Your Brain On Mindfulness

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An 8-week course to help you dissolve stress.

My friend and fellow-teacher Rachel Posner is going to be offering her incredible course Your Brain on Mindfulness: 8 Weeks to Dissolve Stress, Build Resilience and Thrive. I love Rachel’s work. She’s an incredible teacher, really knows her stuff, and I think will get a great course if you register.

Rachel and her family just spent two years in Spain during the same time that me and my family were living in France. Rachel and I even did a workshop about reducing stress for the holidays together.

I wanted to help her spread the word about her course and would encourage you to take a look.

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Your Brain on Mindfulness: 8 Weeks to Dissolve Stress, Build Resilience and Thrive

A course by Rachel Posner

This is the online course for people who want to permanently reduce stress.

Launches on September 28th, 2020

Register before Saturday and type earlybird  when it asks you if you have a coupon and get $200 off!

Does This Sound Familiar?

I often feel stressed and overwhelmed.

I lose patience with myself and my friends and family more than I want to admit.

I beat myself up for not being or doing “enough”.

I know there’s a lot of good in my life and a ton to be grateful for, but I’m too stressed to pay attention to any of it.

You deserve to feel calm, present and happy in your life. Your Brain on Mindfulness is what you've been looking for.

Your Brain on Mindfulness is a comprehensive online course designed to completely shift your relationship to the stressors in your life. We'll work with evidence-based practices that help you feel calm, even when life is chaotic. These mindfulness techniques will create lasting change and support you in feeling more calm, present and happy.

Your Brain on Mindfulness

• www.rachelposner.com

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Your Brain on Mindfulness: 8 Weeks to Dissolve Stress, Build Resilience and Thrive by Rachel Posner

Buy for $695

Buy for 2 payments of $350

Your Brain on Mindfulness: 8 Weeks to Dissolve Stress, Build Resilience and Thrive

This is the online course for people who want to permanently reduce stress.

Launches on September 28th, 2020

Are you ready to find calm amidst the chaos?

Make Real Change

Commit to your own well-being

Enroll Now

Does This Sound Familiar?

• I often feel stressed and overwhelmed.

• I lose patience with myself and my friends and family more than I want to admit.

• I beat myself up for not being or doing “enough”.

• I know there’s a lot of good in my life and a ton to be grateful for, but I’m too stressed to pay attention to any of it.

You deserve to feel calm, present and happy in your life. Your Brain on Mindfulness is what you've been looking for.

Your Brain on Mindfulness is a comprehensive online course designed to completely shift your relationship to the stressors in your life. We'll work with evidence-based practices that help you feel calm, even when life is chaotic. These mindfulness techniques will create lasting change and support you in feeling more calm, present and happy.

"It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it."

- Hans Selye

Lots of people teach classes to help you relax. Relaxation techniques are definitely important, but they’re not enough.

I’ve spent the last 20 years helping people reduce stress and be more happily engaged in their lives and I know what it takes to truly change your stress response. If you want to create lasting change, you need to approach stress from a variety of angles.

The solution isn’t to get rid of stressors, but to change the way we respond and relate to those stressors.
I’ll teach you techniques to rewire your brain to handle stress differently so that you stop paying so much attention to what isn’t working and instead focus on what’s already great in your life. 

Truly the nicest thing I’ve done for myself in this lifetime.

"Your Brain on Mindfulness was like a curated tour through my brain that allowed me to stop and re-wire synapses along the way. Rachel’s presence created a safe place for me to laugh, cry, discover and nurture my best self. Truly the nicest thing I’ve done for myself in this lifetime."

Corbin / Musician

Have you said any of these things lately?

• I yelled at my daughter in the grocery store yesterday and then felt totally embarrassed and ashamed.

• I’m burned out and I’m tired of taking care of everyone else. What about me?

• Lately I feel nervous or even scared for no good reason.

• If one more person tells me to take a deep breath, I’m going to scream.

• I feel like nothing I do is good enough.

• I really wish I hadn’t said that to my husband last night. I just lose my temper so quickly and it’s like I don’t have control over what comes out of my mouth.

• I just can’t catch up. It feels like there is never enough time in a day. 

• On a stress scale of 1-10, I wake up at a 3 or 4 and by the time I get to work, I’m already at a 5 or 6.

• I’m just not as patient as I used to be.

• I feel like I’m always behind and can never catch up.

• I’m so tired all the time. I’m always up late trying to get stuff done but when I lay down, I either can’t fall asleep or I can’t stay asleep. It seems like as soon as I close my eyes, there are a stream of worries bombarding me.

"No matter how educated or wealthy you are if you don’t have peace of mind, you won’t be happy."

-Dalai Lama

Find more ease in your life

We all have stressors in our lives - in fact stress is at an all time high and America ties for #4 on the list of the worlds most stressed-out nations. In other words, our exposure to stress isn't going to change. But how we experience that stress can change. The practices in this course will help you:

Feel Calmer

• Decrease your stress and anxiety levels 

• Feel safer and more at peace

• Breath better

• Wake up in the morning feeling more rested and less stressed

• Be less reactionary and have more control over you temper

• Stay calm even when life gets intense or chaotic

Feel More Compassionate

• Take better care of yourself

• Feel less self-judgement and self-doubt 

• Feel more self-compassion and self-confidence

• Be more patient with yourself and others

• Feel more compassionate and less angry towards others

• Feel less “burn-out” - drained by the pain of others and the state of the world

Feel More Joyful

• Feel more connected to yourself and others

• Notice life’s small but beautiful moments throughout the day

• Pay more attention to what is wonderful about your life and focus on nourishing and growing what you love.

• Embrace all of it!

By decreasing stress we are able to grow what we love about our lives and change what no longer serves us.

Rachel’s offerings are an indelible resource to longtime practitioners as well as the newbie.

"Rachel’s course synthesized information for me in a way that made complex and challenging material accessible. Her depth of knowledge shines through experiential activities thoughtfully assembled and presented with warmth and authenticity. Rachel’s offerings are an indelible resource to longtime practitioners as well as the newbie." 

Steve / Psychotherapist

Join Me

Enjoy learning from the comfort of your own home.

Enroll Now

So how do we do it?

How do you embrace your life so that you can both address your stressors and challenges head-on AND keep growing what’s already good? The answer is not one-size fits all.
Sometimes we need to build our stores of self-compassion, sometimes, we need to work with practices that take us out of our fight/flight/freeze response and calm our nervous system and sometimes we need to track the underlying patterns that got us here in the first place.

Your Brain on Mindfulness is a unique approach to mindfulness that takes YOUR mind/body/brain into account. You’ll explore a comprehensive range of practices that will help you gain understanding and perspective so that you can get grounded, build resilience and thrive!

Rachel Posner MA, C-IAYT, ERYT-500

This course is the culmination of my 20 years of teaching yoga, practicing yoga therapy and counseling, and designing and guiding wellness courses and retreats. 

With so many courses out there, what makes this one different?

1. I excel at taking complicated information from yoga, mindfulness, neuroscience and psychology, and presenting them to you in a way that is easily digestible and actionable.
   
   
   

2. I’ve created a unique blend of evidence-based practices that will rewire your brain to handle stress differently so that you can focus on growing states of calm, presence and joy.
   
   
   

3. You’ll learn the “why” and “how” of the practices. When you understand why a practice works, it increases your belief and confidence in the practice itself. The mind is extremely powerful and studies show that when we believe in something, it works better. YOUR understanding and belief in the practice will make it more effective and the change more significant and long lasting.
   
   
   

4. I’ve been teaching this course live for years and can say with absolute confidence that it works!

Curriculum

Module 1

Your Brain on Mindfulness:The Big Picture

Module 2

Finding Your Center:
Practices To Turn Off Your Fight / Flight Response

Module 3

Deep Calm: 
Reversing The Negative Effects Of Stress 

Module 4

Self Awareness:
Grounding In The Power Of YOU

Module 5

Self-Care:
The Art Of Paying Attention

Module 6

Compassion:
The Neural Networks that Build Happiness

Module 7

From Compassion to Optimism:
The Neuroplasticity Of A Cup 1/2 Full

Module 8

Where Do We Go From Here?

What does it look like?

• Every Monday morning you'll receive a new module filled with the exact lessons, tools and practices you need to start changing the way you deal with stress.

• You'll receive additional emails throughout the week with reflection questions, poems, articles, bonus practices and inspirations.

• Online does not mean unsupported. Through office hours and email support, a private facebook group, live chats and optional add-on sessions I'll be here to guide you through the process. 

I am full of gratitude to Rachel for being my mentor, my guide and my brain’s best advocate.

"I have enjoyed the physical and psychological benefits of a yoga practice for over a decade, but it was Rachel Posner’s “Your Brain on Mindfulness” class which brought into sharper focus, the latest neuroscience research available to enhance my practice, calm my mind and enlighten my interactions in the world. Rachel shared the latest scientific evidence showing how one can actually create new “grooves in the brain” to interact in this increasingly chaotic world in a more complete, calm and healthy manner. Through examination of the research, class interaction and practice, Rachel shared how it is possible to consciously change our brains through meditation and mindfulness in order to create a more open, accepting, positive and joyful frame of mind. I am full of gratitude to Rachel for being my mentor, my guide and my brain’s best advocate."

Sally / Retired Librarian

Is this course really for you?

Changing your relationship to stress takes commitment. If you don’t think you are ready to carve out time each day this is not the course for you. I recommend you:

• Take 15-20 minutes a day to explore mindfulness meditation practices.

• Turn practice into action by consistently implementing what you are learning throughout your day with 3-5 minutes "practice pauses".

I want to be clear that without actually practicing these techniques, you won’t likely see results. Please make sure that you are at a time in your life that you want and are ready to commit to a regular mindfulness practice, so that you can create the changes you desire.  

REFUND POLICY

I believe this course is highly effective and am committed to offering you with a valuable and positive experience. That said, I know that it may not be for everyone. Therefore a full refund is available if you notify me via email, rachel@rachelposner.com by October 5. After that deadline no refunds will be permitted. No exceptions. Before requesting a refund, please go through the module 1 lessons and practices to ensure that this course is not the right fit for you.

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Register before Saturday and type earlybird  when it asks you if you have a coupon and get $200 off!

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Mediation Under the Microscope: How to Change the World

Today on our walk home from the playground, I told my toddler that we are going to celebrate New Years in a few days. He me asked what New Years is and I told him that it’s kinda like the earth celebrating her birthday. “Papa,” he asked, “how does the earth eat cake and what does she want for her birthday?” I told him that the earth doesn’t mind if we eat cake on her behalf and that what she wants for her birthday is for us all to be more mindful. The earth wants us to meditate.

But let’s get real for a second—can meditation really make a difference in the world?

I know that those of us who are rationalists or scientifically-minded might be thinking that navel gazing is not going to solve the world’s problems. So I’d like to share a little bit of what the science says about how meditation can make a real difference in the world. It’s important to remember that first and foremost, science and meditation have the same purpose: both are simply methods of inquiry. Neither is designed to “prove” anything but rather to practice observing. Both practices point us toward our ground of Being, that of Awareness itself. But Awareness can change the world and many scientists have shown how.

In one such carefully controlled scientific experiment in Washington D.C., a group of meditators were shown to reverse the violent crime trend in the area by 23%. They wanted to show how easy it is to reduce crime and social stress by using meditation. The regular trend toward violent crime resumed after their meditation. These scientists weren’t alone. About 40 earlier studies already showed how meditation could create more coherence in society. Their aim in doing this D.C. study was to show key government officials and lawmakers the power that meditation can have to change the world. Citation

As scientists have continued to study this phenomenon of affecting the outside world through meditation, they have learned that the benefits come more from the quality of meditation rather than the quantity of meditators or time meditating. More focused meditation = better results

So how does that work? How can one, seemingly autonomous thing possibly affect another? Ancient wisdom may give us a clue. Perhaps you’ve heard the ancient Hermetic phrase, “As above, so below.” This same ancient wisdom is also contained in the Gayatri Mantra, a mantra contained within the ancient Vedic text, the Rig Veda, dating back to about 5 thousand years ago. The Gayatri Mantra states quite succinctly that everything comes from Source and we if truly understood this we would see that we are no different than the thing we seek. We are all a part of everything else and that one part of the world and Universe effects another.

Me and my twin brother, Chris, at my wedding, 2014.

In science, this principle is known as quantum entanglement. Dr. Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva conducted an experiment where they split a photon in two (a photon is an elementary particle which makes up the electromagnetic field atoms) and sent the now two different photons to different labs which were 14 miles apart. When they manipulated one photon in one lab, the other photon 14 miles away acted precisely in the same way as its twin, showing that it was still energetically linked even though it was in a different location.

And as a human twin, someone who was once one egg and split into two, I personally can tell you many fascinating stories that all could be chalked up to “quantum entanglement.”

In more ways than we might think, we are all like twins, like these photons, separate beings originating from the same egg, the same source. We all have the power to affect everything else that was also originated by that Source. Science is catching up with ancient wisdom that teaches us that changing the outer world depends on how we hold our inner world. Truly we must become the very thing we wish to see change in the world. Perhaps one of the modern world’s greatest authorities on changing the world, Mahatma Gandhi, said:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

But what if our inner world isn’t leading us toward a better self or a better world? If history teaches us anything, it’s that it repeats itself. Many of the negative things that happen in the world are the product of individuals and nations continually reacting mindlessly to global events with fear, anger, and selfishness. While these are all natural, human qualities, we do have the power to wield other natural but more-elevated qualities like compassion in order to respond to these same events.

To respond mindfully means to act from a grounded place of observation, often with compassion, and without reactive judgement about it. This does not mean being passive; quite the opposite. And at crucial times when it is our responsibility to respond powerfully to important world events— like climate change, dramatic political polarization, hegemony, and massive unequal distribution of wealth— we may do so from a place of grounded compassion and not from a reactive place of anger or fear, in order to break the cycle of negative reactiveness.

