Baby, You Fugly.

Most babies are cute, right? Most of them—even if you aren’t a fan of the little ones—inspire oohs and ahhs or, at least, a deepening smile from on-lookers. And I had just such an experience recently when I saw a sweet little girl in the airport. She was smiling and giggling and looking right at me with an unabashed grin of enthusiasm at meeting another human. “She’s so cute,” I said.

And then I looked at her, I mean looked right at her, and I tell you, she was ugly! Not just ugly, but really ugly; she looked like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. Big ol’ pumpkin of a head with thin straggly hair hanging over her broad forehead and big ears that stuck dramatically out to the sides. I looked at her parents, neither of whom was terribly ugly, and it seemed that she had gotten the worst traits from them both. Yet they were all just happily loving each other, a little family in the midst of a crazy airport, smiling, talking together and completely unconcerned about the busy world around them. They loved each other, it was obvious.

Baby Gollum leaned her way over to me, inch-by-inch against the row of seats. The whole way she looked at me, she just looked at me and smiled. Not a half smile or a smile of uncertainty, but a giant, ear-to-ear, drool-filled smile. 

She had no insecurity about herself or her actions. She had no fear of being rejected, no thought of what I would think of her and she definitely wasn’t concerned with how she looked. She was simply content in her own little skin, making friends with anyone who was interested. This, I thought, is what makes her so beautiful. It made me grin right back at her and even smile at her parents.

Confidence is beautiful. Confidence is sexy. Confidence can get you a job or a date. Really, it can help with anything. A friend of mine once told me a story. He was tying his boat up to dock when a confident, well-dressed man walked up to the boat next to his. As he started to untie said boat, my friend asked if he’d like help shoving off. The man said yes, they exchanged pleasantries and off they went their separate ways. Next day at the dock my friend was approached and asked if he’d seen anyone or anything unusual at the slip next to his because the boat that docked there had been stolen. Seems confidence can even get someone to help you steal a boat!

Beauty, really, occurs naturally when we truly accept and honor who we are. Sexiness is when we love ourselves so much that we are confident with how we look, even if its not the norm that society or media tells us is beautiful. (And a little reminder, societies differ in their thoughts on what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. One of my friends always says that if you begin to feel your age is making you unattractive, it would be better to spend the money on a trip to Italy—where age is thought to be beautiful and sexy—than on plastic surgery.) Nothing is a bigger turn off than someone repeatedly complaining about themselves and their problems. That makes anyone Fugly!

Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But, for a beholder to see the real you, you have to reveal the essence of who you are. Each of us has an inner uniqueness, an essence that we can’t change no matter how hard we try or how many surgeries we have. Some of us are just plain quirky. Who me? Match the color of my clothes to the mood I’m in? And sometimes change three times a day? That’s not strange. It’s just who I am. You have to have swagger enough that says Hey, world, I love who I am, take it or leave it! Actors and models have been doing this for ages. Think J. Lo’s booming posterior, Madonna’s gapped front teeth or Brooke Shields’s thick eyebrows. The quirk, when loved and preened to perfection, becomes a trademark.

To be true to your quirks and true to who you are is one of the most confidence-inducing things you can do. It is to live out your purpose here; be yourself and be happy. That’s your dharma. Most definitions of dharma include some sort of wording about right action or living a proper life. For me, the most “right” thing you can do is just happily be yourself regardless of the most demanding situation or the rudest a-hole. One of my traits, part of my essence, is I am an incredibly loving person. To live my dharma requires me to be the love-bug that I am even when some jerk cuts me off in traffic. When I react in hatred it goes against the fiber of who I am and all I’m left with is feeling terrible about myself and angry, while he drives away to cut someone else off.

What if all of us were as open as little baby Gollum? What if we stopped being so overly-concerned with what other people think of what we are doing or how we look? Wouldn’t we be more open to meet strangers and make friends? If we could be comfortable in our own skin and turn all of our scars into marks of beauty and honor them, wouldn’t we be more happy?

