LIVING YOUR YOGA

Living your yoga assignments are given out in Aparna's classes each week.If you missed one you can also find them here.

OCTOBER 2019

Week I - This week as you travel through life, offer good wishes to each being you meet.

Week II - This week stay centered, do not over reach. Extend from your center, return to your center.

Week III - This week leverything in moderation, including moderation.

Week IV - This week contemplate : every wakeful step, every mindful act is the direct path to awakening. Wherever you go, there you are.

Dearest yogi & yogini,

 
“Let go of certainty.

The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose  sides.”
 ― Tony Schwartz


A single small seed contains in itself the potential of a full tree with branches and leaves, flowers and fruit. Yet unless and until the seed gives up its need to be a seed, breaks and dies as a  seed, the tree cannot come forth and be. Its only once the seed has let go of its identity and allowed itself to open  to possibilities that the blossoming of the tree begins. The seed knows that, that  is the risk of growth and transformation.

Abundance is a process of letting go, that which is empty can receive. If we truly want change we have to be willing to take the risk of letting go of the old and making space for the new. The caterpillar has no idea what’s in store for it as it breaks through the chrysalis and yet it knows that it can no longer be what it was. It has to leave the place it has called home for so long and release the body of its old identity to open its wings and learn to fly, to share itself as a butterfly with the world.

Time and time again we are asked by life to break or be broken from the past, to relinquish ideas, beliefs opinions and ways of thinking that are irrelevant to the times, to give up the ghost of identities we no longer fit. And  yet we keep clinging to small little ideas of safety, familiarity and that which is comfortable, existing from day to day instead of walking the Earth fully alive. Could you imagine a butterfly refusing to leave the chrysalis or  a seed saying no to the glory of a tree ?

To truly live we have to be willing to take the risk of being completely cut open, to lose sight of the shore as we swim towards new horizons, to give everything to make life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in our imagination. It is our duty to take this risk, to love live & feel without defense or reserve, to ask ourselves daily whether the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. And to remember that if we don’t risk anything, we risk even more.