The first order of operations for any individual to respond positively to world events, is to first practice personal responsiveness by simply learning to draw inward and mediate. Before they can positively affect the world outside, they must do so inside. “As above, so below.” One individual can change the world and meditation can help break the vicious cycle of repeating negative events and can change the world.

This New Year, let’s give the earth a marvelous birthday gift. Let’s change the world for the better by changing ourselves for the better through meditation. Start meditating today and practice responding to personal and global events from a place of grounded and compassionate responsiveness. Together we can change the world for the better!

31-Day Meditation Challenge

I truly believe in meditation and I consider it one of my most important missions in life to invite you to be your best self through the power of meditation. So, to make meditating fun and accessible I’m offering a 31-Day Meditation Challenge during the month of January. The challenge is to simply meditate at any time that works for you during the day, for 15 minutes a day, every day for 31 days. Many people have taken this challenge and have extended it to 60 days and even 6 months.

For the novice meditator, I’ll give you plenty of guides and even guided meditations you can follow all month through emails and a support page on my website full of articles, recordings, and helpful links. For the experienced meditator, just do what you normally do but by joining our group you’ll be part of a cyber sangha. Either way, I’ll be giving you regular support and encouragement throughout the month. We will even have the chance to meditate together with some live, online meditation sessions.

The challenge costs $31 and as an incentive to finish it, for everyone who succeeds, you will have the option to get 100% of your tuition refunded to you. Dead serious. Many people have even recruited their family and friends to enroll to create their own meditation tribe for added support and accountability.

Join me!

Sankalpa: Being Known By The Universe Through Our Desires

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I'm so excited!!!!!!!

My new book, Practical Yoga Nidra, hits the shelves December 10th. That's like in 5 days! This is really a dream come true for me. I'm really proud of this book and I can't wait to share it with you.
The following is an excerpt from my book. My book offers a simple, 10-step guide to developing a Yoga Nidra practice, one that will help you reduce stress, improve sleep, and restore your spirit.

Preorder your book on Amazon ($12.99) by clicking on the photo and I’ll give you a FREE live, online Yoga Nidra class ($12 value).

Enjoy this excerpt and let me know what you think about the concept of Sankalpa and intentions. Keep in mind that though I’m writing about setting your intention for a Yoga Nidra practice, the practice of Sankalpa could be used for starting a yoga practice, meditation, or any project or goal.

Also, in my upcoming volume of Yoga Nidra recordings (available in a few weeks), I’ll have an entire practice dedicated to using Yoga Nidra, and in particular the use of Sankalpa, or intention setting, as a deeply mindful way of helping you to visualize your goals to make them into a reality.

Step 1 of the 10-Step Method is to set your intention. Sankalpa is a Sanskrit word that could most simply be translated as your intention. However, the practice of choosing your Sankalpa is a bit more entailed than merely stating your intention for your Yoga Nidra practice. Your Sankalpa is like a personal mantra or a statement of truth that you repeat in your mind as you begin your Yoga Nidra practice. I encourage you to sincerely consider your Sankalpa each time you begin a Yoga Nidra practice. If there’s something big in your life you feel you need, your Sankalpa could be the same each time. However try to picture what specifically you need today in relationship to that desire. In other words, don’t get stuck in the past with a Sankalpa that is outdated for you.

To choose your Sankalpa, it’s best to pause for a moment, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and become present by opening to your senses. Then reflect for a brief few seconds about what you need most in your life in the moment. Your Sankalpa might be for something practical and physical, something emotional, or something spiritual. You may even set an intention for the well-being of another person or whole group of people. Your Sankalpa doesn’t even have to be about what you want but rather maybe for the ability to articulate a recognition, appreciation, or gratitude for what you already have. It’s important that your Sankalpa is as short a sentence or phrase as possible. This helps you to gain clarity on what you really need or want. When choosing your Sankalpa, be positive, specific, and be present.

First, be positive. The Universe is one big, eternal yes. It’s inviting you to merge into its path of awakening to a complete understanding of this positivity and this yes. Yoga Nidra is about aligning with your True Nature and you can begin this essential alignment by choosing a Sankalpa that reflects this Universal positivity.

When choosing a Sankalpa, focus on what you want rather what you want to avoid. I heard one of my teachers, Judith Lasater, say, “What is worrying but praying for what you don’t want?” I grew up in Utah where everyone mountain bikes in the summer and skis in the winter. Coaches in both sports teach beginners to look where they want to go rather than where the don’t want to go. It’s incredible how focusing on something, good or bad, brings about its realization.

The next consideration in choosing your Sankalpa is specificity. Being specific paints a bullseye for the Universe to aim for. Make your Sankalpa one short sentence. Choose the exact thing you want rather than sweeping generalities. Once, a friend in her 20s asked the Universe for a car. Her intention was to own something with an automatic transmission and a sun roof. A week later, her family inherited a Lincoln town car that indeed had both automatic transmission and a sunroof but smelled like an ashtray, was 12 feet long, and probably older than she was. She drove that car gratefully but was sure that the next time she made her automotive intentions known to the Universe, she was sure to add that she wanted something a bit more sporty and hip.

Lastly, when choosing your Sankalpa, it’s essential to be present. The part of you that you’re communicating your Sankalpa to only understands the present. Past and future are abstract concepts regulated by different parts of your brain and being. When making your Sankalpa speak to what is rather than what isn’t. This means formulating something you’re searching for in present terms and focusing on where you’re at, what you have, and who you are now in relationship to where you wish to go.

Here are a few samples of Sankalpas that you can modify to help you create your Sankalpa that is positive, specific, and present:

• “I’m on my road to ___________.”
  
  
  
  

• “I already have everything inside of me that I need for ___________.”
  
  
  
  

• “The Universe is ready to give me __________.”

What This Practice Does for You 

Your Sankalpa acts as a guiding star for how your journey of Yoga Nidra will unfold, what kind of awareness will be revealed, and which layers will be removed which obfuscate your ability to experience your True Self.

When you state your Sankalpa, you plant a living seed of spirit, hope, and desire inside your mind and heart as a clear and direct invitation to the Universe to reveal to you your true identity through that intention. Your Yoga Nidra practice cultivates the fertile soil for your seed of Self-Awareness to grow and bloom.

The beautiful and ancient Gayatri Mantra is one of the oldest mantras we know of and comes from the Rig Veda, part of a body of texts called the Vedas dating between 1700–1100 BCE. The Gayatri Mantra teaches how stating your Sankalpa before your Yoga Nidra practice works to help manifest that thing. The Gayatri Mantra states:

oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ suvaḥ
tatsaviturvareṇyaṃ
bhargo devasyadhīmahi
dhiyo yo naḥ prachodayāt

My favorite translation of this mantra from Donna Farhi goes something like:

Everything on the earth and in the sky and in between
Is arising from one effulgent source
If my thoughts, words, and deeds reflected a complete understanding of this unity
I would be the peace I am seeking in this moment.

As this mantra says, if I understood the essence of all things—including myself and the thing I want—I’d understand that everything comes from the same source. Ultimately, I’d see that I’m no different than the thing I want.

While this is nice to understand on a philosophical level, it will most likely take a lifetime of practice (or more lives if there are more to be had) to truly understand this truth. Yoga Nidra is a perfect way to practice coming to understand this truth, by aligning with our magnificent Source.

According to Yoga Nidra philosophy, everything in the Universe is boiled down to Awareness. When you align with your basic Awareness through presence, Yoga Nidra being my favorite way to practice presence, you align with the origin of all things, including you and including those things you feel separate from. Remember, Yoga Nidra is about remembering and experiencing our fundamental wholeness. This is why this is considered a practice of yoga or “yoking” together of all things.

Your Sankalpa speaks to the eternal part of you that isn’t dependent upon past or future. Therefore, planting the seed of Sankapla in your heart and mind is like planting iris bulbs in the fall—they bloom in the spring whether you remember planting them or not. Because your Sankalpa works for your benefit whether you remember it or not, it’s essential that we be mindful and deliberate when choosing a Salkalpa.

The practice of Yoga Nidra is simply about being present. Starting your Yoga Nidra practice with your Sankalpa makes you very present by first, taking a moment to recognize your needs and second, by alerting the Universe how to best awaken you to your ultimate Awareness. You do this by practicing Awareness and an understanding that you are no separate from what you seek.

It reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem,” where the artist meditates on how through our perceived brokenness or sense of lack, we come to understand our own wholeness and illumination. We aren’t perfect despite our brokenness but because of it. Stating our Sankalpa is alerting to ourselves and the Universe the avenue by which we are coming to know ourselves as perfect, whole beings.

I'd like to share with you the powerful Yoga Nidra practice we had last week during our live, online Yoga Nidra practice. It's is a practice that is designed to develop your Sankalpa, your powerful intention and manifestation to the Universe for whatever you feel you need in your life right now.

It's about 21 minutes long. I hope you love it. Tell me what you think.

Also, you can click below to join this week's class on Sunday, December 8 at 9 am MST. This class theme is : You Are Bigger Than Your Beliefs

How To Improve Your Sleep Naturally Without Medication

The following is a guest post by author Dylan Foster

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Photo by Pixabay

We all know that sleep is good for us. In fact, Mayo Clinic states the average adult needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. During those hours, our REM cycle helps process the events of the day. Lack of sleep, on the other hand, can contribute to issues such as heart disease and diabetes.

You do have several options for combating sleeplessness. Prescription medications can help; however, they also come with their side effects. Sleeping pills can be highly addictive, and even those who aren’t addicted may experience side effects, which are enhanced with alcohol consumption.

Here are some natural ways to improve your — and your health — without the use of prescription meds.

Upgrade Your Bed

If you’ve been sleeping on the same mattress for several years now, it might be time for a new one. On average, you should change your mattress every 10 years. After that, it can contribute to aches, pains, and generally poor sleep.

Before investing in a new mattress, it can help to determine what type of sleeper you are. By understanding your sleeping habits, you can put your money to good use on the best mattress to support your quality of sleep.

For instance, if you sleep on your back or stomach, look for a versatile mattress can provide you with the necessary support you need. You should sink into the mattress just enough to feel comfortable, but not enough to misalign your spine or cause tossing and turning throughout the night. Along those same lines, side sleepers can benefit from choosing pillows that support the head and neck.

Learn the incredible practice of Yoga Nidra, the Yoga of Sleep

Another comfort concern is what you put on your mattress. If you’re trying to sleep on scratchy, sweaty sheets, you can still end up tossing and turning. With that in mind, ensure you top it with well-chosen bedding. You might need linen sheets in summertime, and flannel in winter. Choose according to your comfort and the season for the best results.

Exercise

Even if you have a fairly new, comfortable mattress, you may still struggle to fall asleep. That’s where exercise can help. As little as a half-hour of moderate aerobic exercise— like swimming, running, or cycling— can help improve your sleep that same night.

However, in certain individuals, exercise signals the body that it’s time to wake up. If you find that exercise increases your insomnia rather than decreasing it, make sure you end your workouts at least two hours before hitting the bed.

If you need a gentler form of movement, yoga, especially Yoga Nidra, can improve your sleeping habits. Yoga Nidra, in particular, is known for improving sleep habits and can help you feel well-rested.

If you have a tough time maintaining your fitness routine, you can use a fitness tracker or smartwatch to monitor your progress and make exercising more enjoyable. These gadgets can count the steps you take and the calories you burn and can even monitor your heart rate. Some even feature emergency SOS, fall detection, an altimeter, and a heart rate sensor.

Eating Habits

Although your eating habits might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of treating your insomnia, what you put into your body is crucial. Getting proper health and nutrition can benefit not only your waistline but also your level of shuteye.

To improve your sleep, try to eat a balanced diet consisting of plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. When it comes to protein, choose options that are low in fat and high in vitamins. Some healthy choices include fish, poultry, lean meats, dairy, and eggs. Mood-boosting foods like kale, spinach, quinoa, and avocados are also nutritious options. Additionally, avoid drinking alcohol if you can. If you do choose to drink alcohol, try to have your beverage earlier in the day, so it’s less likely to interfere with your sleeping cycle.

If you’re having trouble getting to the root cause of your sleeplessness, it might be helpful to start a daily journal. Write down your experiences or use an app to provide clues into what could be triggering your lack of shuteye. Anything from eating a meal right before bed, to taking certain medications, or feeling anxious at night could be the culprit.

Consider sharing your journal with your doctors and other medical professionals to help manage your care. Once you know what’s causing your symptoms, you can take steps to improve your quality of sleep.

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Luxury Yoga Retreat at a Bordeaux Château. “Savor Your Life!” June 2020

Nice to Be Back: A Return Trip from Hell

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Photo by Alex Adams

I’m sitting at a park in Nice having just arrived home on Wednesday after the a return trip from hell.

I left for Salt Lake City airport at 8:30 am Monday morning and didn’t arrive in Nice for another 42 hours. I had 4 legs of the journey (I know, the added price of a cheap airline ticket is the pain-in-the-ass tax) My second leg was delayed significantly—I had to hang at Oakland International for 12 hours! From Oakland I flew to Stockholm and was able to catch an earlier flight toward my next connection in Copenhagen in the stretched out saga to get back to my loves in Nice but the airline had scheduled me to land and catch my next flight with only 15 minutes to get from one gate to the next and the gate was all the way across to the other side of the airport. I landed in Copenhagen, rushed off the plane and sprinted like an airport olympian. I made it to the gate in record time but nonetheless got there right as the plane was scheduled to depart. They’d closed the boarding and even though the plane was sitting there, staring at me smugly through the window, they wouldn’t let me board. Then, to add insult to injury, they said that the next flight to Nice wasn’t until the following day and that I’d have to spend the night in Copenhagen. Then, if this weren’t bad enough, they didn’t know where my bag was so I had to go to the hotel without a change of clothes or my toothbrush.

