So the 'I am' that exists at this point in time is semi-awake most of the time, fully awake some of the time and completely unconscious some of the time.

Having said the I do find that awareness is a constant thing. That is there is never a time when I am not aware, even when I am asleep. It's just that sometimes I am more aware than at others. I have noticed that as I have woken up to who I now am I have seen things about myself and others and the world in general that I found very challenging. This is really just what normal people would call a maturation process, or growing up.

Awareness is a 'double edged sword', and I can't really understand anyone that would rather be asleep once they have tasted what it feels like to be fully awake.

"I awoke from dreaming I was a butterfly, and didn't know for a moment if I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a man." Lao Tzu.

Because most of us live in the narrow bandwidth of 'consensus' reality we don't really ever need to ask the more existential questions such as, 'what does it all mean'? because we are too busy struggling with the shopping etc. But once we start to tread the yogic path we may find it ever more necessary to ask questions like this. I only say this because sometimes I have struggled with the idea of life being something that you do for a short time between long periods of darkness and infinity.

Imagine for moment the idea of nothing at all before birth or after death, and that we just have this time now between to gaping chasms of nothingness.

Now imagine that you have a soul that is travelling through eternity with you experiencing everything there is to be experienced before returning to the source of infinite intelligence and bliss absolute.

Your mind could be seen as a laboratory for the pure purpose of experimenting and experiencing different ideas and concepts. Like trying on a new programme for the day, a new personality. Become a Buddhist for a month, live in the reality of a Buddhist. Then try Hinduism for a month, then Atheism and so on. Try out these different realities and see what they feel like. This is essentially what we are doing all the time anyway, except this way is a more conscious way of doing it.

You can experiment with being happy or miserable, all you have to do it learn to tune your nervous system correctly. I would say that most people would choose joy over misery anytime.

Have you done twenty rounds of sun salutations today? Have you ever tried to do twenty rounds of sun salutation? Why don't you try it now?

Hare hare Maha Deva Shambo

I used to be very indecisive, now Im not so sure.

Tamas = tired, inertia, low-energy, depressed - under achiever

Rajas = Hyper active, anxiety, restless, driven - over achiever

Sattva = Balanced.

We are becoming more Sattva as we continue to practise. True!

The initial stages of practise may well put you in touch with the body a bit more in the form of feeling. Feeling more of your body may require a little fore-bearance on your part, because it hurts, for most of us!

One of the subtlest messages put out by the media and advertising is that life 'should' somehow be easy. It isn't though is it? Because of this subtle message we may feel, if we are suffering in any way, that there is something wrong with us. What we may not realise is that some/most people we meet are faking it too. That is not to say that they are suffering unbearable agony, but how many of us would rather be doing something else when we are at work in an office on a sunny day?

So there is an element of faking it I would say, to what is euphemistically referred to as normal life. The point here is that this is ok as long as we are ok with it. This is where the ability to be flexible comes into play.

Just to re-cap. Yoga is NOT an escape from your life. It is an opportunity to FEEL your life exactly the way it is NOW and work from that platform to create IT the way YOU want IT to be!!

Asana practise is the starting point, it allows us to feel again. In this feeling we may REAL-ise that we are tired, overworked, stressed, unhappy and at this point we may say, 'Hmm I don't think much of this yoga lark'. And go away and do something else. That is the problem right there. So we have to see who's running our programme from within (sub personality). If we keep it very simple we know we can sometimes be positive and sometimes be negative. So SATTVA is a more or less neutral place from which we can look both ways, at our positive and negative selves and see that they are both illusions.

"What is he going on about Doris?"

So the question is then if it is all and illusion. What is real?

'Now just hold on there a God Darn minute' John Wayne.

Everything we think and feel is pre-determined by our conditioned responses to external. stimuli. This is behaviour we have learned form childhood onwards. As we 'DO' yoga we may, if we are tenacious enough begin to undo some of the more damaging programmes running our lives.

'It takes allot to laugh, it takes a train to cry" Bob Dylan.

For some of you early on the path of yoga this may sound like a load of horse shit, but it's all true! Is it ? It is yes! Is it?

