Smiles

Mother Teresa said "Peace begins with a smile."

Finding your inner peace can be done anywhere, walking down the street, sitting while you work, quietly in your mind you can take yourself there. That great feeling after a yoga class is attainable anywhere and at anytime. Put a smile on your face and boldly take your smile with you in your day. Observe your surroundings and make an effort to find the peacefulness around you today.

Peace

Robert Fulghum said: "Peace is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away."

Notice around you peacefulness in ideas, people, environment and actions. What actions have you committed today that brought you or someone else more peace? It is often that we know the answers to finding more peace in our lives, but we rarely listen to our intuition to embrace this peace. Follow your own advice today, do what feels right, and find that peacefulness from within.

Kindness

Lao Tzu said: "Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love."

Be committed to spreading joy in the world. Want everything you say and so and think to result in more happiness, and value kindness, while you allow it to govern your life. If you do thinks rooted in kindness, your results will give you and others around you more happiness in their lives. Look for the good in every situation and share that goodness with others. (Practice the Presence by Edward Viljoen and Chris Micheals)

Patience

Reading from Thursday 4:30 class:
"Patience, persistence, and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success." ~Napoleon Hill~

Yoga, as a practice, takes patience. We hold poses for numerous breaths, we try week after week to do a new balance pose, or we wait for weeks to find changes in flexibility. In our daily life our patience is tried. When driving, working, in our relationships, and we can practice patience in your practice and allow it to blend into patience in our daily lives.

"When I accept the world around me, I am not giving up; I am shifting mental gears, so that I can become engaged in the world with a dynamic, yet relaxed, frame of mind. In this state of relaxed attentiveness, I begin to notice that all of life is about perfect timing, and that patience is necessary to truly witness what is going on. Without patience, we stand a very good change of missing some perfect detail." ~ Practice the Presence by Edward Viljoen and Chris Michaels

Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way. ~Florence Scovel Shinn

Tonight's reading at the 4:30 Mixed Level Flow:
"Sitting still with a question and allowing answers to rise up from within you is a powerful practice of accessing intuition, which is the activity of the Presence within you.

Intuition requires patience and gentleness. It is not accomplished by trying to hush the mind or stop the thoughts, or even change them. It is to be approached with serenity and a willingness to sift through the myriad thoughts until, at last, a stress-free and beautiful voice emerges from within." ~Practice the Presence by Edward Viljoen and Chris Michaels

Many people do not meditate because they think they should be "doing something," but meditation is the act of doing nothing. Meditation is allowing the stillness to do the work. If we are still enough we can see through the thoughts that cause noise from within. It is allowing thoughts to pass through the mind. It is not passing judgment upon those thoughts. It is being witness to what your inner being has to say to you. The vrittas or thought patterns of the mind are often distracting and do not allow us to listen within ourselves. Meditating is allowing the vrittas to pass and being still enough to see through the smog of our minds.

For more information on finding stillness in breath and meditation visit: http://www.beingontosomething.org/index.htm Sami and Patricia are very wise and have a lot to offer the yoga community. They have an upcoming workshop in Overland Park! Check their site for details.

Simplifying Things

I recently returned from a trip to Vermont to visit my Grandmother and my Uncle at their home in Cavendish. I was impressed by their life they had made on the farm land in the mountains. Morning chores, evening chores, farm animals, large gardens of vegetables and another of flowers. Apple, cherry and peach trees. It was a delightful environment to be in, and I realized that I, too, would like to incorporate these connections with my yard, my animals, my home life.

Those of you that know me, know that I tend to carry a full schedule of "to dos" in my life. I took this past weekend to start that "to do" list at home. I started my first garden. I do not know much about gardening, just enough to know I like the idea of growing and eating my own foods. I know that I like the idea of composting to prevent waste, and I support being mindful of recycling. I spent two days in my new garden and the work is not nearly completed, but I am beginning to value the simple things at home. My life with my husband, my evenings with my pets, and now my garden. This weekend we also began feeding our pets rice and chicken (it does not really cost that much more than we were spending already) and we reorganized our recycling, making it a simpler task to encourage us to do more of it.

I am already setting a new routine with my home life as the priority, and I am excited to carry these new priorities into the work year in August.


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