And as I was walking through the Copenhagen airport, tired and cranky, I reminded myself over and over the essential lesson I learned from Lionel Richie which is, “I don’t need to have an opinion about this. It’s all just information. I’ll just make the situation worse by complaining about it. Just do whatever you need to in order to get to the hotel.” Once I got the the airline fix-it desk, they had a hotel voucher waiting for me, they had arranged a taxi ride both to the hotel and back to the airport for me, and had given me a meal voucher. When I got to the hotel I was pleased that it was lovely and before long, I was relaxing in a nice, quiet, and comfortable room having showered and lounging in bed with room service and Netflix. I thought to myself, I’d rather be snuggling with my loves in Nice but I gotta say, as a consolation, this really isn’t bad. I turned off the lights and sank into an incredibly soft bed in a wonderfully quiet room.

The change of timezones caused me to wake up at 4 am feeling rested and alert and I enjoyed the quiet of the morning with a very centering 30-minute meditation. I’m in the middle of my 30-day meditation challenge and I’m loving the ritual of a daily meditation. After another shower, coffee, and breakfast, I decided to go on a walk through Copenhagen before I took a taxi back to the airport. I immediately fell in love with Copenhagen. The early-autumn morning was cool and crisp having rained much of the night before. To me it looked like everyone had just walked out of the European equivalent of an Eddie Bower magazine. And one of the things that struck me was the bike lanes teaming with cyclists on their way to work. People were friendly and polite and my walk completely set my mood for my final flight back to Nice.

Despite rush hour traffic, I got the airport in plenty of time. The Copenhagen airport has got to be the friendliest, cleanest, most modern and civilized airports in the world. Have you been there? The security lines were quick, automated, and efficient and the personnel were all smiles and courtesy, a stark contrast to the TSA in the Oakland airport who barked orders at the long lines of doe-eyed travelers. After going through security, which was decidedly a pleasant experience, I had plenty of time to wander around the airport. This airport was lovely! If I lived in Copenhagen, I would almost want to buy an airplane ticket somewhere just so I could have an excuse to hang out at the airport, it was that nice.

I got on my last flight without issue and landed in Nice. It was so great to get back. Funny how even though I’ve only lived in Nice for 8 months it felt so much like coming home when I saw that beautiful coastline and azure waters out of the airplane window. As I stepped off the plane, I was met with warm and slightly humid air and I took a fat breath in followed by a sigh of relief. They had found my bag and I was grateful for that. I jumped on the tram and it made for a very easily trip to our apartment. Seneca and Elio met me at the tram stop and as soon as I stepped off Elio saw me at ran, jumped in my arms and held on tight and didn’t let go for several minutes. We had a lovely 3-way hug for a long wile, reuniting and kissing and loving each other. I’d been gone for almost 5 weeks, waaay too long, and it was such a beautiful reunion.

We changed apartments since I left for the states and Sen and Elio took me back to our new digs and showed me around. It’s small and quaint but works great for our family. It’s in a part of town we love and we’re quite happy there.

The weather is lovely in Nice, in the mid-70s and sunny. Sen made us a lovely lunch of salad and lentil soup and after we strolled down to the beach and sat on a straw mat as we opened a bottle of Rosé. Then Elio stripped down to his unds and I rolled up my pants as we waded into the surf and I threw rocks into the ocean.

It’s so nice to be back with my loves. I love France!

It’s great to be back and I also loved being in the States! I really loved teaching all the classes, workshops, trainings and retreats. I really had a marvelous time. This adventure in France has been really wonderful and has given me an opportunity to focus on my writing. I spent a good part of the summer on a writing project that I’ll let you know about soon. I can’t say much about it yet but I recently sent my final edits off to a publisher so if it all goes as planned, I’ll have a big announcement by the end of the year. So that’s thrilling. More about that later . . .

I taught a yoga retreat with my dear friend Kim in Tuscany this summer and have been teaching a few classes at a studio in Nice but have been spending most of my working time writing and supporting my online offerings like my Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training. So it was nice to come back to the states and do a lot of teaching. It was really great to connect with friends and students and it was great to be reminded that my teaching makes a difference to people. I can’t tell you what that means to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

So, now that I’m back in France, what’s next for me . . .

Luxury Yoga Retreat at a Bordeaux Château

Well, if you haven’t heard already, I’m hoping that you’ll join me for my next big European yoga retreat in June of 2020. I’ve always wanted to host a yoga retreat at a Chateau in France. I lived in Bordeaux for 2 years more than 20 years ago, that’s how I learned to speak French. I absolutely adore this region and I’ve always thought that it would be such an adventure to revisit and host a yoga retreat. So, I researched online and found THE PERFECT place and this spring, Sen, Elio, and I drove out there to see for ourselves if it was as good as it looked online. And it was like 10x better than it looked online. This place has been owned by the same family for more than 400 years and was sold to the current owners about 20 years ago who renovated it, keeping its natural splendor but updating it, sprucing it up, and adding a few essentials like a beautiful indoor yoga room as well as an outdoor yoga deck. Oh, and an incredible swimming pool outdoors. This place has an incredible history including underground tunnels which were used to hide people in the 100 years war as well as allied spies in WWII. I’m billing this yoga retreat as a “luxury” yoga retreat. You’ve got to see the bedrooms in this place, each one looks like it should be a suite in the most expensive French hotel ever. The pictures are absolutely amazing and rest assured that they don’t do this place justice.

So, at this retreat we’re going to spend 6 days together doing all-levels yoga, breath work, meditation and Yoga Nidra and also enjoying ourselves as we lounge around the pool, take French cooking classes, and if you want to, biking around and exploring the vineyards and countryside. We are going to take a day-excursion to one of Bordeaux’s most notable vineyards, the world-class Saint-Émilion. We’ll also have a sommelier come in to the chateau for our own private wine tasting. I find that wine pairs very well with Yoga.

The theme for this retreat will be learning to savor your life with presence. The idea is that without presence even a life-changing retreat in France will go unnoticed. With presence, everything in your life is a miracle. Many of the spots are sold already but I still have some left. Don’t worry about the time off work, I spoke to your boss and they said that it’s fine to have the time off. Also, this retreat is set up really well for you if you wanted to bring a friend, spouse, or partner. Maybe you’re celebrating an anniversary, or a special birthday, or just want a mindful and delicious vacation your favorite person ever. Plan on this joining me. If your special person doesn’t do yoga, no worries. They can come and enjoy all of the OTHER, amazing things in this area.

This retreat is going down during the best week of the year to be in France— it’ll be from June 13–19 of 2020.

AND, since I love France and have come to love Paris so much, I’m also offering a Prelude in Paris, it’s a three-day pre-treat al personally guided walking tour through some of my favorite places in Paris. I’ll personally walk you around and show you some of my favorite neighborhoods, some of the lesser-known but fascinating corners of that incredible city, as well as some of the best museums, quaint cafes, and best shopping spots in perhaps the most romantic city in the world. Then, when that’s done, we can take a short flight or train ride from Paris down to Bordeaux for the Chateau retreat.

Even though this is going to be a luxury retreat, I’ve still priced this to be affordable. I’ve got a few spots left and I’d love to have you join me. Please go to scottmooreyoga.com, under Courses, Retreats, and Events, go to Bordeaux Yoga Retreat, and make your deposit for this adventure. This will certainly be epic and I want you to come so do what you need to do to make this happen.

New Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training

Also, I wanted to tell you that the last few days that I was in Salt Lake City, I connected with my friend and filmmaker, Natalie Cass to film a new Online Yoga Nidra teacher training. A while ago I launched an online Yoga Nidra teacher training and I’ve been immensely pleased by all the responses I’ve received. I’m thrilled that people from all over the world are discovering this training and using it to learn how to teach what I feel is one of the most fascinating practices EVER in a way that trains people to deliver this practice uniquely and with their own voice.

I’m always looking for ways to make my offerings better and better so I thought I’d take the time to take this Online Yoga Nidra teacher training to the next level. I just barely filmed it and I’m looking forward to the editing process. I am organizing this training to be more comprehensive, more accessible, and frankly, more beautiful.

This training will be a multi-media experience that gives you a ton of information about the in-depth philosophy behind Yoga Nidra as well as how to teach it effectively. There will be easily digestible videos, a full Yoga Nidra library, PDFs, handouts, stories, chants, links, and other stuff to give you an excellent Yoga Nidra education. By the end of the training, you’ll get a certificate of completion and you’ll have all the tools and experience necessary to teach Yoga Nidra with your own voice. It even counts as continuing education hours with Yoga Alliance. If you’re interested in learning more about Yoga Nidra check it out. Plus, if you register for my existing training which is already amazing, as soon as the new training is done, you’ll get the second one FOR. FREE.

New Yoga Nidra Course Coming…

Also, If you’re interested in how Yoga Nidra can benefit your every-day life but not necessarily interested in teaching it, I’ll be offering a new Yoga Nidra course next month so stay tuned for that, it’s going to be amazing.

Global Story Jam

So, I’m a storyteller at heart and whenever I’m in Salt Lake City, I love to attend a storytelling event called the Bee. On several occasions I’ve told stories there, along with several other storytellers, in front of hundreds of people and I did so recently just before leaving Salt Lake CityI had such a blast doing it. The Bee archives many of the stories so if you ever want to hear some of those stories I’ve told you can click the link here.

Anyway, several months ago, I hosted what’s called a Speakeasy, where I invited a bunch of people to get together at a friend’s house and we all brought drinks and food to share and I spent the evening telling some truly heart-felt stories. We cried and laughed together and had a very special evening and by the end of the evening I felt very close to everyone.

I’d love to do another storytelling event but this time with a different twist. This time I’d like to invite you to tell the stories. I’m calling it Global Story Jam. My vision is to have a global storytelling event where everyone who wants to can share a story based on the theme: Shocked. It’ll be a live, virtual storytelling experience and it’s going to be incredible. What we’ll do is log on to zoom all across the world at the same time and everyone who wants to tell a story will submit their names to be selected randomly. I’ll announce names in real-time and that person can tell their stories. Everyone will get 5 minutes to tell a story. It’s going to be so much fun! This will be Saturday, October 12th at 10 am to 12 pm MST (you can do the math for whichever time zone you live in).

200-Hr. Yoga Teacher Training Certification

Another project I’ve been working on this summer is to get approved to be a registered yoga school with Yoga Alliance. I’ve created curriculum for universities which was a piece of cake compared to the effort of getting my curriculum approved for Yoga Alliance. Anyway, if you’d like to study with me and earn your 200-hr Yoga Alliance teacher certification, let me know. I’d like to start a program around the beginning of the year. I’d like to gauge interest on this so give me a shout out if you would like to do something like this.

Yoga Teacher Mentor Program

If you’re already a yoga teacher and would like to up-level your teaching with a private teacher mentor program I’ve also got one or two spots open. Maybe you need to gain confidence as a teacher and get some personalized feedback about your teaching. Maybe you’d like to learn how to conduct workshops, masterclasses, and retreats. Maybe you need help getting you yoga teaching business up to speed. I’ve mentored many teachers who’ve been interested in improving their teaching. If you’re interested we’ll chat and see if we are a right fit for each other. Then, what I’ll have you do is take a strengths test to illuminate to us both how you operate best. Then we figure out your long-term and short-term goals and from there we set up regular appointments where my job is to give you information and encouragement and accountability as you steadily work toward those goals. My goal is to have this mentorship pay for itself right away as the result of your improved teaching and teaching opportunities that result from this mentorship and of course have this new information surge you forward in your career. Often times, what I’ve found is that existing teachers don’t need another training to know more, they need a mentorship with someone who’s doing what they’d like to be doing. If that speaks to you, please let me know. I’d love to work with you and help you shape your own teaching. I believe that you have unique gifts that allow you to teach people in only the way that you can. Let’s work together to get your voice heard.

There are more things I’d love to tell you about but they’ll have to wait.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for all of your love. Thanks as always for pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down.

Whatever You Believe In, Practice It Every Day.

LISTEN TO THIS POST!

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So, you may have heard me tell this story before but several years ago, I was leading myself through a deep Yoga Nidra meditation. My aim for this meditation was to channel the wise person that resides within my own heart to see what kind of message my own inner wise person would give me. I got very relaxed and went deep. Really deep.

I tried to think of the wisest person I knew immediately an image of one of my favorite professors from college jumped into my mind. In this vision, completely of my own imagination, I was sitting in his office and asking him for some guidance. In my mind, I could see the tawny grain of the wood of his desk. I could hear the soft buzz of the fluorescent lights above muted slightly by the plaintive squeak of his office chair as leaned back to think to survey the ceiling. He stroked his beard as he thought about what to say to me. Then, he looked at me slyly with a sideways glance and said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Whatever you believe in, practice it every day,” and then simply nodded.

“Whatever you believe in, practice it every day!” That revelation hit me like a ton of Norton Anthology of Poetry books. It was my own inner-wisdom reminding me of the importance of a daily practice

30-Day Meditation Challenge

If the wise person inside of you also values a daily practice, if meditation is something you believe in or are at least curious about, and if you want to explore what happens when you make meditation a daily practice, I invite you to register for my 30-Day Meditation challenge. It begins September 1st and runs for 30 days. It’s going to be fun and easy. All you do is meditate for 15 minutes a day, every day for 30 days. You’ll start to notice right away how you become more mindful, more calm, less provoked, and less reactive. Everyone you live with and work with will wonder what has happened to you.

Once you register for the challenge, you’ll start to receive emails that will support you with information, guidance, and encouragement about making meditation a regular practice for the month of September. You can do this challenge wherever you live in the world. You can meditate at any time of day that works best for you, and choose any style of meditation that suits you. I’ll give you several options that you can choose from if you’re newer to meditation

This costs $30 and if you complete all 30 days you can even have the option to receive your tuition back.

Tell your friends that you’ll be doing this to help keep you accountable and even invite them to join you because there’s nothing like mindfulness to bind a friendship together.

This thing starts Sunday, September 1st so sign up now and start your meditation practice now.