I know you have funny quirks and cool birth marks. I know you have traits that make you unique. I’d love to hear about them, I’d love to hear about your swagger and your dharma. What do you do that is true to you? How do you show off your marks of beauty? What makes you, well you?

Watch out for the 2 x 4!

My good friend Daryl once said to me, “Whatever is in front of you, use it.” Use it as a means to open up to something unfamiliar, uncomfortable or ignored, as a way to know yourself better, to see the world more clearly and to know what you are creating as your day-to-day experience. Whatever is before you is a mirror and an opportunity to learn. Learn regardless of the circumstance. Meditate on the metro not just on the perfect zafu. Practice yoga outside when its hot and windy not just in an environmentally controlled yoga studio. Have a conversation with a stranger instead of only people you know. The point is to learn, to grow and to enrich ourselves. Now the fun part, the creative part, the part we can manipulate and mold is how we do it.

I don't know about you but I spent years—no, decades—learning from challenge, from hardship, from suffering and sadness. I do believe that events and experiences that create distress and discomfort can be great motivators for change. When I feel like shit, there is only so much complaining I’ll do before I get off my derriere and do something about it! In fact, for many people, including me, this is the the first step on the path of personal growth.

Maybe it doesn’t resonate with you to have learned from hardship and struggle. Maybe you had a hunky-dorey childhood, two parents who loved you and each other and nary a care in the world besides doing homework and finding a great job upon graduating from a prestigious university. Ok, yes, I put on my Sarcasm Super Hero suit there for a minute. No one has a perfect life, I realize that. Everyone can remember times where they felt free and alive and everyone has experienced suffering, too.

Cancer, heart attack, death, divorce, job loss, bankruptcy, miscarriage. Suffering. That’s when we are at a crossroads, the crossroads of who we were and who we want to be. Cataclysmic events demand that we grow. Evolve and grow or stay stuck and continue to suffer.


When faced with adversity and feeling stuck, I’ve learned to ask myself, “If I had to stay stuck like this for the rest of my life, what skills, traits or characteristics would I have to cultivate in myself?” Usually the answer is the very thing I need to get me through the stuck spot and into a new version of myself.

Every time we find ourselves at the crossroads we are giving ourselves a little push to move forward. Growth is getting out of our comfort zone and it always means taking responsibility for ourselves and our feelings. We have to stop and look at the problem and notice how we feel. And then instead of the why-me’s what if we asked “What can I do differently next time?” And you ask that question again,

“If I had to stay stuck like this for the rest of my life, what skills, traits or characteristics would I have to cultivate in myself?” 

Its just another way of taking responsibility for our feelings and our reality. Of learning to deal with things differently instead of repeating the same old thing over and over again until you are pissed the hell off!

I was at that moment several years back when my inner world was cracking apart. I was at the nexus of all my issues; they were colliding inside me and I was at a crossroads. So I made a choice. Enough with this learning through hardship and suffering! Time to be responsible for my own happiness. At the crossroads I chose to learn from love, laughter, joy, peace and happiness. It was a choice, nothing more complicated than that.


Many people are used to suffering and it has become familiar and comfortable. Yet inside they struggle with feeling unhappy and, yes, they are learning, but the little voice inside their head is asking “Why is this happening to me?” If you have that voice, that question, then you are coming from a victim attitude. I know because I was too. But it doesn’t have to be that way.


Of course difficult and terrible things will continue to happen, but so will good and amazing things. Some people are obsessed with doing anything they can to avoid their feelings of discomfort and unhappiness, they are often unwilling to learn and grow on a personal level. But, the Universe has a funny way of upping the ante until we pay attention. First we get the pixie dust (you and your husband don’t seem to connect like you used to do). Then we get the magic wand (you’re irritated and aggravated by your husband because he works all the time and never comes home to have dinner with you and the kids). Next, you get the 2 x 4 (he’s having an affair). 