And here we have the crux of the whole dilemma of our personal reality. What is true? Or put more succinctly. What is true for you?

Hari Hari Om

So what then?

Sometimes I think just the fact that I am bit older now is one of reasons for my improved quality of life. This is partly true, but without my yoga practise I really know that my life would not be as 'good' as it is. What I mean is that somehow we get older and we 'should' get wiser but this isn't always the case. But I feel with yoga backing you up, you cannot fail to get 'wiser'. And by 'wiser' I mean using your inherent intelligence to make the life you have the one you want it to be. Waking up your inherent intelligence with yoga practice.

Without wanting a medal for it I feel have struggled quite allot in this life. The cause of my struggle on a material level I think has been a certain lack of direction and not being very driven or ambitious to achieve the so-called things of life such as wealth or fame . As a result of this combination and a lack of self-confidence I became semi-marginalised, that is I never fitted into the 'nine to five' and i never quite fully embraced the so-called alternative lifestyle of the 'new-age'.

However having been 'washed up on the shores of yoga', I eventually found what was 'really' missing and what was really missing was me!

If you have been reading this blog from the start you may have read about the multi-dimensional self or the sub-personalities model of 'psychosynthesis' which I touched on a while back.

I have come to believe, indeed my experience of my mind has taught me that more than one aspect or self exists. To make it easier to understand you may want to look at the different behaviours you may adopt for different people or situations etc. You may not behave the same way with your work colleagues as you do with your mother or lover, without labouring the point I think you know what I mean. We are who we become as a result of conditioned responses or 'pavlovian reactions' to certain stimuli.

The point I think I am trying to make from this model; is that if we constantly flip from one to another mode of operating sub-personalites without an anchoring process, i.e yoga or some other form, we may get lost within ourselves and end up not knowing 'our arse from our elbows.'

So the newly evolving 'yogic self', in this case, becomes the integrating and anchoring dynamic of these differing sub-personalities.

Hmmmm, well I think that makes sense, the idiot-critic within is giving me a hard time about my writing skills and my grammar now.....

Yoga practise at the very least enables one to get a clear perspective on mind-body-breath and the 'effect' of the unity of these three elements.

Just to make another point, if you are always the same with everybody then you may suffer from an in-flexibility of mind and body. If you are always changing direction and don't know who you are, you may find that you are hyper-mobile in mind and body, a space cake.

Yoga can and will strengthen and make more flexible the mind and the body. You will need to embrace both strength and flexibility otherwise you may become a 'physical jerk' or an 'intellectual bore'. Which may of course be your karmic destiny, only you can decide.

I think the overall practise of yoga allows for more freedom of choice. Operating from the same old programmes becomes deadening and life negating, until we become so over-identified with who we think we are we become tyrannical or subordinate. We get stuck, worshiping deities of our own construction because we haven't really found our own strength and flexibility. We blame and shame others, it's all there fault.

If you ever get caught up worrying about some trivial nonsense just contemplate for a moment the finality or not of death, or think about the size of this vast universe we inhabit. Then do a posture or two and breathe in and out with awareness for 15 minutes. Then when you've done that twice or three times, go back to worrying if you want.

Om

And on and on

So after January 98 post bone marrow transplant, I started to do yoga. Blimey that's only 12 years ago, although it does seem longer. I did my first yoga class in 96 so officially I have been 'doing' yoga for 14 years more or less. But I do feel I didn't really 'do it properly' until 98, in 98 I made a 'proper' commitment to it, thank God!

To be honest at this time I never really had anything better to do, I was emaciated from 7 months of ongoing drug treatment and bed rest caused muscle wasting, I was in a right old mess to be honest. So doing what I could in a yoga class seemed like the perfect remedy for me. Like I said in the previous blog sometimes on entering a class I never thought I would make it to the end, but I always managed. I had a fire inside of me that started to burn brighter as I continued to work through the different layers of inertia and misery.

After 2 years more or less of 'doing' at least 3 classes per week I went and did my yoga teachers training course in Canada, at the Sivananda Ashram. I can't say I enjoyed this experience but it was the perfect training for me. It was all over in a month and my previous training as an osteopath stood me in good stead as far as working with bodies and people was concerned. Working with ego's, mine very much included, is a bit different and has been a much longer learning curve, which to be honest, continues up till today.