If you’re in NYC, I’ll be coming to town the first week of September and offering two amazing workshops. The first will be a Yoga Nidra for Happiness workshop at Pure Yoga West on Wednesday, September 4th from 6:30–9 pm. We will explore through poses, discussion, and Yoga Nidra the happiness that exists always within you despite events and circumstances. I’m really excited to offering a workshop at my old studio and hope you join me if you live in NYC. Also, I’ll be co-hosting a Yoga Nidra and Freeing breathwork workshop with an amazing teacher Tiffany Curren at Nirvana Yoga and Wellness in Wayne, New Jersey the next day on Thursday, September 5th from 6:30–9 pm. I’m really excited to work with Tiffany and this will be an incredible offering. If you live in the area, I’d love to see you at one or both of these events. I’m not sure when I’ll be back to this area.

Thanks for considering all of these offerings. Please forward this email by pressing the share link either below in the email or the Facebook share and like button near the top of the page if you’re listening to this email via my blog.

Hey, thanks again for being you and everything you do

And most of all, thanks for pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down.

Living On The Edge

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I’ve been practicing all my life. Since childhood I’ve practiced everything from music to magic, baseball to baking. So when I started practicing yoga and meditation it just felt natural to begin a new practice. One day when I was a kid, I was practicing the saxophone and I realized something essential about the notion of practice: practice is the end, not the means to the end. Sure, I get better at playing the sax by practicing it, but the point is to be playing. Practice is being at the edge, at the frontier of experience. Also, sometime in the last 20 years of practicing and teaching yoga, it dawned on me that there’s never a yoga performance, no yoga recital. It’s always only a practice.

Today I want to talk about the practice of living at the frontier. I’d like to invite you to reconsider the purpose of practice. Consider that maybe the goal of any practice isn’t to improve, it’s simply to be present at the frontier. I know, I know, I know, why do we practice if it’s not to grow? The thing is that you do grow when you practice but maybe growth is just the byproduct, not the purpose. Being at the frontier means regularly leaving the comfort of what we know, abandoning what’s automatic and easy, and stepping onto unsure ground to truly learn to know ourselves. Therefore, it’s our life’s practice to simply be at the frontier.

Frontier=Presence=Self-Knowledge

To my mind, the word “frontier” conjures images of gritty people working with the land and wrestling with the unknown as they learn and grow. Our frontier could be our edge in a yoga posture, our edge in our awareness in meditation, or perhaps simply the edge of entering a new stage in life. Being at the frontier isn't always easy but isn’t that the point? While it’s not always easy, it is always real. Our frontier is a place we’ve never been before and being there helps us to truly come alive because it quickens our minds, makes our senses come alive, and forces us into radical presence. There is no coasting or autopilot at the frontier.

For me, traveling has been a practice of being at the frontier. More than geographical frontiers, traveling regularly takes me to cultural, philosophical, and humanitarian frontiers I would have never known had I lived out my days in Smalltown, Utah where I was born. But more important than learning about another place, traveling always involves a healthy dose of getting knowing myself—there’s usually a steep learning curve to making your way somewhere else, one that unavoidably makes you look inside. More than learning about someone else, traveling puts you at the rugged frontier of knowing whoever the hell YOU are, a frontier that is invariably west of wild.

While our goal in practice may not necessarily be to grow, it happens regardless and you can’t grow without challenges. I once heard someone say, “If you ever find yourself coasting in life it probably means you’re going downhill.” In yoga philosophy, this heat necessary for growth is called Tapas and is the driver toward self-knowledge. Experiencing Tapas, being a little on edge or confronted with challenges, is an essential part of our awakening because in a very real way it wakes us up from the anesthesia of easy, and puts us into a place of fierce presence, and presence is the secret that whispers to us our true, universal identity. Presence teaches you who you are.

Flowing At Your Edge

Sometimes breaking out of the stupor of easy to be present means doing something big, something drastic. I can tell you from experience that nothing wakes you up like a psychedelic trip with a shaman in the jungle or jogging around the conservative state capital wearing nothing but your best set of briefs, running shoes, and your hands-free device. But a regular practice of being at your frontier doesn’t mean regularly stepping to the edge of stupidity. For example, it’s hard to be present to the full grandeur of the Grand Canyon when your toes are dangling over its edge. Instead, you’ll grow far more from your every-day practice if you allow it to be a comfortable step away from both boredom and your absolute edge.

Steven Kotler is a NYT Bestselling author who studies and writes about how uber-performers thrive at their edge by achieving a state of flow, an optimal state of consciousness where people can both feel their best and perform their best. One of the ways he’s discovered that people can get into flow is by regularly stepping up to their comfortable edge. Steven Kotler has learned how to write while in a state of flow and through his words how to put his readers into the same state. In December of 2018, right on the frontier of embarking on my journey to live and work in France, I attended Steven Kotler’s Flow for Writers Workshop in San Francisco. For three days, our intimate group of writers holed up in a chic San Francisco loft as Steven revealed to us some of the secrets of good writing where he taught quite succinctly: write from your edge and readers will read from theirs.

And while performance maybe isn’t the point of practice, being at your comfortable edge is the secret sauce to great performance. Whether it’s writing or rock climbing, being at your edge and in flow stimulates your brain into a deeper awareness that illuminates the microscopic but essential details that would otherwise fly under the radar. Being at your edge and in flow releases all the feel-good chemicals in your brain. Chemicals that catalyzes your performance around the subject by focusing your mind on its subtleties and nuances, by illuminating long-chain connections to otherwise disparate ideas, and by unlocking your boundless creativity. In yoga class, I encourage my students to negotiate their edge of each pose by finding the version that is just north of comfortable, what I call the “comfortably-intense” version of every pose. Also, I often ask if they could become just 10% more relaxed.Flow simply can’t happen when you’re either bored or panicked to tears.

The Only Way To Get There Is To Be Here

After developing a regular practice of being present at our edge and bravely taking those essential, small steps forward, one day we’ll look back to see that we’ve covered a lot of ground. When you look back, it will feel like you’ve spanned a damn-near impossible distance. But here’s the deal with forward movement, whatever your next horizon—be it it be becoming more flexible, more focused, or more financially sound—the only way to get there is to be here. Be exactly here at the frontier that presents itself to you at this moment. But the thing about here is that it’s always changing. No sooner do you get comfortable with the grass at your feet than do you naturally grow toward your next horizon.

When you take ambition out of the practice, you give yourself the perspective of working with your actual edge rather than the edge you hope to be at one day. It’s being present at your actual frontier that gives you the firm ground to step forward into that next step, and the next, and the next… For example, I can’t learn to play Coltrane until I first experience the frontier of learning to play the sax, how to read music and the rudiments of jazz, etc. It’s not until I’m present at those frontiers that new frontiers will open up until one day I’ll find Coltrane’s masterpiece, Giant Steps, dancing out of the bell of my horn while wondering, “How the hell did I ever do that?”

It’s presence that promotes growth because it’s the only thing that’s real. Sure, find your star that guides you forward in your endeavors but the practice itself keeps you grounded in the frontier of the moment. Isn’t that what life is, being present at our frontier of experience while watching our own inevitable evolution? Growth will naturally happen as you’re present with your frontier and making the essential trek of 1 inch, the spot directly in front of your toes.

Finally, the paradox of the frontier is that you’ve already arrived and arrival means never stopping. We must find home by being comfortable in our discomfort. This home is our birthright and the eternal and joyful journey toward our highest self. We have arrived the moment we put ourselves at the frontier and open our vision to simply witness ourselves grow.

Conclusion

Several years ago, I experienced a great revelation about the importance of regularly visiting my frontier through practice. I was leading myself through a Yoga Nidra practice and wanted to hear the wisdom of my own heart to hear whatever it might tell me. I visualized the wisest person I could think of in order to tap into my own inner wisdom. A vision of my favorite prof from college popped into my mind with stark clarity. All my senses were popping: I was sitting in his office and could smell the oiled wood of his desk, see it’s tight-knit, tawny grain, and could hear the buzz of the lights and the squeak of his chair as he leaned back, pondering at the ceiling. There was a moment of generous silence between us as he stroked his beard. Then he looked at me out the corner of his eye. And with a sly, paternal, and loving air said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Whatever you believe in . . . practice it every day.” This event never happened except for in my mind but the truth of it became more real that if it actually had. This was my wise inner-self reminding me to always be at my frontier through practice.

If you’re interested, click here to listen to that same Yoga Nidra practice where I lead you hear the wise person inside of you.

I invite you to consider reevaluating your relationship to practice from being something you do in order to improve to something you do in order to regularly be at your frontier. I invite you to forget about the ambition of practice and simply be present at that frontier and watch how growth naturally happens. And I invite you celebrate the many frontiers you find yourself at in this moment of your life.

Whatever you practice, do it regularly. I hope to practice with you soon

PS

I used to drive around town with a sticker on the back of my truck that read 1,” a nod to a poem that speaks to the greatest frontier I ever hope to arrive at.

“A Spiritual Journey” by Wendell Berry

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,

no matter how long,

but only by a spiritual journey,

a journey of one inch,

very arduous and humbling and joyful,

by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,

and learn to be at home.

Mantras and Visualizations: Meditations that Sting Like A Bee

“Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.”

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This was Muhammad Ali’s mantra. Perhaps yoga and mindfulness isn’t often associated with Muhammad Ali, yoga's first principle of non-harming and all that, but he was someone who was particularly adroit in his use of the yogic principle of mantra and visualization. His iconic mantra has become synonymous with a champion. What is the power of mantra and visualization and how can they be used to mold reality like they did for Muhammad Ali, and how can we use these tools to achieve our dreams?

Writing the Script on Reality

Although his mantra practically became his sonic name tag, it wasn’t just a pithy phrase he liked to throw around because it was catchy; it wasn’t his slogan or his attempt at branding himself. Maybe few understood that Ali’s mantra was his access point into his deep inner-source that believed he would be the boxing heavyweight champion of the world. Saying it over and over again was his craft, the practice of helping the logical part of his mind both believe and expect this belief to become reality.

In addition to using his mantra, Muhammad Ali visualized over and over his fight with Sonny Liston where he would win the heavyweight championship. He saw himself win the title thousands of times in his head before ever stepping into the ring. By the time he stepped into the ring, all that was left to do was the final step, the physical practice of what he already knew was true. And Muhammad Ali isn't alone. It was like he theatre of life—he knew the script and on opening night he simply needed to go on stage and perform the play.

It reminds me of a story in the Hindu scripture, The Bhagavad Gita, where the God-turned-mortal Krishna is instructing the warrior prince Arjuna about his duty to fight in an epic battle. At Arjuna’s reluctance, Krishna pulls him aside and informs him that truth and time is not so linear and that the battle has already been fought and won. Knowing this, Krishna told Arujuna that the important thing is that he must go out there and fulfill his dharma, his destiny. Similar to what Ali told himself through visualization and mantra, Krishna told Arjuna to tap into the source of belief of what was already true.

Thought Precedes Form

Many psychologists and neuroscientists will affirm that despite our trust in it, our mind isn’t necessarily the best preceptor of reality; it’s readily subject to prejudice, interpretations, and misapprehension. In yoga philosophy the name for this misapprehension is Avidya, the opposite of clear seeing. Like modern brain science suggests, two people might see the same facts and both have wildly different beliefs about translating those facts. They might even debate what is real. Thus our mind is subject to our own personal beliefs and prejudices. Our mind creates a "reality" from a dizzying array of options suggested by our perceptions, interpretations, and desires. This subjectivity tugs at the very fabric the notion of reality.

Yoga suggests that since our beliefs are so powerful in contributing to our reality, we can use things like mantras and visualization to help us create our reality, perhaps like Muhammad Ali and Arjuna, a reality that somehow in our hearts what we know is already true. We have a bigger part to play in creating our reality than we think. Mantra and visualizations can help.

Beliefs change all the time. One minute you believe in the Tooth Fairy and the next you don’t. In Vedanta, a school of yogic philosophy, the sheath or layer of our being that negotiates beliefs, both conscious and subconscious, is called the Vignana Mayakosha. Yeah, it’s a crazy name this part of our being is perhaps more powerful than we sometimes give it credit.

Dr. Bruce Lipton, an internationally recognized biologist and author who works to bridge science and spirit, says that 95% of our decision making comes from our subconscious. If we can learn to source and even manipulate our subconscious, there's no telling what power we might have over our own world. Visualizations and mantra are two very effective and powerful ways of shaping our world. Muhammad Ali powerfully demonstrated his ability mold his reality of being the heavyweight champion of the world using mantra and visualization.

The Power of Words

Words are powerful. Religious texts like The Bible even says that “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God.” In the Hindu scripture, The Yoga Sutras, the principle of Satya or truth is the second highest principle behind non-harming because of the power of words. For longer than recorded history, magic, mythic, and religious traditions have regarded certain words, whether vocalized or thought, as both sacred and powerful. I heard one of my yoga teachers, Judeth Lasater, say, “What is worrying but praying for what you don’t want.” Thus is the power of thoughts and words.

So put words to the test. I invite you to choose those words that, like Muhammad Ali, like Arjuna, will manifest your sacred destiny. And I invite you to find a way of reciting them to manifest their power in your life. Maybe you know already your mantra, what words you need to evoke for you to live into your true destiny. Perhaps words like: Power, Clarity, Forgiveness, Strength, etc. Maybe you need to discover what your mantra is.

I invite you to do a meditation in order to distill your clarity on which words are right for you. This meditation doesn’t have to come by spending months in the desert in deep contemplation. Rather, maybe 10 minutes concentrating on clearly answering a few questions for yourself. You’ll know it when it comes. Maybe it will take a few days of meditating for a few minutes each day.

Here’s the mantra-finding process: First, ask yourself what has been reoccurring in your life recently as a theme that you need to pay attention to. Another way to answer this question is to think about what ways the Universe is asking you to grow right now—what challenges are presenting themselves to you now, asking you to grow? Next, don’t allow your thinking mind to take over, here, but rather let the answer to this next question be instinct, the first thing that comes to mind: What does your heart know is your purpose for this world? Distill the answer to these questions down to a phrase or maybe even one word (don’t worry, you can change it if you need to, you don’t have to marry that word for life) but allow yourself to use that word or phrase as your powerful catalyst forward to what you already believe about yourself.