All the while, your body is telling you the same little parallel story. Tired leads to exhausted, leads to tense, leads to headaches, leads to migraines, leads to, well, you get the idea. Your body will show you the disharmony in its level of discomfort if you stop and pay attention. If you have pain and discomfort, whether the pixie dust or the crack of wood upside your head, you are at a crossroads. And you can acknowledge that you feel like shit and DO something about it. (Your relationship is over, use the time alone to refine what you will do differently next time and to think about what you really do want in your life, because that wasn’t it and you knew it as soon as you got sprinkled with pixie dust). 


AND you can realize you don’t have to keep feeling like shit by being a victim. You can make  dramatic changes without cataclysmic life experiences. You can make a choice or a series of small choices to learn and grow from positive experiences and still be open to learning from the challenging ones, too.



There are things we can’t control, but, (you knew I was going to say it) we can control our reactions to them. If we resist change and growth, if we resist the dynamic flux of life, which contains both challenges and love, then all we do is create disharmony. So its time to make a shift, maybe subtle, maybe huge.

Here is a practice I use to transition away from unnecessary suffering and to attract more of what I want. Of course I acknowledge the challenges and the dark stuff, they can be incredible teachers. But I start consciously looking for what I want in my life in the people, locations and things around me. When I see that amazing couple holding hands, laughing and in love, I whisper “thank you” to the Universe. “Thank you for showing me that so I know it exist and it is possible.” Thank you is what we say after we are given something for which we asked. So if you say thank you its as if you already received it, and you begin to build a new pathway to creating something positive instead of being a victim.


Whatever is in front of you, use it. But you have to look in the mirror. Are you truly happy with what you see? In what areas do you feel less than fulfilled? Where are you feeling stuck? If you had to stay like that for ever, what would you need to do or how would you need to act differently? Do you tend to learn from challenges or from love or from both? 

The Lovers, The Dreamers and Me

I’m a dreamer. I'm talking dreams at night, every night when I sleep. Big dreams, colorful dreams, dreams full of action and suspense and love and fear. I fly in my dreams, flap my “wings,” land in tree tops, soar over oceans, the whole nine yards. In one of last night’s dreams—the inspiration for this post—I found a crystal sword. The handle was wood and it joined the to the base of the crystal, which was incased in steel burnished a warm copper color. I inspected the metal and found a subtle embossing to it. There were faces of many humans there, not people I knew, but kind, friendly faces. The crystal was emerald and I laid the side of my head on it, squinted one eye closed and peered from handle to tip with the other eye. The “blade” was true. That’s it, the whole dream. And I knew, even when I was sleeping, exactly what it meant. In fact, in the next dream I was actually telling one of my dearest friends about the emerald sword.


Dreams used to have me searching endlessly for understanding, trying to interpret the complicated landscape. Nearly twenty years ago when I was going to a really wonderful psychotherapist it started to make sense. She was trained predominantly in the style of Carl Jung and a style I adapted in my own work. Jung took a stance on dreams that relates what is happening in the dream with the persons or situations in the dreamer’s real life. Unlike his mentor Sigmund Freud, who believed that dreams only related to our past, Jung saw dreams as indicators of changes in the individual and signposts to the future. He saw them as part of the process of the dreamer learning to have a more healthy relationship with his ego, one that allows for growth and evolution. 


Once I started paying attention, the relationship with my “dream self” naturally grew. I learned how my unconscious would cycle into deeper and deeper conversation with my conscious brain. There would be dark phases of my dreaming where I would not be able to remember what I was dreaming, just that I had dreamed. Then would come the phase where I could feel the emotion of the dreams, the raw feelings without much relation to anything, and no understanding at all of what it meant.  I started to recognize recurring symbols, like the ocean, which mirrored my inner emotional landscape, or certain people which stood as icons for certain eras in my life, like high school. 

