I’ve been teaching and practicing yoga for the past 30 years. I notice, with more compassion that I had when I was young, that it’s not always easy to be alive as this human body. There are constant challenges that arise. Even the most wonderful body has weak areas, places that remain tight, contracted or shut down after years of practice. Sometimes I look at my students and see them struggling so bravely with a hip, a knee or a shoulder that just doesn’t seem to respond to their efforts and intentions.

Because this happens more as we grow older, I’ve been carried into a much broader and more expansive view of what yoga is, and what it means to live in this body. Our post-modern technological world does not encourage us to live as embodied beings! Think of the way our grandparents might have lived. I know people from that generation who walked, or rode horses every day of their lives. They grew their own food, and paid attention to what their bodies were telling them about the weather.  When I was in New Zealand, we lived for a while among the aboriginal people there-the Maoris. We were a group of white hippies, trying to learn how to live on the land. Our experiment was actually a grand failure, rich with deep learning and transformation.

Every morning, our white boys and the Maoris would get into their boats and go out to fish.  Every day, the Maoris would paddle to one place in the water, put down their anchor and start pulling in the fish. In the beginning our boys would drop anchor somewhere else. But the fish were always where the Maoris were. It was incredible to us- they really knew where those fish were! We asked them many times to tell us how they knew this-was it the weather, the wind, the sky, the water? They couldn’t tell us-we were still trying to understand with our minds. They used to laugh and tease us about it, with great kindness. One day, one of the elders finally told us, “Listen to your bodies. The body holds the secrets you are looking for.”

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I was at a workshop last week with some people who were looking for their ‘vocation.’ One man spoke with a lot of energy about global warming, the environment, and teaching people about sustainable living. I kept encouraging him to look at this as something that was really calling him, since this topic was the only thing that made him light up and come alive. He had a lot of reasons for not getting engaged with it.  One of them was: “The majority of people in Canada are not ready to change the way they live, or even to consider how serious the situation is. We are losing vast tracks of forest now to the pine beetle and other beetles, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

I heard myself replying to him in this way:

“When was any great idea, project or initiative ever supported by the majority of people? If you wait for them, you’ll wait forever.”
I spoke to my partner about it that night, and he said, “The only thing that the majority of people have consistently agreed upon is going to war.”

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At one of my writing workshops over the weekend, we were writing in response to a picture. In my picture a beautiful dark-eyed woman was celebrating at some kind of party- blowing a streamer, with colored lights glittering behind her. I could hear the loud music, and the voices; I could feel the presence of the crowd. It brought home to me the Christmas and New Year’s season awaiting us all-the food and the parties, the drinks and the drugs; and the deep sadness and isolation many people experience in the midst of it all.  Every year I have clients who speak to me about their challenges at this time of year. My daughter often says about birthdays, Christmas and New Years, “It’s a set-up, a perfect way to make yourself miserable. Any other day of the year, you’d be happy just to have an ordinary day. But on these days, you’re supposed to be having an incredible time, and often, it doesn’t measure up to what you had hoped for.” I have a few friends who have been bold and brave enough to declare, “no presents this year” and stick to it. I know people who have even tried ignoring Christmas and birthdays altogether. But I sense there’s something here the human heart longs for.  I think these times are really about community and celebration.

And this is what we often call celebration: herd us all together into one space, turn up the music, pass out the drinks and the drugs, and leave us to drift-lost, isolated, occasionally making brief contact before we sink even deeper into the collective coma.

When did we forget how to celebrate, really? What is it to celebrate? How do I celebrate you, us, our life together?

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As I was preparing for my ‘Finding Your Voice’ course, which starts tonight, I had several friends and students call and express to me what was going on with them. They told me that it was a very intense time for them right now, full of uncertainty, loneliness, and deep anxiety. I spoke about how many people have expressed such feelings to me lately. I passed through a period like that a while ago, and realized that it was something happening in our collective consciousness, not just to me. For me, this is one of the most powerful things about learning to speak from our core, without holding back. And learning to listen from the heart, with unconditional acceptance. We discover that we are not alone! This kind of experience and understanding relieves a lot of our suffering. Things are not easy in our world right now. Our whole species is on the edge of an evolutionary leap, a movement from separation and isolation to unity and mutual engagement. We simply cannot manage by ourselves any more. It is not working. We need each other, in a way we may not have ever needed each other before.

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There is a lot of talk about presence these days. We come upon this word in all sorts of places. Our collective consciousness seems to be moving in the direction of presence, as if in response to some deep and urgent need.

What does it mean to really embody the meaning of this word, and why is it so important to us at this time?

To be fully present is to rest in the state of being. Right now our whole world has been swept up into a frenzy of doing, getting, and achieving. We are all participating in this global trance. Everyone talks about wanting to slow down, but most of us just keep running, hoping that if we run fast enough, sometime soon we’ll find the time to rest.

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Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. All weekend I have listened to friends and family express their gratitude for life, love, nature, community, spirit, beauty. Many people spoke about how lucky we are to live in North America.

It’s easy to feel how healing and empowering it is to be grateful. And it’s also so easy to forget the gratitude, when we are faced with all the challenges that life brings us.

One of the best practices I have discovered for staying connected to a sense of gratitude is what I call ‘the buddy system.’ Find a friend, and ask them if they would like to exchange a daily gratitude email. (You can include the weekend or not)

Just sit down at your computer and send a few sentences to your friend about something you are grateful for today. It doesn’t have to be big. This is important to remember. One day my friend wrote and said she was grateful for the smell and feel of her clean sheets.

You can commit to doing it for a month, three months, six months, or a year. Some of my students kept going long after they had agreed to stop, because it added a whole dimension to their lives. You’ll probably be surprised at the difference it makes. I was.

Have you heard about the positive deviants? There is growing body of research on this particular group of people. I first heard of them from Bill Harris and Marshall Thurber, a student of Buckminster Fuller. The positive deviants are people from all races and cultures, who have somehow triumphed in situations where everyone else got stuck.

The research has shown that these people have three main characteristics.

First of all, they are very clear about what they want, and do not give up. They just seem to have an inner ability to endure, long after the people around them have thrown in the towel. Jack Canfield, author of the ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ books, is a great example. His books have now sold more than any book in history, including the Bible. He went through 142 publishers before he found one who liked the book. The others all told him it would never sell. Sometimes the best things meet huge resistance at the beginning.

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I have a friend and yoga student interviewing me about yoga tomorrow. She knows that I have taught yoga for 20 years, and that I lived in India for 25 years. I was telling her this morning that Yoga actually began a long, long time ago in India, with teachings from a scripture called ‘Patanjali Yog Darshan’ The first sutra (verse) says, “Yoga begins now.” This is really the essence of yoga-living in the eternal now. Yoga was never just about building a strong, flexible body. The ancient seers and rishis of India would not have seen the point in that. What good is a great body if you don’t know who you are? What good are beauty, riches, fame, or power, if you think you are just this body-mind that is going to die someday?

The whole purpose of yoga was to cultivate the relationship between the body and mind, and bring the whole being into a state of natural harmony. Then a state of ease and clarity emerges that can support meditation, inquiry and awakening. Awakening to what? To our true nature, our unconditional being.

I noticed this after practicing yoga for many years in India. It was no longer the state of my body that was the focus of my attention, but the clarity, stillness and aliveness that opened up in me during a yoga session.

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