Journal Posts | iHanuman

iHanuman

Love, Service, Devotion, Yoga

Journal Posts

If you're looking for a sense of ease, grace and effortlessness in your practice, the key lies in finding a sense of spaciousness in your mind. There is a way to practice and to be with your body to create the kind of neurological and structural foundations for a complete sense of openness. There is a way to literally get more flexible without collapsing the core stabilizing patterns of the body. In this way you may learn to practice all types of yoga with an inner awareness that has relaxation as its basis.
Openness in the body relates to acceptance as a state of mind. Acceptance takes in reality in totality and sees without delusion what's possible and available in the given moment and works with that. Only when we relax the high standards around ourselves, our lives and our practice can we open to that level where apparent set-backs transform into moments for deeper learning. In each moment you are always evolving.
The first step along the path toward allowing more openness into your life is to search out all the places where you're closed down. Explore the...

posted: 11 years 9 months ago
posted: 6/11/12
Emotional vulnerability seems to snowball at all the most inappropriate moments. When you're feeling down the most insignificant comment can send you deeper into the darkness. On days when you feel torn open by life, your heart is raw, exposed, and injured. In this space everything hurts. Is it just chance and coincidence that dishes up misery for no reason or is there some hidden cosmic force that answers to a pecking order higher than your melancholic feelings? I find myself constantly at odds with the ever-changing screen of my own own feelings. They get hurt too easily when I least...
posted: 6/11/12
Food is not who you are. It is a way you communicate with the world. You express things through food, through eating, like you do through any art form, but it nevertheless is not who you are at your deepest essence. Your eating habits are merely habits, not your life or your vitality, though they may seriously enhance your life, your energy levels and your overall health. There is so much attention given to diet and exercise as the solution to every health worry. There are at least a dozen new diets promising to make you forever young, cancer-free, heart healthy, thin,vibrant and closer to...
posted: 6/11/12
Yoga inspires us, moves us beyond our normal boundaries, and asks us to dedicate ourselves in new ways. Even if you are just beginning your yoga experience, you already know the unmistakable peace left in your body after an amazing session. If you are lucky enough to have a regular yoga practice already, then you have committed yourself on at least some level to the path of personal discovery. In every yoga class, you renew your commitment to be present with ourselves. When you choose to create the time and space to practice yoga, you powerfully create the life that you want. Each breathe...
posted: 6/11/12
It's easy to seem peaceful in the quiet cave of your own mind. It's much harder to face the test of integrating your learning with your life. No matter how peacefully you might leave your daily meditation or yoga practice, there is nothing like a seemingly callous or thoughtless comment from a friend to trigger the stickiest habitual patterns. Know that in moments when your emotions seem larger that you, there is the real meat of personal transformation. If you practice regularly you will see that no emotion, no thought pattern, no physical condition has power over you. If you run...
posted: 6/11/12
Confrontation is a grey zone on the spiritual path. Should you fight your way out of a defeatist victim-mentality? Or should you take a few breathes to ventilate your hostility before taking your inner rage out on your fellow freeway drivers? When is it appropriate to stick up for yourself & when is it time to quietly wait out the storm? Anger, whether my own or someone else's, has always been challenging for me. I remember the shock of experiencing the seething kind of backlash that years of unexpressed boundaries can bring about, and then, realizing that my anger was just that:...
posted: 6/11/12
The spark of interest in yoga often ignites an inner obsession that infiltrates every aspect of your life. At first yoga is life and you cannot get enough of it. Yoga reconnects you to long forgotten inner realms and you somehow fall in love with yoga. Yet if your yoga practice evolves into a daily, lifelong relationship it is almost inevitable that at some moment you will get bored with it. The insatiable hunger for as much yoga as possible will shift and change to a space where you will be absolutely full of it. This period of lackluster levels of initiative often comes ironically as a...
posted: 6/11/12
Our life is short, yet a real sense of time eludes us. It is more common to get hooked on the world of sensory pleasure than to live a spiritual life. E-bay, appointments and shopping consume the grasping mind. Television seems calmer than silence. Pain and loss are more addictive than gratitude and joy. What's stopping you from simply rejoicing in this very moment? Surfacing from the past like a sleeping giant, it is often past hurt, drama, pain, sadness, or anger that hasn't found its way out of your system. Sometimes these patterns seem larger than life and you spend months,...
posted: 6/11/12
Living in North America, we are part of a society that exports the flashy famousness of the newly discovered. We are collectively in a rush to unearth the next hidden secret and produce our very own million-dollar invention. This makes us brilliant innovators, forward thinking dreamers and daringly ambitious artists, and yet simultaneously, history-deprived, beauty-obsessed shopaholics haunting soulless strip malls sipping mass produced lattes. Is it no wonder then that we as nation seem to be in search of spirit? What else is left for America to invent than an authentic self in the midst of...
posted: 6/11/12
The mind enjoys putting on a melodramatic show. From the thick plot of stress, anger, pain and loss, it proclaims that we are "just fine", "coping quite well" or "not really bothered at all". The body, by contrast, doesn't lie for very long if at all. Its simple proximity to nature cannot go on with show forever. If stresses like lies are present, the body will hold it in the belly for a period of time and then, after a critical turning point, it will give up, give in and collapse. Some of you may be all of familiar with this state of your body. If you want...
posted: 6/11/12
Have you every noticed how noisy we all are? In the last twenty years, we have invented and now need iPods, iPhones, CDs, portable DVD players, louder motorcycles, super jet engines, walkie-talkies, reality TV shows, music videos and Starbucks. Silence is like a dirty word in the modern vocabulary. When you sit with another person there is an almost irresistible urge to speak. Sometimes you converse about important subjects and sometimes you just talk. This meaningless, friendly chit-chat about light-hearted matters is a kind of social sport. Imagine the awkwardness of a first date where you...

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