All along I believed in the power of positive thinking. I would daydream, too, about what my perfect world would look like. I would set my mind to thinking about what I wanted as if I already had it and do all the Law of Attraction stuff. I would think and pray and meditate and speak only “positive” thoughts. Thoughts that coincided with the life I daydreamed about, the life I wanted as my future. I chose more carefully who I surrounded myself with, what music and news (none!) I listened to and kept my sights set on my own north star.

And I ended up exactly where and how I didn’t want to be. What the fuck?! I was angry, frustrated and unhappy. I felt trapped in a life I thought I wasn’t creating. I thought I was doing all the right things. I ate well, practiced yoga, got outside in nature, even went to therapy, but my body would ache and I felt very sad. On the outside, things looked pretty damn good, the car was clean and shiny, but under the hood, the engine was about to explode! I talked and prayed and was selective and focused on the positive ‘til the cows came home but nothing changed. So what went wrong? 

My conscious mind knew what it wanted, but my unconscious was programmed with conflicting information. And the result was stress! Stress, we all know (even the Lululemon bag says it, so it must be true!) is the cause of 99% of all illness. So what happens if on the outside we try to create the life of our dreams, but on the inside we are programmed to believe we are not worthy of it? Stress! Stress, in short, is the fight or flight mechanism activated. The hypothalamus, pituitary gland and adrenals engage and send the majority of the blood supply to the limbs to either fight or run. Meanwhile, the viscera get shunted and are strained. If we have chronic stress our organs are taxed and eventually we get sick. If we are living from this reactionary place, the place of survival, it is impossible to expand and grow no matter how bad we want to.

So, what to do? How do we get out of this strange loop? I use multiple tools. Of course, I use my dreams to uncover what is stirring in my unconscious mind. I compare that to what my conscious mind wants and see where the misalignment is. I notice who is showing up in my dreams which tells me from what era the unconscious programming originates. I also pay attention to signals from my body. When I feel stressed, run down, achey or if I have pangs in certain areas (like around my liver or low back) I know something in the present has triggered programming from my past. The stress is showing me the disagreement between what my conscious brain wants now (where I think I should be or where I want to be) and what is holding me back from it (unconscious programming that I have outgrown or doesn’t fit with my new/desired vision).

The unconscious mind is the hindbrain, the part of us that is related to survival, to reflex and instinct. It is trained through our experiences (I burned myself on that hot stove last time) and learned from our environment and parents (you are too emotional, stop crying.) Imagine driving down the freeway at 70 mph hour with one of your friends in the car. Your unconscious mind is the one that is driving the car, moving through repetition and instinct withut really having to pay that close of attention, while your conscious brain is the one having the conversation with your friend. The forebrain or conscious brain, which is the part associated with reason, choice, preference, self-awareness, etc. can direct the hindbrain to stop reacting to things unnecessarily and can reprogram it completely. Thus, the two working in tandem can relieve you of unwarranted stress and open the doorway to a life in which you want to live.

When we bring those triggers and old programs to light, when we have the courage to look at them, then we have the chance to rewrite our inner computer. I love using my dreams for this. I love being familiar with what the symbolism. I love having the free will to choose where I want to be, to live the life I dream of, not a life of survival and fear. I feel empowered to be able to reprogram the owner’s manual my family gave me and make it match my life now, not their life then. I love carrying an emerald sword, green for the color of the heart chakra, for love, abundance and growth. I love seeing all the other amazing beings—the lovers, the dreamers and me—do the same. It inspires me to no end! I love bringing light to the shadow and being blessed with the opportunity to grow and evolve, not to stay trapped in the past but to courageously make dramatic life changes and go forward, leading the way with crystal sword in hand. Has anyone seen my cape?