I do get really bored with the whole, 'which yoga is the best and/or which yoga is best for you debate'. The yoga that is 'best' for you is the one that you love, and I might go so as far to add, 'if you don't love it find something or somebody that you do love enough!' Get on with it that's all. . . . .

'Many are called few are chosen' I think this is from the Holy Bible, but I don't know in what context, but it surely applies to the yogic path. Many, many people come for a while and many, many drop out after a while. It's not wrong to drop out, for some people yoga practise may just be a fill in until they find another more enchanting game to play, such as falling in love and getting married, or moving to another planet, or becoming very rich. . . . or . . . . . whatever.

But for those of you who like me find yourself travelling the yogic road fear not, the truth is at hand and it is right under your very nose. . . . . Keep breathing, keep chanting and then dance for awhile, maybe even breathe a bit more, write, paint and then go for a walk. . . .You never know you may wake up!

This only applies to the poor malcontents of you that are searching for some kind of answer. If you have an answer maybe you could leave a comment on here and tell us all what it is, if you're too shy to do that maybe you could tell me in private.

Yogic practise for me is and anchor or an island that i can return to when my 'ego' gets overloaded. Sometimes I 'need' to switch off the internal computer and 'let go' of my whirring mental programmes. It's beautiful to have this gift. A learned and earned gift I might add!

'You' may not like 'Me' but that is beside the point.

'I' may not like 'You' and that is beside the point too.

When we meet in that quiet space there is no 'you' or 'me' to like or dislike. There is only what we share together - this time, this space, this moment for ever.

Ram.

Here now!

I went through my initial treatment for AML from March 93-Sept 93. Unfortunately I relapsed in 96 and after putting off the inevitable I went into hospital for continuing treatment in July 97. This time I was to spend 4 months in hospital with ongoing treatment, culminating in a bone Marrow transplant in January 98. This second lot of treatment made the first seem like a picnic.

So after all of this pain and misery of illness I finally find myself left with nothing. I stumble across a yoga class, which fortunately for me had a teacher that embraced the whole spectrum of yoga and not just asana practise. I was always into the breathing exercises and really enjoyed the pranayama processes. It got me high! I needed to get high too, I needed to escape from the misery that I was trapped in with post chemotherapy syndrome of depression and general misery and tiredness.

And here I am today, perfect. . . . . . . Well not exactly but a long way from where I was 12 years or so ago post chemo, post bone marrow transplant.

It has been an interesting journey. Starting with the initial recovery process, getting my body stronger. I went to three or sometimes four classes per week, I went because I wanted to go, not because someone was telling me to. I went because it made sense to me and I felt a whole lot better after a class than I did before it. Sometimes I went into a class feeling like 'death warmed up, and I would leave feeling like I had been somewhere and done something, my whole energy had changed.

Those of you that have been reading this blog for a while may have sometimes picked up my cynicism and criticalness relating to some yoga systems or other so called forms of healing, the quick fix routes, that end up becoming dead ends leaving you poorer and more miserable than when you begun. This is all good in a sense because essentially you will find what you 'really' need in the end. But you need tenacity and courage to pull you along the sometimes hard slog and inertia of the 'lower mind' puzzles and labyrinths.

If you are into yoga and you love it, you are very lucky I would say. You now have a system that will carry you forward for the rest of your lives. All you have to do is turn up for yourself, whoever you may be on a daily changing basis!

I have tended to avoid teachers that are too sure of themselves and start to preach to others that they know the way for everybody. We are all different and I really believe the adage, of one man's meat is another man's poison.

Keep your own counsel. Follow your inner dictates, see where they take you. Getting attached to a teacher is fine but be conscious of what you are doing and listen, keep your bullshit detectors switched on at all times.

But having said all this, you know it is all good really, if you are a true yogi, it doesn't matter, you will become what you are, all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other.

"Follow your bliss" William Blake.

"Disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed" Anon.

variations on a theme

In 1993 I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). It was a huge shock to realise that I was so ill. AT the time I was studying Osteopathy and I had an old pathology book. In this book, which was 15 years old at the time I read up on the prognosis for AML. It said the prognosis was poor at best with a 15% survival rate. That was a shock to my system that was very difficult to come to terms with.

The reason I'm talking about this now is because I see that the life I have now which includes an integrated yoga practise is very different to the one I had then. It is different because I feel my life now has a groundedness to it that it never had before.

Leading up to the diagnosis I had been under a huge amount of stress for various reasons, but I was unable to be objective about it. I was literally swallowed up by my constantly worrying mind (ego).

The cause of leukaemia is unknown according to the medical profession. All I know is that on reflection at that time I was very, very stressed. What I mean by that is that there was no way I could step outside of myself and see what to do.

I found myself lying in a bed in hospital looking into this idea/belief that basically I was doomed. It didn't matter that studies in the treatment of this illness had moved on since the time of my old pathology book, and the doctors telling me my survival rate was 60% per cent or more. I had convinced myself it was all over.

What did it mean? I looked at the thought of me dying and couldn't compute it, it didn't make sense to me. I had watched many movies where someone was dying, in these old movies sad music was played and there was a sense of drama and safety that it wasn't me and it was only a movie. I could look at the character and remind myself that it wasn't me that was dying. But here i was lying in a bed in a hospital, there was no sad music, no drama, it was just another day for everybody else, life was just carrying on and it didn't care if i would live or die.

Many things went through my mind as I lay there in the bed. It felt like my mind was unravelling itself and I could just watch it. Old memories came back and there were emotional moments with family and friends who came to visit.

My emotions consisted of deep terrifying fear and intense sadness and strangely the odd feelings of joy and surrender at the idea that it was all over and I needn't worry anymore.

At this point in time I still don't really know what happens next after death, but I have to admit I find it harder to believe in nothing existing after I die for all eternity than I do that something must carry on in some form.

But whatever happens the most unyielding truth is that 'I AM HERE NOW'.

HARI OM

before and after

"I was always self-realised, I just didn't real-ise it!"

You are here now and always will be, It is always now and all you have to do is decide who you are and what you are doing. This is my opinion, I must emphasise that.

I don't know if there are any shortcuts to the truth of who you are and what you want. All I do know for sure is that one day I/you will die, i.e, I/you will no longer be here.

If I find myself lying on my deathbed worrying about something I 'Should' have done but didn't I will be unhappy- probably.

So it is a good idea in some sense to imagine dying and ask some of the questions such as, what is it, where do we go etc? We will no longer exist, we will not be here anymore, hmmm.

This is not an exercise in becoming morbid it is an experiment with feeling. The ultimate destiny for all of us after all, is death, this is an existential truth of the highest order!

The fact that we are getting older and are finite in a physical sense is a profound 'felt truth'.

Some older schools that existed in the tradition of awakening were unencumbered by modern concerns of being sued or being politically correct, or even being polite! Do you think you are going to get awake by being an idiot? You will need to feel the truth at a deep level, this requires some shocks to the system.

If you have ever been shocked by life, e.g, a close friend or loved one dying suddenly or a serious accident you may have been involved in, or a divorce or loss of some kind. As you may know it can suddenly and rather harshly put you in touch with this unacknowledged sense of meaninglessness. Suddenly the ground opens up beneath us and we stand in awe of the great mystery that is life. "What is it all about?"

We can try and push it away by pressing on with our lives but sooner or later this 'existential angst' will come and get us again and again, I believe.

So as you may by now know, meditation isn't some flight of fancy into some imagined twinkly world of peace and love. It is a place of confrontation with you in all of your manifestations.

Sorting the real from the unreal is the process of self-awakening and of course it is not a 'nice' subject is it, this death stuff.

So as I was saying in the older traditions we would be asked to undergo extreme feats and hardships in order to find ourselves. Imagine that now, some yoga centres even have carpets on the floor so you don't feel too much discomfort. I suppose from this we may have to assume that people are generally getting weaker and more moly-coddled as we move into an unknown future of robot technology. Perhaps at some point the geneticists will be able to remove our senses or feeling faculties that we currently posses, so we then wont have to suffer at all, ha!