Then, if you’re inclined, grab a mala (you can get these at any crystal and incese, dragon and rainbows shop). They are beaded necklaces with 108 beads on them. The Mala’s will usually have a tassel on them representing the beginning and the end. Hold the mala on the first bead between your right thumb and middle finger, just beyond the tassel. In your mind or aloud, repeat your word or phrase then move to the next bead. Do this over and over again until you come to the end of the mala. If it’s short and you’d like a longer meditation, turn the mala around and repeat the mantra going the other way on the mala until you come back to the tassel. After your meditation watch to see how you see the world differently and how you live into the beliefs that you bring to your mind through mantra.

In addition to discovering your mantra, create a visualization where you see yourself perform what you'd like to arrive for yourself over and over. Remember to use all of your senses and think about it happening in the moment, instead of dreaming for a future. The part of our brain and the part of our consciousness that we are accessing only understand now. Spend a few minutes in visualization to see yourself succeed and just like Muhammad Ali, become the champion of your world.

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Meditations on Happiness

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We all just want to be happy. We all search to be happier. We are all scouring for clues to solve that mystery as to why we aren’t fully satisfied in life? So we turn to things like yoga and meditation to help solve the happiness mystery. Surely yoga and meditation will help us to be happy, right? Yes they will but maybe not how we think they will. Much of the immediate “happiness” we get from yoga and meditation is fleeting and finite: a nice yoga butt, the ninja-like ability to do a handstand, 5 minutes not worrying about your finances while sitting in meditation. And as soon as we’ve finished class, we often find ourselves disappointed to be in the exact same place we were before class.

The problem occurs when we use yoga and meditation as self-improvement instruments. We say to ourselves, “If I could just improve my flexibility, forget my aching heart, and calm my busy mind, then I’d be happy.” But what if yoga and meditation aren’t for self-improvement at all? What if they are merely tools that help bring us to Awareness? And that’s it. These practices aren’t for self-improvement because the Self doesn’t need to be fixed.

But beyond that, in a very practical way this Awareness also helps us to find happiness by clarifying to our conscious mind both what we really want in life as well as helping us recognize it when we’ve received it. In truth, Yoga and meditation simply help us to practice Awareness which in turn reveals the true mystery of happiness: that happiness is presence.

Secret No. 1: Don’t Wait for Happiness, You’re Already Perfect

First, and this is one of life’s biggest lessons, yoga and meditation make you happy by giving you the Awareness that everything simply exists and is perfect in that existence. Including you. You’re already perfect. This Awareness also reveals that happiness just exists, the same way everything else does.

One of the secrets to happiness is to realize that we can’t wait for the events in our lives to align perfectly for us to be happy. You gotta stop waiting for the world to make you happy cuz the world just doesn’t care. You gotta start making the decision to be happy despite the events and circumstances in your life because there will always be something other than yourself to blame for the fact that you’re unhappy. You’re in charge of your emotions. Nobody else is responsible for that job, not your partner or spouse, your kids, your job, your teachers, God—nobody but you.

The stone-cold truth is that the events in our lives are neither good nor bad. They just are. It’s the meaning we assign to those events that triggers the emotions we associate as good or bad. And guess who gets to choose the meaning of each event that happens. You do.

Awareness shows you that this moment is all there is. Stop waiting for happiness. There’s never a more perfect time to be happy as the eternal now. Awareness shows you that you gotta stop looking for happiness outside of yourself. You’ll never find it. It doesn’t exist. If you can’t find happiness inside, you’ll sure as shit never find it outside. That’s just Truth with a capital “T.”

One of the oldest vedic mantras, the Gayatri Mantra, thousands of years old, says that if I truly understood the fact that everything comes from Source, I’d see that I’m no different than the happiness I seek, I’d see that happiness is my essence. (Click below to listen to me chanting this mantra.)

I know what you’re thinking, “That’s shit! life’s hard.”

Sure, life’s hard. Yet through Awareness there’s a happiness that can’t be touched by life’s difficulty. Life is beautiful even in our hardest moments because our struggles represent our growth-evolution of learning to see ourselves as the perfect beings we already are. Our life’s struggles are just like those of a new butterfly struggling to break out of its chrysalis, to unfold into its own magnificence. A butterfly won’t survive without those struggles. And like the joy of the butterfly bouncing triumphantly on the wind, one day we too will celebrate every stitch of pain that birthed our unknown wings.

The late, great Leonard Cohen said it perfectly in his lyrics to the song Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything,

And that’s how the light gets in.

Even the rhyme is broken yet these are perhaps some of the most succinct and poignant lyrics ever to remind us that we aren’t perfect despite our brokenness, but because of it.

In order to see our perfection through our brokenness, we must learn to be present when painful emotions arise, enough to feel them fully but without letting them define us. The practice is to realize that while we may experience emotions, what we are is fundamentally larger than emotions. And as much as you can be present with emotions, no matter which one, that presence actually serves to reveal the perfect, luminous thing inside of you which is larger than emotions, call it Awareness, Source, God, Spirit, your True Self— whatever. What you are is Awareness experiencing itself as an emotion, like an otherwise unknown being trying on a costume to understand itself. It’s by being present to your emotions through Awareness that reveals the happiness inside of you, a happiness that can’t be touched by events and circumstances

Being present with your emotions is opposite of pretending that emotions don’t exist, especially difficult emotions.They do exist. They just don’t define you. Plus, remember that every emotion is in flux, here one moment and gone the next. Just like everything else in this loving Universe, it’s part of an orbit. Emotions are part of the game of life, a part of the dream. Awareness is the part of you that’s having the dream, the part that never changes, despite any emotion that may visit. In fact, it’s things like emotions that help to reveal yourself as Awareness.

Yoga and meditation cultivate the Awareness that what we are is a spiritual being having a physical experience. We are coming to know ourselves as the Divine, a force that is fundamentally reduced to love. Divine love is in you and in everybody and everything else in the Universe. When you know that, when you feel that, come what may, nothing can touch you. You’ll even be able to experience things like heartache with love.

So while on the surface, yoga and meditation don’t make you happy, they do cultivate an Awareness which reveals some key secrets to happiness. Namely, it reveals that you are a perfect, Divine being, that you can only find happiness within, and that you’re in charge of defining the events that happen in your life. It’s the challenges in our life that help to illuminate our perfection. Awareness teaches you that what you are fundamentally is happiness (Gayatri Mantra) and that you can’t wait for life to align perfectly to “find” happiness. It also teaches us to be present to our emotions because they don’t define you but are valuable tools that help to illuminate the happiness that exists despite the events and subsequent emotions of life.

Secret No. 2: The Cosmic Taco—Place Your Order, Please.

Another way that Awareness leads us toward happiness is by giving us the clarity to know what we really want in life. Despite the fact that we are perfect just as we are, we are nonetheless hardwired to grow and to evolve. This means that it takes Awareness to realize when we’ve outgrown our current situation. Sometimes our growth is cued by a feeling of being disconnected or unsatisfied with what is. Often this is the Universe saying that we’ve outgrown our current condition and that we need to find something else, like a hermit crab whose outgrown their shell.

The dark side of being hardwired for growth means that for some of us, we are always looking for greener grasses. But with presence, we can hold the paradox that this moment is both perfect as it is and that the Universe is calling on us to grow and move away from it. With presence we also recognize that our current situation is the best and only platform for us to step into our next stage of evolution. In fact, failure to do so—both failure to acknowledge our current situation as well as our failure to grow into what’s calling us forward—ironically traps us in what fundamentally isn’t working for us, just like a prison cell. Failure to evolve from a place of grounded presence traps us in a vicious cycle of reliving our old lessons until we are ready to move on. It’ll be just like Groundhog Day but instead of Bill Murray, it’ll be us living out that drama.

Many of us mistake our itch for growth as unhappiness when it’s really just our own call for evolution knocking on our door. It’s like looking down and seeing that the pants that used to fit you just fine are now riding up around your shins. What’s worse is that most of us might feel the need to grow and look for something new but don’t even know what we are looking for. Here’s a perfect example…

Several years ago I needed to find an apartment. I had exactly one week to find a place and move out and I was really feeling the pressure. Despite the fact that I had looked at literally dozens of apartments I felt like my search was going nowhere. I realized that I was looking at apartments and not really knowing what I was looking for. After examining yet one more apartment that left me massively underwhelmed, I realized that I didn’t even know what I was looking for. So, I went home and wrote down precisely what I wanted, about 15 different criteria, everything down to which neighborhood, the price, what kind of amenities—even the architectural style and age of the building. The very next day, I looked at yet another apartment. It didn’t meet the majority of those criteria. That’s because it met ALL of them— Every. Damn. Detail. I went on to spend some very happy years in that apartment.

Many different yoga and meditation traditions say that consciousness precedes form. It was like the Universe was just waiting for me to put in my order, like the invisible person that lives in the speaker box at the drive-thru, happy to serve me as soon as I made up my mind and tell it what I want.

I believe that the Universe is constantly waiting to give us what we want and like any good teacher, if we’re not asking, it’s not giving. Asking for what we want, visualizing it in a way that is current, possible, and positive, is a way that alerts the Universe that we are ready to receive what the Universe has been waiting to offer all along.

I told this story to a good friend and she told me, “You could probably ask the Cosmos for a taco and open up your hand and, boom, a taco would drop into your hands.” Thus a new term was born, “The Cosmic Taco.” I now use this term to refer to telling the Universe exactly what you want. “Um, yeah, could I please get a beautiful place to live, in France, along with my adorable family, a great job that I love that makes me feel loved, fulfilled, and useful? Oh, and could I get that with avocado and hot sauce? Thanks!”

What do you want on your Cosmic Taco? Make a list. Be specific.

Telling the Universe what you want on your Cosmic Taco is useful for so many reasons, but specifically it clarifies to both your thinking mind and simultaneously to Universal Consciousness what you want so it can begin to dish it out. Like I said, most of us are walking around looking for something other than what we have and we don’t even know what it is we are looking for.

For many of us it’s a matter of what we feel we are worthy of. Remember, you’re the Divine having a human experience. It’s your birthright to have EVERYTHING. Don’t be afraid to ask for exactly what you want. You more than deserve it.

As you get clear with what you want, I promise that you’ll start to notice those thing coming to you from many directions. Don’t be surprised if you start to be bombarded by clues, synergies, and opportunities. Even the songs on the radio will start to get on board to somehow sing to what’s coming through for you. Recently I had a powerful experience where I was feeling overwhelmed by the simple perfection of the lyric, “All you need is love,” and a fucking beetle came and literally landed on my hand. “Yeah, Universe, I know it’s the Beatles.”

Has something like that ever happened to you? Probably. Why is that? It think it’s because the Universe operates in an order and once you get onboard with a trajectory, you’ll see how that ordered thing begins to play out. Chances are, these clues for what you wanted were passing you all along but since you had such a dizzying array of options in front of you, each one just as viable as the next, you were simply blinded by all the myriad options to notice them.

One of the things I’ve learned from Yoga Nidra, the fascinating and transformative type of meditation I’m so passionate about, is that the past and future are abstract concepts and the eternal part of us, the one that’s connected to Universal Consciousness, only exists in the now and exists in a universe of YES—always has, always will—so you have to talk to it in ways that is current and positive. It helps to put yourself on your pathway of growth by creating mantras, aphorisms, or prayers that make a positive statement of truth that will help you grow in that direction, like a pole lashed to a tree to help it grow straight. Don’t speak to your perceived lack or the incompleteness, speak to your inevitable wholeness, to what is real and true in the moment and what is leading you to the next thing layer of wholeness. I heard Judith Lasater once say, “What is worrying but praying for what you don’t want.” Pray for what you do want.

Here’s are two examples for a positive mantras that speak to the power of the moment:

“I’m currently on my road to _____________,”

“Inside, I already have everything I need for____________.”

Both of these examples are realistic, positive, and happening in the moment. Both reflect what my therapist has been telling me for years, “Reach for the stars and keep your feet planted on the ground.” Both are mantras that communicate to the Universe what we want and positions it to help us manifest those things.

Awareness therefore brings us happiness by helping us realize that despite being perfect beings living in a perfect moment, we are nonetheless hardwired to grow. It helps us to know when we need to move on, it gives us the clarity to know what we are looking for, and it does so grounded in the positive reality of what is.

David Whyte is a rockstar in my world. Check out what he says about growing into what we feel we are worthy of in this world.

The True Love

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don't
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don't want to
any more
you've simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

~David Whyte

I love this because your True Love could be your partner/spouse, kids, job, beliefs, or anything.

What is YOUR True Love?

Secret No. 3: What We Need is Here

Not only must we be clear with what we want, but we gotta learn to recognize it when it comes. I think that between knowing what you want and recognizing it when it’s come, the later is the more difficult and will lead us more quickly to enduring happiness. We cant get so driven to see over the next horizon that we fail to recognize that what we wanted all along is actually lying at our feet. It’s the story of the hero’s journey.

Presence opens our eyes to see what is here and what is real. It teaches us that now is a perfect moment, despite whatever’s happening, and that there will never be a better moment than now. Presence shows you that what you want is here. What you want is not the thing over the next horizon, what you want is being here. Being here is being home. Check out what

I love poets because they have to be so present in order to articulate the moment that’s happening right before them. Check out this showstopper by Wendell Berry:

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

~Wendell Berry

I invented a magic mantra for happiness that helps me to see that what I need is here. It helps me to realize that this moment is as perfect as any other can be. That mantra is, “This is EXACTLY what I want to be doing in this moment.” I repeat this phrase even and especially if it feels like what I’m doing in this moment is pretty mundane or average because each time I do, it opens my eyes to the perfection of the moment. The perfect moment is defined by what’s happening but rather how I’m choosing to pay attention. Repeating this mantra instantly locks me into presence and takes me out of perpetual search mode. It helps me to lift my head, open my eyes and all the rest of my senses. As I’m writing this, a nice glass of Bordeaux next to me—fruity and bold—and some dark chocolate with sea salt, I feel myself swinging in the flow of this writing, the keys popping rhythmically under my fingers, and I acknowledge that, THIS is EXACTLY what I want to be doing IN. THIS. MOMENT. This is what I want. I can’t tell you how immensely satisfying it is to acknowledge that. This phrase helps to realize that I’m not waiting for the perfect moment, I’m watching it unfold before me.