True Health

Every practitioner, hands down, if you asked her would tell you there is one reason why she practices yoga. Its simple, really, the reason we all practice yoga is the same. Whether it is Ashtanga, Yin, Iyengar, Bikram or any other style, we are all in it for one reason; it makes us feel good. Every person on Earth, on some level or another, wants to feel good. Whether the sense of well-being is derived from getting out of physical pain, from having a clear mind, from improved relationships or even from a toned and fit-looking body, we all want to feel good. Pan back a bit and this idea of feeling good sits in a bigger context, that of health. According to the World Health Organization health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

So how does yoga help us improve this sense of well-being and live a happier, healthier life? My pondering on this started, of course, when I wasn’t feeling healthy at all—coughing my brains out in bed with bronchitis—and wanted to get healthy again. It was then that I stumbled across the sanskrit word swastha. Swa meaning self and Stha meaning to be established or steady. So, yogically speaking, true health is to be established in your self.

What the yogis mean is to be established in the part of ourselves that is unwavering, steady and stable. This is the part of us that can observe what is happening in our lives. The part that can witness our feelings, emotions, reactions, relationships and so on, without getting caught up in the roller coaster ride of their wild pendulum swings.

All of these experiences and our ensuing emotions are constantly in flux. One thing is for certain, what you experience and feel today will definitely be different tomorrow. We gain weight, we change jobs, get married, have babies, move to a new town. This churning whirlpool of change is like a shell, an outer layer, but underneath, there is a stable part of each of us that never changes. To identify with those changing and shifting parts of ourselves as the only thing we are is to live in samsara or endless suffering, trapped in the spinning whirlpool, as it were.

We need our minds to survive in this world, to know hot vs. cold or empty streets vs. those full of speeding cars. But the mind wants to keep things the same and resists the changes we must endure if we are to live in a human body. This causes a friction, an internal battle which, if left to rage, will turn first to agitation, then to discomfort, then sickness and finally to dis-ease.

Yoga to the rescue. On the yoga mat we move and stretch, we heat our bodies and our minds begin to relax. We breathe deeply and evenly in the victorious ujjayi breath and a miraculous thing happens; we feel good! We return to the seat of the witness. We watch our minds, our reactions, our feelings and practice embracing them fully, even if they are terrible and uncomfortable and ugly. And we learn that we are NOT our minds or those uncomfortable feelings we are watching and experiencing. Instead, we establish a seat inside all of the change. We push our bodies and practice staying present to our breath and noticing the emotional reactions to things like balancing on our hands in the middle of the room or dropping over backwards from standing into a full back bend. When we learn to stay calm despite the intensity, when we stay established in the unwavering part of ourselves no matter the circumstance, then we take a seat in true health.

Remember that regular practice is a type of housecleaning. If we clean a little every day its easy to keep up with, but if we wait weeks to clean, the dust piles up and more effort is needed to get in there and make it shine. To truly shine, we must be established in ourselves. Regular and consistent practice over an extended period of time and we become a little more familiar with the inner, unchanging landscape. The more time we spend there the more established we become and the easier it is to engage in the world while still being internally rooted.

Get to your mat and practice. Practice taking the stance of the witness. Breathe deeply and watch your breathing, especially when its challenging. Watch your mind’s reactions, notice your emotions and know that you are much more than them. They are a valuable part of you and your time here, but you extend well beyond the whirlpool of change. You are a naturally vibrant and healthy being, go and be established in your self.

Taking Off My Shoes

I walk out to the concrete slab and remove my shoes. I’m not trying to keep my feet OR the concrete clean, or for that matter to make either of them dirty. Taking off my shoes as I step onto the slab represents a conscious step, one where I am listening, observing and meeting myself anew. This is a way for me to claim sacred space, to say to myself; This is important, pay attention.

What I didn’t mention about my sacred space is that its actually a helipad. There are four tie-downs embedded in the concrete and the pad is a hexagon about thirty feet across. The mounds of sand around it support healthy and wonderful smelling creosote bushes. Off to the west I hear the whirr of blades at the nearby windmill farm, a white noise, like the ocean, playing background to the calls of birds or, if I’m out late enough, coyotes. And above me is the vast, open sky. Its my very own outdoor yoga studio; walk out the front door, cross the driveway, take off my shoes.