'Staring at the sun' is a term given to this idea of meditating on death. We can only do it for so long before we have to look away. It is the name of a book by author Irvin Yalom and I would recommend it if you are interested in going deeper into this subject.

'In order to live well we have to learn to die well'. Anon

Hari Om

Respone-Ability

The movie 'The Matrix' showed the Earth run by robots, which used human beings as batteries for bio-power.

We are indeed like batteries in that we charge ourselves through the process of eating food (fuel), sleeping, resting etc, (re-charging), and, if you are reading this, doing Yoga practise and all that it entails.

We take energy in; and we put energy out, of course, through working, physical exertion and brain power, thinking, planning, working things out etc, etc.

As we do yoga we 'HAVE TO' (I think), acknowledge that it is 'we' who are ultimately responsible for what we do with ourselves, our energy output, our energy input etc.

Strong emotional reactions use up so much energy, getting angry at things, getting upset by people, events etc, is a massive waste of energy. Of course here we need to make the distinction between healthy and unhealthy emotional discharge. Or maybe it would be better to think of 'emotional responses', rather than reactions!

For example if we drop a cup of tea on our new rug and start getting so upset we have to take a pill, a drink or go shopping, we may then realise that there may be something going on beneath the dreaded surface. If you are a woman you may have the luxury of being pre-menstrual as an all encompassing excuse, but as a man I don't have that luxury. That is not to say that there are not times when it is easier to lose one's rag than at others. Being tired or hungry can leave us more exposed to the effects of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

So, as yogi's how can we work with this idea of response-ability?

Pick your least favourite asana and practise it everyday for a month, two or three times per day or more if you can. Really feel the 'feelings' that are evoked during one of these least favourite postures, they are exactly the same feelings that are evoked during anytime of resistance, to anything that you resist. Inertia, apathy etc, will get the better of you unless you are prepared to go the extra mile.

"Why should I go the extra mile?"

And that is a very good question, cos as far as I'm concerned, you either is or you ain't.

"For those of us that don't know there are no explanations possible. For those of us that do know, there are no explanations necessary."

Ommmmmmzzzzzzzzzzzzz

nothing to do no where to go

What would you do if you could do anything you wanted to do?

If you can think of something the next question is, why aren't you doing it?

It doesn't matter which way you look at it, time in this life is finite, one day you will take your last breath. A sobering thought!

Are you living the life you really want to be living or are you 'going with the flow', waiting to see what happens next?

We are, all of us, free spirits, we really are, even when it doesn't feel like it! We are constantly choosing our next move, whether we do this with some awareness or when we are half asleep we are nevertheless always choosing. What are you choosing right now?

If we strip away the layers of conditioning what do we find? Nothing/everything?!

What is it that lays behind the mental and emotional conditioning that you are programmed to react to and against?

If you can keep still long enough for your breath to settle and your heart beat to regulate you may find that the mind, that is the thinking faculty, will jabber away endlessly and you may become mesmerised by it's sparkling wit and ingenuity. You may come to the conclusion that you are a genius or an idiot or you may tell yourself you don't care about anything, but you are still here, you are still breathing in and out. If you continue to sit still you may find all sorts of interesting things flowing through the mind, mental gymnastics abound, a pure spectacle, a bit like a circus.

One day the mind becomes quiet, there are no thoughts, what then? What does this mean? You have achieved something/nothing? At this point you may 'real-ise' that you will still need to go on living in this world, you may still need to pay the rent/mortgage. So what is it all about then, this yoga?

Well in order to find that out you really do have to read a few books I think, read the books, try the exercises, and see whether they have any validity, otherwise you just have to take other people's word for it, that yoga is good/bad whatever.

You are the laboratory and you are the experimenter. Try it and see and stop bloody complaining that you are unhappy/tired and stressed. If you invested half the energy in finding out what the problem is as you do in ignoring it then you just might get somewhere, maybe, but it may hurt a bit in the beginning, but you already know that yoga isn't an easy path, don't you?

"Before enlightenment chop wood fetch water. After enlightenment chop wood fetch water" ?