And as I clarify what I want with presence, I realize that if I’m on my road to higher growth and I’m actively doing what it takes to move me along my path, then this is the only place I can be and therefore exactly where I want to be. So, yeah here is where I need to be and is the essential ground leading me to my next step forward on my path for growth and discovery. This is the harder lesson.

The last poem I want to share, a poem that has become a beloved friend to me, one which express this vital truth of presence, written by one of my heros—the woman, the wonder, the legend, drum roll please — Mary Oliver!

Mindful

Everyday

I see or hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light.

It was what I was born for —

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world —

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy,

and acclamation.

Nor am I talking

about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,

the very extravagant —

but of the ordinary,

the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar,

I say to myself,

how can you help

but grow wise

with such teachings

as these —

the untrimmable light

of the world,

the ocean’s shine,

the prayers that are made

out of grass?

~Mary Oliver

I love this poem because it points to presence as the key to happiness, to satisfaction. And that without presence, we will never realize it when what we are searching for has arrived at our feet.

It’s my prayer that you find yourself in the Awareness that you are perfect just the way you are. May you have astounding clarity about what you want in life. And may you find yourself reading this and repeating the magic mantra for happiness, “This is exactly what I want to be doing in this moment.”

Thank you for sharing this moment with me.

Going deeper:

• Remember that you’re perfect the way you are

• Put in your order for your cosmic taco, make a detailed list of what you want your life to be

• Regularly practice the magic mantra for happiness, “This is exactly what I want to be doing in this moment,” no matter what you’re doing in that moment.

Please share this with someone. Comment below about what you feel are YOUR secrets to happiness.

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Tuition for Life Lessons: A Mediation on Resentment

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Several years ago, while I was still in college and before I started on my yoga career, I worked in a little loan company processing loans. The man who owned this company (we'll call him "Jeff," mostly because that was his name) taught me several valuable things, many about people and others about myself. While some of the lessons he taught me were very costly both in money and in hurt, it was all great tuition for some essential life lessons.

One of the valuable things Jeff taught me, something I'll remember for the rest of my life, was that even more important than processing people's loans, my real job was connecting to the people I served through the loan business. He taught me that It doesn't matter if you're a doctor, teacher, or loan processor, you're real job is to connect to people. Your 9–5 is just the particular lens through which you're called to connect to others.

He also taught me how to focus under pressure and how to organize my tasks around priority. He taught me things about working with people that I've used everyday since I worked there. He showed me parts of myself waiting to come out.

But this article is about what he taught me about forgiveness. 

Everybody has their Kryptonite. Despite Jeff's shining attributes, he wasn't a very good business person. I grew very concerned the day that my paycheck bounced. When I approached him with this dilemma, he asserted that even though the company was in a little slump, everything would soon be ironed out.

It never was.

I liked Jeff and wanted to hang in there for him until he got things figured out. But eventually, I could see the writing on the wall and after a few months of not getting paid, I finally left. When I walked away, he owed me these few months of back pay. What he owed me was a lot of money for a starving student, not to mention that all this happened coincided with Christmas and the tuition deadline for next semester. 

Even though I was the one who offered to stay, I really thought that Jeff would come through and was really hurt when he didn't. I felt really betrayed. Jeff stopped returning my calls. My feeling of hurt turned into betrayal, turned into a bitterness, turned into obsession. I just couldn't let it go. For a while it was all I could think about.

I wanted some recourse so I called the Labor Commission and filed a complaint, adding to the other employees at the failed loan office.The process was fraught with bureaucracy and dead ends—unfruitful and painfully slow. Eventually, the courts began to subpoena Jeff to arrive in court. I soon realized that I could easily gain my money back if I were only paid five cents every time I heard the Labor Commission say the phrase, "Your file is under review and we'll notify you once we know anything different."

This empty search continued for over two . . . (I pause for effect) YEARS. Each new attempt to resurrect my file brought me more pain and frustration.

Then one night I had a dream. I dreamed that I met Jeff. I saw him not as the evil person I'd made him out to be but as just a simple dude with a five-o'clock shadow (that's the way he always looked, even at 8 am). In my dream, as soon as I saw him, I suddenly got tired of holding this grudge. I forgave him of the whole thing. Completely. In my dream, Jeff didn't seemed very thankful or changed by that fact, nor did he seem really to even notice, but that didn't matter because I had changed. Instead of angry and dark, I was light and free. So, I woke up that next morning let it go. I let it all go. I was astounded how easily it was to forget about after that moment.

It took me several years to understand that even though Jeff had done me wrong, he still taught me some very valuable things. I began to think that my lost wages as a tuition paid for some very valuable lessons. Unbeknownst to me, my lessons weren't over yet.

One day, more than a decade later, I heard something on the radio that reminded me of Jeff. I hadn't even thought about Jeff since I'd had that dream about a decade previous. By this time in my life, I lived in a completely different town more than 50 miles away and had given up the world of mortgage lending for yoga teaching. I don't even remember what it was on the radio but whatever it was reminded me about all the great things that Jeff had taught me. I felt not only healed from all the resentment and pain but like I'd even grown from the experience I'd had at the failing mortgage office. Proud, I said to myself, "If I ever meet Jeff again, I promise that I will vocally forgive him and thank him for what he has taught me."

Something else I've learned is that when you call out to Destiny, prepare for an all-out a bare-knuckle brawl. She'll come and she'll test you just like you asked her to. She'll give you what you wanted but expect a little more blood—your blood.

Beehive Tea Rom, the cafe where I saw Jeff

So, almost exactly an hour later after calling out to the Universe that I'd forgive Jeff if I ever saw him, I was nursing a cup of Raspberry Mint tea in a cafe when over my shoulder I heard a disturbingly familiar voice. I didn't have to turn my head to know that it was Jeff and despite the warm tea, my insides turned to ice. 

I sat there listening to his voice as I burst into a cold sweat. And despite the fact that I'd just told Destiny that I'd forgive Jeff if I ever ran into him, now that it came to it, I wasn't so sure. I hadn't seen him in a decade. There was bad blood between us. I'd even subpoenaed him in court. Would he even remember me? Would he want to hit me?

As I debated within myself, he started to get up to leave. If I was going to act, it had to be now. I took a deep breath, stood up, and stepped toward him. "Hey, Jeff. I don't know if you remember me but I used to work for you at the mortgage company." He paused for a moment with a stunned look in his eyes. He took a step back probably wondering if I wanted to hit him. I explained to him quite frankly how he had hurt me then just as mater-of-factly said, "But you know what? I forgive you." I then explained to him all the things that I learned from him and that if I ever ran into him, I'd thank him for those valuable life lessons.

He just stood there stunned. He made no apologies, no explanation. He simply told me that I made his day. I made mine, too.

And no, he didn't write me out a check for the back pay.

That day, I realized that the money I'd lost was a relatively inexpensive tuition for the life lessons I'd learned. Some of the biggest lessons I learned through that experience were that holding a grudge only hurts me and forgiveness heals that hurt. That and to watch out when you call out to Density.

Our yoga and meditation practice is one way of creating intention and therefore dancing with Destiny. It's a way of producing an Awareness to see that even the muddy waters of our bitterness and pain can lead us to see the lotus of our own love, the nature of our True Being. Ultimately, we'll find that our blossoming love rests in our ability to be flexible and teachable to the lessons that beset us each day.

Would you mind sharing this?

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Private Yoga Lessons in Nice, Cannes, Monaco in English and French

Contact me

Hi, my name is Scott Moore and I've been teaching yoga as a career for over 16 years. I have extensive training, am very personable, and would love to teach you private yoga sessions that give you personalized attention, perhaps take you further in your practice, or help you stay active while on vacation. I can come to your home, yacht, hotel, or I have access to studio space that we can use. We can even meet in a park overlooking the ocean!

These sessions will meet your specialized needs and match your schedule. 

I speak English and French.

Whether you live here or are just visiting, I offer private yoga classes in Nice, Cannes, or Monaco, or other towns in the Côte d’Azure.

Private Yoga Lessons in Nice, Cannes or Monaco

I live in Nice but can visit you in Cannes or Monaco. (There may be a traveling fee depending where you live)

Styles

I specialize in: Vinyasa, Power Yoga, Hatha, Restore Yoga Meditation.

“Scott is a master yoga teacher with over 16 years of teaching experience and his insight and wisdom will take your yoga knowledge and skills to the next level and beyond. Scott is very detail oriented and will help you identify your strengths, set goals for improvement and create a step-by-step plan for improvement.”

— B. Burnham

“Scott has the ability to nurture and empower at once, connecting you with your own heart to find that which you need the most. Whether that’s a deeper rest, a deeper pose, or a deeper connection with self and spirit, Scott is a humble loving guide.”

— M. Fischer

Kissing Cops and Gilets Jaunes

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So, one afternoon as I was walking back to our apartment, I ran into a protest led by the Gilet Jaunes. I’m not sure if you’re up on French politics but the Gilet Jaunes are a group of protesters, a movement that’s been happening in France since November, 2018. These are yellow-vest-wearing protestors who oppose mostly the financial direction of the French government, namely the raising of taxes on certain things like gas.

Now you gotta remember that since the French Revolution, protesting for the French people has been a national pastime—they truly identify the ability to call bullshit on the government.

Well, unlike most protests in France, this one’s gotten violent at times and thousands of people have been arrested and several people have even died. Before coming to France, I was boning up on my language skills, listening to the French news, and hearing about these protests and I really hoped that I didn’t encounter any of them while I was in France.

Like I said, one day, I’m walking back to my apartment and I’m pushing my son in the stroller through one of the main squares in Nice, Place Garibaldi, when I see a Gilet Jaunes protest happening. But this is Nice, where everything is more tranquil and more laissez-faire and so instead of protesters lobbing bricks and molotov cocktail bombs, these protestors (most of whom couldn’t even be bothered to wear the damn yellow vest) looked like they were gossiping, dancing, or otherwise enjoying an afternoon together in the square. People were sharing cheese.

Now whenever a protest happens in France, the French riot police automatically show up. So on the other side of the square, a safe distance from the half-hearted Nice faction of the Gilet Jaunes, was a full arsenal of riot cops: big dudes who look like they were recently pulled from a rugby field somewhere but instead of rugby jerseys, they were wearing Kevlar armor.

I don’t care how tough you are, in France you greet your friends, both men and women, with a kiss on both cheeks. So I witnessed these riot cops filing out of their battle vans and arriving on the “riot scene,” each big and burly cop, dressed to the teeth for battle, greeting EVERY other cop with a gentle kiss on both cheeks. This created something akin to a wedding line of kissing cops.

Sure, there may be civil unrest but it’s no reason to be uncivilized. I wished I could have pulled out my phone to capture that priceless moment of lackadaisical protestors and kissing cops but I feared that doing so would violate some unspoken code of propriety so I merely pushed my stroller along my way.

A few days later, while I was holed up, writing in the apartment, Sen and Elio were down at the beach enjoying themselves until a really, really, obnoxiously drunk guy came up and started to harass everyone in the vicinity. Another guy, not far from Sen and Elio who was trying to enjoy the beach was really getting bothered by Drunk Guy

France has really increased its military presence in public places in the last few years due to terrorist attacks and so it’s not uncommon to see the camo-and-beret-clad, machine-gun-and-flack-jacket sporting army dudes patrolling in little platoons around town.

Well, the guy on the beach (heretofore known as Angry Guy) had finally reached his boiling point with Drunk Guy (who really was being an ass) and Angry Guy made a big to-do toward the nearest beret with a machine gun to do something about Drunk Guy.

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Army Dude then very calmly walked down the stairs from the Pramenade to the beach, loaded machine gun strapped to his chest, and spoke gently to Drunk Guy and Angry Guy. He then gently helped Drunk Guy by the arm up the stairs, away from the beach toward the Pramenade. Drunk Guy proceeded to sit on the 20’ wall overlooking the beach, fall off said wall (only 20’) get back up without anything broken, including his bottle of wine.

At this point, Army Guy gently walked down the stairs again and helped Drunk Guy up the stairs and sent him walking along his way with an encouragement to stop bothering people.

As Sen told the story, it was clear that Army Guy had 100% of the power. Drunk Guy was of African decent, by the way. But despite Army Guy’s power, he was still the most civilized, gentle, and rational one of the bunch and the entire event passed such that the perfect afternoon in Nice wasn’t disturbed by any unnecessary violence or drama. The worst thing that happened was probably the headache for Drunk Guy the next day who vaguely remembered falling off a wall . . . and something about camouflage.

A few days later, I was sitting in a cafe with Elio—I was writing in my journal and sipping an espresso while he was munching on a croissant—when a small platoon of these Army Guys came in, grabbed a few tables and proceeded to munch on their own croissants and espressos before heading off to make their patrols. Apparently this happens every day at this cafe.

What all of these snapshots show me is that even in times of unrest there can be civility, culture, and even gentleness

Meditations on Snow

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This is a picture of the Buddha.

He's in there somewhere, hibernating, meditating.

The Buddha is sitting where he likes it best, summer or winter: on the deck above the carport.

He doesn’t need to be on display, doesn’t need to brag to his massive Instagram following (and you should see it) that he’s been meditating under this blanket of snow for the last 42 hours.

He’s doing it now. Simply being. Watch him go. Or not go.

It’s quiet, standing in the snow just watching him.

Don’t we all have a Buddha in there somewhere? Maybe he’s hibernating, maybe he’s sleeping, but he’s there. It's the ability to simply be with what is, even if that's buried under several inches of snow.