To the owner and builder of the home it was a helipad, but as a helipad it is of no use to me. What good does it do me when I don’t own or know how to fly a helicopter? By knowing what things do and how I use them, I give them meaning and importance. By the act of removing my shoes I claim what could be useless as a meaningful and sacred space. Further, that barefooted, naked approach is a little statement I make to myself that I come open-minded, open-hearted and ready to learn.

As yogins and yoginis—whether you call yourself one or not—we strive to grow and learn by engaging ever more deeply in the world and in our relationships. We acknowledge that it is our beliefs, opinions and our ensuing actions that help us define the very world and relationships with which we are engaging. It is our beliefs and opinions that help us to see what is important or sacred to us and for what we have no use at all. And to make it more interesting, everything is always changing and evolving and so, too, must our opinions, beliefs and interactions with the world.

What follows is to examine the very source of our beliefs and opinions. Where do they originate? Are they the product of our society or our religion? Or a rebellion against them? Could they be from the owner’s manual that our parents were using that clearly doesn’t fit this newer model? Are they truly ours, gleaned from observing the world, our experiences and from times of deep reflection?

Often our personal identity, according to poet David Whyte, “is actually more of a function of our ability to pay attention to the world around us.” As we look out into the world we determine what is sacred and what is useless, what is important to us and what doesn’t really matter. When we look at  at our experiences and all those things which seem to be separate or different than ourselves, we define what we are not, thereby, in some way, defining what we ARE a little better.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you begin taking your shoes off everywhere and acting like everything is just as sacred as everything else. We all know that just plain isn’t true. Would a composting, stinking trash dump be a sacred place from which to serve your finest meal? I don’t think so. But I am suggesting that you start paying better attention. Pay better attention to what is meaningful to you, to what your beliefs, opinions and even preferences are. Notice if they are, in fact, true to who you are and what you want today. Pay better attention to how you interact with things and people so you can refine your view of the world. Pay better attention to the part of you that is having all these emotions, experiences and opinions so that you may better know yourself.

One of the ancient yoga texts, the Shiva Sutras, reminds us that “The senses are spectators.” When we use our senses fully to pay attention, we can spectate rather than get caught up in the drama of our unfolding universe and our reactions to it. Our beliefs and opinions are refined by our ability to pay attention, by re-defining who we are and what matters to us in each moment. This state is a paradox of both feeling our feelings more deeply and simultaneously knowing that we are NOT our feelings, but something much greater than them. From this clearer view of ourselves, one that isn’t muddied by our emotions, we start to notice that certain places, people and actions seem more sacred to us than others (as they should!) And whether we are on a helipad barefoot or not, we begin to see that we, too, are sacred, and that we have the courage to pay attention and reveal that naked and vulnerable part of ourselves that is always learning and growing.

Polishing the Mirror

I keep coming back to yoga as relationship and as the mirror in which we can see our reflection more clearly. When I say relationship I don’t just mean with a lover or a sibling, or any specific person. And, more to the point, it isn’t even about the other person. It is about the way in which we relate to anyone or anything that is before us. And even more specifically it is about how that relating reveals our own true essence.

Whether we are relating to a friend who asks for help or to our car that just blew a tire, the way in which we respond or relate to a situation is the relational side of yoga to which I am referring. These people and experiences act like mirrors because they elicit a response from us. Through the reflection of how we react and respond we can better see who we are. I’m not suggesting that there is a right or wrong way to respond nor that we will always have some simple, peaceful, centered reaction to everything. I would hope that if we won the lottery and if someone near to us passed away we’d have completely different reactions to those two experiences. I am, however, suggesting that how we respond and react is an excellent way to better step into relationship with oursleves.

