Drop your usual excuses: Rewiring your mental patterns

The one place where my tailbone feels comfortable in this asana (Navasana): at the beach. Now to bring a bag of beach sand with me to yoga class.

Why do this pose? It's a good way for me to describe what ashtanga yoga does for me.

breathe into challenge

On a yoga mat on hardwood floor, all of my focus is on slow deep breaths and on engaging uddiyana bandha and mula bandha. Going to the edge of challenge and breathing into it cultivates this pattern in other areas of my life.

When I first walked into a mysore-style ashtanga class and was asked to do this, I had all the excuses on why I'm not so good at it (One, I had 3 pregnancies and my abdominal muscles split apart; two, I fractured my tailbone). All of this was ten+ years before but I carried that excuse with me.

transform excuses to power

What I was really doing was coming up with an excuse to hide and not grow into being more than I was. Good metaphor for why I have continued with ashtanga yoga. It has only gotten better (the lessons) since then.

Namaste.

Robin Ellen Lucas, MA

Find your strength by uncovering fear

Galavasana (Image © Yoga Robin®)When you're trying to find the strength, sometimes it can be found in what would seem to be indirect places.

Expressing emotions unlocks secrets. Voices speak from within the subtle body. What you hear might not be easy to deal with, but move your body around anyway and hear it. Unclog your heart.

Don't build a shell around you or act out from that hidden source covered with fear. Embrace uncertainty.

Namaste.

~ Robin Ellen Lucas, MA

Nervous System, Focus, Acupuncture, and Herbs

Healing the Total Body: Where Western Anatomy Meets Eastern Spiritual Science

Healing Series, part 8

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Skeletal System, fears and spiritual grounding: Healing series

Healing the Total Body: Where Western Anatomy Meets Eastern Spiritual Science 

Healing Series, part 2 

Read on for more details...

Darkness found in your yoga practice

Are you scared to face something?

If you are scared to face something within yourself, you may sometimes feel that time is against you or that you cannot fulfill your wishes because of your fears.

The answers might be in your dark sides that you refuse to see. Yoga can have the potential to be the place to confront what's most deep inside you. This means that you have the power to confront your darkest side of you in your yoga practice.

A place for the bold... But ask yourself, "What am I scared of?"

We hide our darkest parts within our bodies

Deep within our bodies. The best parts stay locked up in our joints and tightest places: hips, necks, shoulders, backs, and even feet. When moving through yoga with deep breath, these gems—as secrets—can become free...

In a big way.

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Diving deep, where are you my fears?

go to the edge

I am now wondering where my fears are, going off the edge to find them in myself, in the depth of who I am. If I am bold enough and I don't turn back, I will be able to renew my patterns. This action will set me free.

In the dark shadows, I imagine I will sail through my depths as if a dream and find the silence I need and have searched for all my life. I know that the best stuff is at the very bottom.

gems and secrets are beacons

More conspicuous and offset against the darkness, the gems and secrets are easier to see and feel. Sometimes they shine with luminosity like a beacon, with my name on them!

The bottom must be a bed of soft sand which I can dig my bare feet into and feel rooted, maybe for the first time. The ground of my soul. To touch this part of me is to release all that I previously imagined was hidden.

Transforming itself, no longer in the dark, I will invite it to be a part of my waking life.

freedom lies in our minds and bodies

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Spiritual escape, spiritual bypass

Overwhelmed?

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed that you dropped everything and turned to your spirituality? I know I have. In fact, I have done it for days on end, which led to months and then years.

I added yoga to the mix as well as dream interpretation and psychology. Although it is all good to dig deep into yourself and find all of your secrets, it can be a double-edged sword. Is it part of the path to enlightenment, or it is a danger to avoid?

Yoga addiction

From the start what got me into yoga was the feeling of loneliness and a special group of people to practice with to stir it all up inside me. I think we were all there for the same reason. It was an escape while I was doing it, but it led to my freedom and happiness.

I was feeling bliss as if flying, yet I was also genuinely lost and ungrounded while I was not practicing yoga. I escaped my life and reality and lived in my yoga, always moving, isolating myself more and more from friends and family into my inner world. I was obsessed to meet some end, knowing on some level that the only way to open the door to peace was through this uneasiness and drama that I created.

Stop escaping

With much strength and years I was able to get a hold of the escapist manner in which I was dealing with my life. I realized I mimicked my life in my yoga! I was able to get out of the endless loop

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How to find your true power through injury

Without yoga ability, I learned

It is through an injury which brought me over my physical edge and left me unable to do my yoga practice and function in my life, that I was able to see my true power and find my true courage!

It was as if I quickly was shown what life would be like without the blessings I currently take for granted: my capable and amazing body. Through a significant injury I questioned, in a desperate way (as if the injury could be permanent), how can it be possible for me to maintain even a basic means of living? I learned how.

Our path teaches us lessons

I knew it was my path. Our path always teaches us lessons. So I tried to see this injury was a gift and I surrendered to it...

With my neck and twist intensive yoga practice I've come to rely on periodical chiropractic neck adjustments from an amazing man—a yogi, in fact—so that I could continue to do the yoga poses which brought me to the most spiritual places that were unheard of before I learned how. They truly are the key to me.

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