This is a beautiful time of year sit by the fire, close your eyes, and go inside.
Winter snows brings life water all year long.

 

Here’s my favorite winter poem by Billy Collins which is perfect for this time of year.

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok

you would never see him doing such a thing,

tossing the dry snow over a mountain

of his bare, round shoulder,

his hair tied in a knot,

a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word

for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.

In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?

Is this not implied by his serene expression,

that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,

one shovelful at a time.

We toss the light powder into the clear air.

We feel the cold mist on our faces.

And with every heave we disappear

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and become lost to each other

in these sudden clouds of our own making,

these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,

I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.

This is the true religion, the religion of snow,

and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,

I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow

as if it were the purpose of existence,

as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

you could back the car down easily

and drive off into the vanities of the world

with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,

me with my commentary

and he inside his generous pocket of silence,

until the hour is nearly noon

and the snow is piled high all around us;

then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,

can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk

and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table

while you shuffle the deck.

and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes

and leaning for a moment on his shovel

before he drives the thin blade again

deep into the glittering white snow.

Pratyahara: Meditation and Breathwork for a Deep Inner-Journey

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I want to talk about Pratyahara and offer a helpful breathing practice to accompany it. First I feel I need to give it a little context.

Yoga 101

Yoga is old. One of the earliest mentions of yoga comes from the Rig Veda, one of the oldest vedic texts dating somewhere around 1700–1100 BC. So, OLD.

Patanjali was a yoga scholar (some say a school of thought—doesn’t matter) around 200–500 CE who wrote a generalized guide to yoga called The Yoga Sutras. Sutra is a Saskrit word meaning suture or stitch. The Yoga Sutras are therefore 196 verses “stitched” together in order to create a larger patchwork of what yoga’s main goal is and how to practice it.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali starts by defining yoga as the ability to calm the mind into stillness to arrive at a state of Oneness with all things. He outlines 8 limbs of yoga or ways to practice arriving at this Oneness. These 8 limbs are presented from gross to subtle ways to practice yoga.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga

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The first limb is the Yamas or outward observances, the way we treat the world. If we’re assholes to everyone around us, we’re missing the essential point that somehow I’m everything and only hurting myself.

Second is Niyamas, or inner observances, the way I treat my inner comportment, my cleanliness, contentment, and ability for self-discovery through work and submission.

Third comes yoga Asanas, or the poses, how literally applying this knowledge to the body, mind, and spirit of my personal being and attempting to discover the unification of all of these. This is what most of us refer to when we think of yoga. That’s fine—you don’t have to start practicing at the beginning—whatever gets you onto the path.

Fourth, Pranayama refers to how this work affects one’s energy through breathwork and other energy manipulation through the chakras, or primary energy stations located along our spine.

Fifth, and this is what I want to talk about most today, come Pratyahara or gaining control over external influences and learning to withdraw from our senses as the entrance into the inner-being.

Photo by Alex Adams

Sixth is Dharana, or fixed concentration on one thing.

Seventh, Dhyana, deeper concentration where you begin to lose your sense of individuality and the object you’re observing start to merge.

Lastly the eights limb is Samadhi, or the state of Oneness.

So now you’ve got probably more information than you need about yoga philosophy and ancient texts, what does this Pratyahara business have to do with me?

If you’ve ever tried meditating, you’ve likely tried at least a few ways of meditating and discovered one or two ways that really help you to go deep into your meditation, where something begins to happen and we start to get that meditation hit that everyone is talking about. In part, this ability to go deeper into ourselves starts with Pratyahara.

The senses are a wonderful tools of cultivating presence. Paying attention to our senses help us wrangle in our wild and wandering mind to a state that is here and now. We’ve used our senses perhaps with the “There Is” Practice or similar practices. However, getting stuck into this mode of paying attention to what is outside maintains external attention and might prevent a deeper inner-journey. So, learning to move beyond our senses inward to a state of raw here-and-now-ness may deepen your meditation practice.

Your senses are always firing and constantly giving the brain information. In fact, there’s so much information happening all the time, that our brains have to learn to filter and select what is essential and what it can turn off. Pratyahara experiments with learning to turn ALL the senses off to find a state of deeper inner-awareness on our pathway to discover that the answers are within instead of outside of us.

To to practice Pratyahara start by listening to your senses and then go inward beyond them.

Breathing Practice to Complement Pratyahara

Here’s a breathing practice followed by a meditation that can help you with just this

Brahmari: Bumble Bee Breath

Brahmari breath is kinda weird so bear with me. What you do is sit, close your eyes, and place your hands on your face with your index fingers over your eyebrows, your middle fingers covering your eyes, fourth fingers just below your nostrils, and little fingers under your lips. Your fourth and fifth fingers therefore create a cradle around your mouth. Your thumbs gently plug your ears. This closes all the exits, except your nostrils. Now, you release your pinkies to take in a big breath through your mouth, replace your pinkies and close your mouth and let out a long hum until you have no more breath. When you’re empty, breathe in again and do another round. Continue for several rounds. Have fun with this: try high pitches, low pitches, make up little tunes— whatever. Ideally, you’ll drown out all other senses except the sound of your own humming in your head.

You may also choose to omit the crazy hands-to-face business and use earplugs and an eye mask—less adventurous but probably just as effective.

This practice will confirm to your neighbors peeping through the windows that yes, you finally have gone nuts and that they should probably look for another neighborhood. Better just to have some private space to do this.

After several minutes of this, keep your eyes closed and choose a meditation that cultivates a strong internal focus, something like mantra meditation or mindfulness meditation.

I might suggest using the Insight Timer and setting your timer for 20 minutes using an interval bell to ding after 5 minutes. Do the Brahmari breath for 5 minutes and after the interval bell dings, try a mantra or mindfulness meditation for the remaining 15 minutes.

This will be a great 20 minute practice to really cultivate inner-focus.

If you’re curious, give this a shot and let me know how it goes.

Yoga Nidra Meditation: Does Your Inner 3-Year-Old Need to Go Nighty Night?

Who else can relate to the this . . .

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Photo by Reed Rowe

My 3-year-old has two settings— turbo and asleep.

One evening last summer, he was spraying the driveway with the hose. When we told him that he had to stop spraying because it was his bedtime, he became absolutely undone with emotion. He erupted into screams of anger, morphed into an inconsolable sadness, then began desperate pleading, which then cycled back to anger, more sadness, (this time accompanied with a slumped-over super-sad walk) and more pleading . . . This went on for several minutes making a performance that could have earned him a Tony Award.

I remember standing there unphased, merely watching this drama play out. As the adult with a grander perspective, not only did I not have to get pulled into his emotion, but my heart opened up to him. I could see this situation for what it was: he’s a 3-year-old ball of raw emotion. I understood that because it was his bedtime, he was very tired and crankiness gets amplified when you’re tired. I also had the perspective that his whole world at that moment was spraying the driveway and now his world had ended because of something as arbitrary as bedtime. But thanks to my adult perspective, I could simply observe his tantrum without having an opinion about it.

Minutes later, my son was sleeping peacefully in his bed.

Photo https://o-meditation.com/2017/02/24/awareness-j-krishnamurti/

Krishnamurti, one of the preeminent yoga minds of the last century, said it best when he proffered that “The highest form of intelligence is observation without assessment.” He’s saying that our highest Self is one that can merely witness something and not react to it.

“Yeah, that’s great when you’re observing your kid throw a fit, but how to you learn to not have an opinion about your own serious adult emotions like stress, worry, or anxiety?” The answer is perhaps easier than you think: observation through relaxation.

I know what you’re thinking and I’m not minimizing these serious emotions. It’s like when you’re worked up into a lather over something and someone rather gratuitously says, “Hey, just relax.” And how often do you then pause, drink in that sage advice, and emerge smiling from immediate relief? Never, because it’s stupid, completely unhelpful, advice.

Like Einstein said, “No problem can ever be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it.” You’ve got to change your state to make any kind of progress forward on a problem.

If you’ve read my blog or emails for long you know how much I love the relaxing from of guided meditation called Yoga Nidra. I Love Yoga Nidra because it brilliantly changes your state of consciousness by using relaxation and observation to arrive at your highest intelligence, or True Self. Your True self is like the adult part of you with the grand perspective that can simply observe without yielding to the 3-year-old part of you with all it’s of its emotions, reactions, and drama.

In fact, relaxation isn’t just merely the byproduct of Yoga Nidra. It’s the special sauce that performs the impossible. Not only can you learn to witness emotions rather than getting sucked in by them, but with Yoga Nidra you also learn that it’s the emotions themselves which are the catalyst that bring you to experience your True Self, that place of boundless equanimity, empowerment, and perspective. Through relaxation, Yoga Nidra changes your consciousness and illuminates your adult perspective which sees everything in your life for what it is: information.

Modern psychology supports this idea of relaxation being the game-changer for state change and stress reduction. Important discoveries during the last century have shown that a person cannot feel both stress and relaxation simultaneously. Therefore, in a state of deep relaxation like in Yoga Nidra, one might skillfully and gradually begin to introduce stressors like emotions into your awareness, but because you’re deeply relaxed, you’ll find that you can merely observe the emotions or stressors and see them as information. You counter-condition against stress and soon begin to identify as the all-seeing calm adult rather than the myopic tantrumy 3-year-old.

This is huge!

What’s more, simply observing an emotion without reacting to it can often break the insidious, downward-spiral that emotions can sometimes inflict on our psyche. In just a few minutes of a skillfully-guided Yoga Nidra practice, you may begin to experience your own “highest intelligence” and begin a new relationship with your emotions.

Simply put, when you practice Yoga Nidra, you put your inner 3-year-old to bed. Maybe that’s why everyone falls asleep during Yoga Nidra. Don’t worry, it still works even when you sleep, cuz the part of you that I’m speaking to is something beyond your rational mind and is always paying attention.

Click the button below to listen to this free Yoga Nidra practice I created called Awakening Through Body and Emotions. It’s designed to help you become very relaxed in your body before leading you through some fairly benign emotions to help you see past emotions and experience your True Self. It’s about 30 minutes long and I’d love to hear back from you about your experience. I also set this to some original chill music: me playing the clarinet with a drone in the background. I hope you like it.

Also, if this topic of using relaxation and observation to rejigger your relationship to emotions resonates with you, this is what my entire 6-week Yoga Nidra series will be about starting THIS Sunday at 9 am MST. This is a virtual Yoga Nidra series (live and online) where we will be exploring the theme, The Magic of Maya: Working Through Illusion, to learn to access the inner adult inside of you for your own change of consciousness and to experience your own boundless equanimity and learn to witness things like emotions. Please join me!

Each session will be recorded and transcribed so if the time doesn’t work for you, you can always catch the session at a time that works for you. Check out the details below

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Mantra Meditation Made Simple

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Photo by Scott Moore Copyright © 2019 Scott Moore Yoga LLC

Today, I want to talk briefly about Mantra meditation. Mantra is a Sanskrit word which comes from the words Manis, meaning mind, and Tra, which is the beginning of the word to transcend. So, literally through your mind, you may transcend into deeper layers of knowing.

A mantra is simply repeating a word or phrase over and over again.

The idea is to loose yourself in the repetition of the words. I've done a lot of mantra practice and have found it very powerful. There is something magical that happens when you engage your soul in this way. Meditation is about focus. It's powerful to focusing on one word or phrase.

We all know words have power:

"In the beginning was the word."
The Bible John 1:1

"The pen is mightier than the sword."
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup."
The Beatles

There are thousands of mantras. Some mantras are chanted in Sanskrit, other Tibetan, others Latin, or whatever language you normally speak.

I want to share two of my favorite mantras.

The first evokes the Hindu god Ganesh. He's the remover of obstacles, the Lord of auspicious beginnings, and is the love-child of consciousness and form.

Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.
This loosely translates into, "“Yo! Ganesh. I honor you and invite your power into my life."

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The next mantra I want to share with you is the Gayatri Mantra. It's one of the most popular and oldest mantras in the world.

oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
tatsaviturvareṇyaṃ
bhargo devasyadhīmahi
dhiyo yo naḥ prachodayāt

My favorite translation of this mantra is:
Everything on the earth and the sky and in between 
is arising from one effulgent source.
If my thoughts, words, and deeds reflected a complete understanding of this unity,
I would be the peace I'm seeking in this moment.

Give it a try!

Choose one of these mantras, or one of your own. It could be a simple phrase or even one word. Set your timer on Insight for 15 minutes and repeat these words over and over again, out loud, for the entire time. 

If you are familiar with mala beads or prayer beads, you can hold your beads and every time you complete the chant, move your fingers to the next bead. Give it a try.

PS

Here’s a great article about using mala beads

Online Yoga Nidra Meditation Training: The Magic of Maya Working Through Illusion

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We're well into the new year and I hope the sun is smiling on you, even if you live in a place where the sun doesn't raise the temp above freezing.

This year has been already so rich for me and every day I practice staying present to everything that arises, in part thanks to my 31-Day Meditation Challenge.

One thing I've learned is that meditation doesn't prevent things like emotions such as fear or anxiety from arising in me, but trains me to be cool with what does arise. It teaches me to welcome whatever comes my way, recognize it for what it is—no more no less. Ultimately it trains me to be merely the witness of that thing. Then, from that place of observation, I may choose to respond to the information rather than react. Strange how emotions like fear and anxiety seem to come around less and less when I stop resisting them and let them be what they are, mere bits of information.

I'm still human, though, and once in a while I might still lose my $#1€, but the more I meditate, the less it happens.

So today, I want to share two things with you that are related to this idea of learning to observe emotions. I think you'll love them: My Yoga Nidra series coming up, and a fun story I wrote called Lessons in Fear…

First, I want to tell you how excited I am about my 6-week virtual Yoga Nidra series starting Jan. 20th called, The Magic of Maya: Working Through Illusion.