Who and what we are relating to, what is going on around us, even our feelings and reactions are always in flux. Seasons come and go, breaths rise and fall, careers start and end, even our bodies change daily based on simple things like food and sleep. With so much always in evolution, how then do we know exactly at what we are looking in this mirror of life? How do we know who we truly are when so much is always changing?

The experiences and the ever-changing scenarios of the world are sign posts that point to our Truth. Often we find ourselves stuck staring dully at the sign post—getting caught up in the emotion and drama of our reactions—and forgetting that the sign is pointing to something much, much deeper. Through yoga we practice seeing the changes as part of our transformation and refinement, but also we look beneath them. We train our eyes to see the beauty in it all, we train our hearts to feel the connectivity between seemingly separate experiences and we train our minds to know the unwavering Presence that sits as the foundation of it all. When we practice looking at our experiences and relationships in this way, then we begin to see the outer fluctuations as well as the inner Truth. We can distinguish the two from each other and begin to know that though we have feelings and emotions they are not who we are, and though we have experiences and hobbies, they are not our identity. And so through the practice we polish the mirror and start to see ourselves more clearly.

On our yoga mats, the poses can always lead us both to the rich ever-changing texture as well as to the stillness underneath the flow. We practice a whole slew of poses, we re-visit them frequently and yet they feel different every time. We change and the poses reflect that our bodies are changing too. The poses offer a chance to bump up against our tight spots, sore muscles, injuries, fatigue and the accompanying emotions and thoughts that correlate. In the process of feeling those edges and having time to self-reflect we go deeper into our very center. When we meet this center the object to which these life-experience-signposts are pointing is revealed.

Another means to polishing the mirror and seeing ourselves more clearly is the oft forgotten limb of yoga that is the hallowed ground of meditation. We close our eyes and sit still so that all that change and flux can be felt and we can learn to differentiate between them and the vast other part of ourselves that is stable and unwavering. The world beyond our closed eyes continues to go on and to change—we are not trying to stop it—and we learn to look within and become familiar with the still and quiet part of ourselves. This is the part that exists in unconditional love, that can sit back and witness our reactions and our feelings without judgement, that can see the beauty in any situation and can surrender into the change and even learn to enjoy the process

Relationships of Yoga

These days I am more and more coming into the awareness of yoga as relationship. We start with the premise that everything is alive with sacred energy and so the yoga becomes about engaging consciously with what is around us. We enter into relationship with whatever is before us and a triad is born; you, me and the space between us. It is this mid-line or center space that is the doorway to deeper connection and the true yoga. The question, then, is never are we doing yoga, but how are we doing yoga?

I find myself stepping into that center and my response varies. The mid-line is always shifting and sometimes it is elusive, while other times it seems to smack me in the face. Sometimes I am patient with the process and sometimes I am frustrated because it makes no sense at all to my linear and rational mind. In either case I always find that a return to my mat makes me feel exponentially better. And this is the deeper seed of why we keep coming back. Over and over we step into relationship with the poses and the practice and we uncover more about ourselves. Yoga becomes a reflection, a mirror of what is in our hearts.

What I know about myself is that I love to laugh and that I also take things too seriously sometimes. I am clear and then completely confused. I am full of love and then frustrated to the point of anger. And to all of this yoga has taught me to say “yes.” Yoga has led me into deeper relationship with myself, where I see my contrasting emotions and the sweet space between them where I am a human being instead of a human doing. In this reflection, I see the unwavering essence that sits in the mid-line and I experience union. A glimpse, and then practice to make that revelation more frequent, more consistent.

Know that when we engage mindfully in what is before us, it helps us to see that beautiful space of the center. When we look to our own center we always have the opportunity to see ourselves with love. The center will likely be filled with contrasting emotions and maybe even conflicting feelings, and yoga would have us honor them as part of the texture of the relationship with ourselves. As Rumi said, “Go there and roam.”