Om

a spiritual diary.

One thing that is very useful for the ongoing story of your yogic practise is a 'spiritual diary'.

'Samskaras' are patterns/habits that are deeply ingrained on our soul or psyche, these are probably closely related to Freud's unconscious, i.e patterns or habits that we are so used to we don't notice that they are patterns anymore, because they have become so ingrained and therefore un-conscious.

As we go deeper into our yogic practise and as we continue for longer periods of time to become committed to undoing ourselves, we will become more and more aware of 'our-selves- and what we do or don't do.

We are now continually waking up the dormant consciousness and seeing more, i.e how we behave, what our reactions in certain situations are etc.

We will find at certain times conflicts within out own mind that in the past we may have barely noticed. Conflicts lead to friction and friction generates heat which manifests as anger and/or irritation and intolerance.

"The truth shall set you free, but first of all it'll really piss you off!"

We can try to live a life of superficiality but once the yogic practice starts to root itself into our psychic/emotional structure we may become a little discombobulated.

We may need all the help we can get in these situations, where do we go for it? We can seek out a 'psychotherapist' etc, or we can turn to ourselves, the deeper part of us that is emerging, a clearing process is beginning as we start to 'really' decide who 'we' are and where we are going.

A diary is very useful as a reference point in our ever changing circumstances. Just writing about one's practise, how one is feeling, what we are starting to notice about ourselves is all good information, especially when one looks back over a period of several months writing to see the patterns that are there.

Therapy is very fashionable at the moment, but you really need to know the difference between a 'healed healer' and someone that has done several courses and now has a really fancy website, but knows f--- all!

A healed healer is someone that has been through their own process of healing for many years, someone that has lived a little and can really empathise.

I digress. A spiritual diary is very helpful for getting used to solving your own problems and conflicts, really getting to the 'heart' of the matter.

"We become enlightened not by imaging beings of light but by taking the light (prana?) into the darkness." Carl Gustav Jung.

It would behove you to get on with it!

Ommmm.

Number one excuse: "I haven't got time, I'm very busy".

Number one answer: "Well of course you are!"

Ommmmm

'I feel a bit insecure doctor'

Our very own nervous system belongs to us, and how we affect our nervous system by the various things we do is up to us. But who are we and what do we do, that is the question, and even more important, why do we do what we do? This question is either very deep or very neurotic depending on your frame of mind today.

The deeper questions regarding reality and consciousness are there for anyone to look at, at any time. If we are constantly busy because we have to worry about paying the mortgage or whatever it is we have to do then we don't really have the time to think or look at anything regarding the nature of our nervous system and the 'condition' it is in.

"We are chosen by our destiny". I can't remember where I read this but I like it. I like it because it takes allot of pressure off of me to be the one who is responsible for my destiny. I used to believe, and sometimes still do, that if i can restore myself to a more natural vibration I will be more in tune with my personal destiny. But then what is natural?

So if this is the case, it becomes a question of balance, between what I 'think' I want to do and become, and what I am already being and becoming as a result of my decisions, whether conscious or unconscious. And then, do I like the direction I am taking, and if not, what am I doing about it? Am I a victim of circumstance, taking various forms of tranquillisers along the way, or am I fully empowered and feeling with my eyes wide open?

Well whatever we do, we know by now, if we have lived on this planet for a while that either/or has it's challenges.

When one practises yoga, what does it 'really' do? Whether you do yoga with others in a class or on your own, what does it really do for you? It is a great way to fill your time until something better comes along. I see it all the time, people doing lots of yoga until a boyfriend or girlfriend comes along, or a job promotion or something that will pre-occupy us to the point where yoga is no longer needed or wanted. It happens all the time. So it is very useful this yoga thing for a 'fill in', it keeps us busy and being busy is much better than feeling the full impact of existential angst.

"It's all in the mind" Mystico the magician.

Ask yourself this: How many people do you know that are truly happy? If you find about 5 people like this, see what it is about them that they have in common, if anything, then try it!

'Ummagumma'. Pink Floyd.

'Wassamadda?' Doctor Death.

Om shandy.