People have a fundamental need for positive and lasting relationships – DeWall, Deckman, Pond & Bonser

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we will ever do – Brown

The self is a consistent pattern, an organized whole – Schultz & Schultz

What does this have to do with anything…it’s everything. Yes I am in graduate school and have been teaching yoga for 10 years, there is a collision of an ancient practice meeting academic standards in my own life currently.  If you were to step onto your yoga mat right now – and if I see you in the next 48 hours this is where I will be teaching from – can you, assuming you have all limbs in tack and if not then there is probably a cellular remembrance of what has gone missing, separate your heart from the whole? Can you separate your mind from the whole? Can you separate your physical, arms legs, hands, head from the whole? You could probably be on your mat mindlessly, but I wonder if it will offer a positive relationship with yourself or others later in the day. You could probable separate your heart, but I doubt you would be very successful loving yourself or others later in the day. And really, could you separate your body, the physical from the mental?

Often the concept of our heart and our mind get left out of the bigger picture. In cases of physical abuse or eating disorder, the body or positive regard of the body gets left. Yoga, as I have said before is a practice of uniting, connecting, allowing all parts of oneself to belong, to make a connection to the whole. Interestingly enough, the lack of satisfaction in our lives is seeing everyone else as separate. Isolating cultures, race, religion, sexual preference, politics, yet we all share the same breath, live on this planet together and everyone, as Paul Tournier puts it, “holds a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance”. The success of our human race depends on having connections with others…yet we are still at war, and the biggest battle is probably within yourself. I am most definitely the hardest person on myself and tend to be the first one to get in my own way and tend to be the last one to put myself first…but I am working on it and refining little patterns that pull me from the collective love of myself. Working on creating a sense of belonging within in order to reflect it back out in to the wild world in which we participate.

We’ve heard it many times before and I wonder if he was ever hard on himself …

Be the change that you want to see – Gandhi

Yesterday’s post, just as you are, refers to the idea that you contain an unimaginable magnificence as Paul Muller-Ortega has taught me. Yes there are the layers that grip us into the non-loving expressions of our humanness, but we also contain the ability to belong, connect and the potential as well as the encouragement to bring forward your best self. What more is there?