Day #75

Today’s favourite poses: Pigeon, Dog, 3 Legged Dog, Dancing Warrior, Warrior III

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: Ten?

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison)

Note – I used to think that it was completely arrogant to consider us lowly humans as divine. Yes, God created us in His image, but how dare we compare our flawed, weak, and ignorant souls to the Almighty Creator?! But as per a post on my other blog, a few months ago, my friend Greg (and later Erik, Nate, Joe and Theresa) said some things to me that convinced me that when my little sister proclaimed “God made me, and God don’t make no junk”, back when we were kids, there was truth to that. I have also read/researched many spiritual/sacred texts (yes, there are MANY of them, not just the bible, although if you think that is the one and only source of divine wisdom, good for you), that reaffirmed my sister, and my friends. The next couple posts are concurring viewpoints.

“We are to think of ourselves as immortals, dwelling in the light, encompassed and sustained by spiritual powers. The steady effort to hold this thought will awaken dormant and unrealized powers, which will unveil to us the nearness of the eternal.” Charles Johnston.

There are two lessons in this beautiful statement about yoga. The first concerns our true nature, “dwelling in the light, encompassed and sustained by spiritual powers.” Either we believe in our innate goodness and beauty or we do not; it is up to each of us to decide. We may spend our entire lives believing a lie about our true nature, or we may put our trust in our own grace. Either way, most of us have to choose what we believe about ourselves each day, each hour, each moment of our lives. The Yoga Sutras suggest that we stand in our divinity, that we consciously experience ourselves as miraculous.

In the second sentence, Charles Johnston returns to us one of the central truths of the Yoga Sutras; that energy is like a muscle; it grows when we use it. We grow in our capacity to do the right thing each time we do the right thing. Steady effort to hold this thought will awaken dormant and unrealized powers within us, which will bring us closer to that which we seek. So our divinity is affirmed, and the manner in which we can make manifest this divinity is outlined. We believe and act accordingly, and as we do, this belief grows in our life. We believe in compassion, live compassion, and compassion grows in our lives. We believe in love, live lovingly, and love grows in our lives. We stand in our light, live in our light, and the light grows within us. We need only make a beginning, and that beginning will foster within us the power to move forward.