Yoga Nidra is a relaxing and profound guided meditation aimed to help you experience your True Nature. The most essential premise of Yoga Nidra is that your True Nature is whole and perfect, a being of limitless power, boundless equanimity, with a cosmic perspective that has no need for worry. Anything in contrast to that is an illusion. But rather than trying to transcend illusion, what if you could actually use it to discover and experience your True Self?

One of the questions we'll explore in this course is, "What if emotions aren't 'real,' but just an illusion of reality and how do we actually use these illusions to uncover what is true and experience our True Self?"

This understanding is one of the things that Yoga Nidra has taught me and countless other people and what I want to offer to you through this this Yoga Nidra series.

This series will be 6 sessions, each around 75 min. During each session, I'll lead you through a verrrry relaxing Yoga Nidra practice (guided meditation), offer an engaging and thought-provoking teaching, and open the conversation to all for comments and questions.

I'll be recording each session and will be offering the recording and a transcript of it for review, or in case you have to miss a session you can watch or read it later.

One of the best features of this series is that you'll be in the comfort of your own home but joined virtually with me and other students all over the world.

In addition to access to the live classes you’ll also receive a Yoga Nidra digital library which includes:

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• Audio/Video recording of each of the sessions

• A transcript of each of the sessions

• Access to dozens of other Yoga Nidra recordings

• Helpful tips and links to videos, recordings, books, and articles to expand your Yoga Nidra education

• Clarinet Lullaby, a high-quality audio recording of me playing the clarinet set to ocean waves and a background drone for the purpose of deep relaxation and meditation.

Using Yoga Nidra to experience the Both and Nature; the marriage of our Infinite Being with our Finite Being.

Be an effective teacher helping your students experience the life-changing effects of Yoga Nidra.

You'll end the each session and the entire series with a deeper experience and understanding of the profound nature of your Self. Plus you'll have lifetime access to all the practices and materials.

In addition, Yoga Nidra also helps with:

• Reduction or elimination of stress

• Profound relaxation

• A deeper, richer, and more present life

• Spiritual growth and understanding

• Greater presence in relationships, work, and the community

• Greater mental clarity

• Clear sense of purpose

• Better sleep

It's like napping your way to enlightenment!

One of the things I love about Yoga Nidra is that ANYONE can do it.

Registration is now open! I can't wait for this to start. I'd love for you to join me. This really is a must-attend series that you can do from the comfort of your own home.

A Ticket Home: Meditations on Homelessness

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What is a mindful approach to homelessness? Perhaps this story can be a meditation on the subject.

Once when I was 21, I saw a guy on the side of the freeway off-ramp with a cardboard sign that said he was stranded and hungry. My heart broke. He looked like a nice guy who just needed a break.

Discovering Darrin

I turned the car around and picked him up. I bought him lunch. As we ate together, he told me that his name was Darren. He told me bits about his life, that he said he lived in San Diego, worked construction, and had recently traveled to Nebraska to attend his mother's funeral. He said that he had a wife and two kids at home but had become stranded in Utah and couldn't get back home to keep working. Without work he couldn't get home and all he needed was money for a bus ticket.

Just a week before, I had executed a brilliant plan to quit my lame desk job, take out a loan, and travel to Europe to for 5 weeks to be with my girlfriend. I didn't have much money, most of what I did have was borrowed with interest, but my heart ached that I had the means to travel to be with the one I loved and he didn't.

So, with my travel plans imminent, pressing preparations looming, and two thousand dollars of borrowed money in my pocket, I did what any naïve 21 year-old, eager to solve the problems of the universe would do: I bought Darren a bus ticket home from Utah to California. I even bought him a ticket to the movies next door to the Greyhound station so he could kill some time while he was waiting the three hours for his bus to leave. I drove away from the bus station feeling great, like I'd really done something to make the world a better place and that I’d really helped someone.

Will Work for Food: Darren Double Take

I went to Europe, had an enchanting five weeks in Austria and Germany, and came back jobless and in debt but in love and the richer for my experience.

I immediately began an all-out assault on the job market, desperate to join the ranks of that elite class of society known as “The Employed.” While driving around looking for anyone reckless enough to hire such an bohemian, I came off the same freeway off-ramp and to my great surprise, saw Darren standing there—same dude, different sign. And though I felt I might regret it, I did it anyway—I turned around, picked him up (again) and took him to lunch (again).

Darren didn't seem to remember me. I told him that I was the kid who bought him the ticket to San Diego several weeks earlier and I didn't mind telling him that I was a little pissed off that he was still stranded in Utah when I had paid his way home. I asked him why he didn't go to San Diego. He said he'd lost his bus ticket while at the movies. I told him that I felt that he'd taken advantage of me. He just sort of shrugged and went about eating his Big Mac. We went our separate ways.

Lessons Learned

In the years that followed, I'd see Darren now and again. His hair would be longer and he'd grown a beard. Every time that I saw him, he looked older. Time on the street was certainly not being kind to him.

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Still, I couldn't judge Darren too harshly. Despite the fact that he didn’t use my “ticket home,” I couldn't help but worry about him, this guy I didn't know. The more I thought about it, Darren didn't seem all the way right in his mind, you know? How could someone who probably needed some sort of guidance, and maybe even institutional help, be out there at the mercy of the streets?

For me, Darren put a real face on the entire blight homelessness. He made something huge and abstract very small and personal to me. And I guess that was the deeper realization for this naïve kid who thought he could somehow fix the world's problems with a little pocket money: that homelessness is bigger than buying someone a Big Mac and or even springing for a Greyhound ticket.

And looking back, I have also learned that it wasn’t wrong to try to help, even if the results were different than what I’d hoped for. I learned that the answer isn't to stop trying, but to try in better ways. How could I not try when Darren in out there somewhere?

More than 20 years later, even though I think it's wisest to donate time or money to the shelter, I still can't resist giving a few coins to someone down on their luck. And though I wouldn't do it again, I don't regret buying Darren a Greyhound ticket to San Diego.

Yes, I hope Darren gets what he deserves: happiness, a warm meal, and the chance to be with the people he loves.

I'm not the less for trying. Nor am I a saint. Who knows, someday if I'm down and out, maybe some kid will buy me a burger and a ticket back home.

Compassion for The World Starts Within

I believe the entrance into compassion for the outside world is to first develop a ready and familiar compassion for Self. Yoga is the best way I know to honor and nurture all aspects of Self. It may seem oblique, but in this light, coming to yoga practice or practicing yoga on your own is a powerful preliminary to helping solve the world's problems. It doesn't preclude us from lifting a finger in other ways, it just helps us lift said finger from the place of a clear mind, strong body, and a pure heart.

Scott

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31-Day Meditation Challenge: Your Most Most Incredible 2019 Starts With This!

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Christmas is Over, Now What?

You’ve indulged. You overate, you overdrank . . . and might just be feeling in sum: over it. Hopefully these next few days before the new year can be quiet and simple. Consider my up coming 31-Day Meditation Challenge.

The week between Christmas and New Years is actually a very special time. It’s that dead-of-winter time where you get to hibernate, meditate, and plant the seeds for what will live for you in the new year. What are you visualizing for 2019?

Power of Visualization

I have a faith in visualization that borders on religious—religious, because it work miracles, both in my life as well as the lives of millions of other people. My belief is simple: If you can see it, you can live into it.

Modern neuroscience agrees with me. Scientists say that the brain does not differentiate well between the images it translates through the eyes versus what it translates via thoughts, images, or ideas. Think about watching a thrilling movie— your heart pounds and your hands sweat, though your rational mind knows they are merely images on a screen.

This proposes a provocative idea: if your brain can’t differentiate well between reality and other images, why not visualize your ideal life and enjoy the feeling of success now? Speaking of seeing is believing, my wife has brilliantly constructed images set to music that reflect her ideal life using “mind movie” software, which she watches on a nearly daily basis to see where she’s directing her life.

Just like countless world-class athletes have shown, visualizing yourself succeed floods your system with all those feel-good and excitement chemicals like Dopamine, Serotonin, and Oxytocin, just like if you had recently accomplished your dreams. It makes you perform at your peak. Plus, since seeing is believing, visualizing yourself succeed shuts off the amygdala, the part of your brain that puts the brakes on doing scary things like jumping out of airplanes, risking talking to your boss about a raise, or hell, quitting that soul-sucking job once and for all and stretching yourself to do that thing you’ve always dreamed of doing. In short, when you see yourself succeed, you live into your vision of it.

This is because you are truly more powerful than you can imagine. Most likely, the biggest thing holding you back from experiencing your own innate magnificence is your lack of vision for it. Do you ever get comfortable with “good enough,” lose your sense of purpose, or busy yourself so much as to distract your mind from what it truly makes you feel alive?

Well if so, starting today, that’s going to change. I invite you to join me for a revolutionary, 31-day meditative journey that gives you the tools and the support to visualize and live into your own magnificent life.

31-Day Meditation Challenge

We’ll start together on New Years Day with a guided and vivid visualization of what your incredible life looks and feels like. This meditation will relax your body and put your mind into a flow state that boosts your creativity, optimizes your learning, and inspires your productivity to work toward the fulfillment of your dreams. Then, for the the entire month of January, you’ll meditate every day for 15 minutes a day. You’ll regularly revisit your visualization for the year as well as use any other form of meditation you like.

Once you register, you’ll get all the details for how the challenge works as well as information about several styles of meditation you can choose to do in addition to our New Year Visualization.

If you’re new to meditation, no problem. You’ll love this. If you’re an experienced meditator, great. We can use your meditation muscles to bolster the spirit of our group. Either way, this will be a fantastic opportunity to join a group of people all over the world benefitting the world with greater mindfulness. All month I’ll be sending you regular emails that offer instruction, support, and encouragement.

This will be fun, easy, and the perfect way to start 2019.

This 31-Day Meditation Challenge will also bless the lives of the people around you. In addition to visualizing an incredible life in 2019, regular meditation will also:

Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training

• Lower your stress levels

• Decrease your reactivity

• Increase your mindful responsiveness

• Improve your sleep

• Reaffirm your sense of purpose

• Give you personal and spiritual insight

• Improve your overall happiness

Do this for yourself. Do this for those privileged (or not so privileged on those off days) to live around you.

This costs only $31. And guess what, if you complete the challenge, you may opt to GET. YOUR. MONEY. BACK. (drop the mic).

Please join today and share bless the world with a more-mindful YOU. Please share this with anyone who would benefit.

Happy New Year!

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Meditating on 2018 and 2019

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I can’t believe that we are wrapping up 2018. Damn, this has been a big year!

Truly some life-changing events happened including: Moving from NYC, hosting some breathtaking yoga, writing, and meditation retreats to Hawaii, Italy, Ireland, Idaho, and Utah, teaching classes, courses, workshops in NYC and SLC, attending a life-changing retreat to Costa Rica where I saw God, launching two online courses, published over 50 articles online, traveling internationally on a writing assignment, conducting my first silent meditation retreat, conducting two Yoga Nidra immersions, making a career-high monthly income, completing a 75-hour Vinyasa Flow training at Wanderlust Hollywood, and attending a mind-blowing Flow for Writers workshop by NYT Bestseller author, Steven Kotler.

Oh, and moving to Southern France.

Can I just pause and breathe for a second, maybe take a bite of this croissant and sip some Bordeaux . . . thanks. Much better.

I realize that much of what happened in 2018 was the result of a regular visualization and meditation practice. It was the product of regularly getting quiet, learning to listen to my heart, and visualizing what was possible. I strongly believe that if you see if you see it, you can live into it. Often what you visualize doesn’t play out exactly the way you planned—often it’s much better than what you planned.

Again, seeing is believing so by visualizing your goals for 2019 regularly you will literally begin to manifest them into your life.

Other benefits of regular meditation and visualization are:

• Clarity of mind

• Clarity of purpose

• Calm and stress management

• Greater compassion

• Better sleep

• Spiritual advancement

How was your 2018? What do you envision for 2019?

I challenge you to rise to your potential, to up-level your game, and to think big into 2019 by visualizing outrageous possibilities for yourself and then to grow into those possibilities with the help of a daily meditation practice.

Starting January 1st I’ll be hosting a 31-Day Meditation Challenge. Join me!

We’ll start with a visualization of an incredible 2019 which defies expectations. Then, for the next 31 days, you’ll meditate every day, affirming and materializing the visualization by building a foundation of mindfulness. After the month is over, you’ll already be launched into an incredible year.

Come on, this will be fun! There will be tons of us doing this together. Join us!

A group of meditators benefits the world in vast ways, bringing magnificence into the world like expanding ripples in a pond.

The Challenge:

We’ll start the month with a powerful visualization (you can attend live or listen to a recording) of what’s possible for 2019. Then, all month I’ll send you support via emails with encouragement and instruction for meditating every day for 31 days for 15 minutes or more.

That's it.

We’ll be using a great meditation timer app called Insight Timer. This app has literally over 10,000 guided meditations to choose from that you can use to enhance your meditation practice.

With the support of the group, you will have the encouragement and connection to tap into the power that happens when a collective of people are meditating together. Even if we are meditating at different times, the power of intention that connects us will empower you and enable your greatest benefit.

If you are new to meditation, this is a perfect way to start 2019 with a new life-long practice. I’ll send you easy, in-depth explanations, teachings, and follow up to demystify the art and science of meditation, and establish yourself firmly in your practice.

If you are an experienced meditator, this is also a perfect way to join this powerful collective to bring new heights to your practice and open nedoors and awarenesses.

While I will be sending out guided meditations for you to use, you can also choose any style of meditation you'd like. We will each be tracking our meditations every day using Insight Timer which will track your meditations, enable you comment to each other, and help you feel connected to meditators all over the world.

Once you register, you'll begin receiving emails and resources to encourage you and support you along the way, including teachings and explanations about visualizations and about the why and how of meditation.

Plus, you'll receive an invitation to some live group meditations via Zoom. In the app, you'll be able to see and comment to the others in our group who are also doing this 31-day challenge.

This next 31 days will positively formulate 2019, change your life, and benefit the lives of everyone around you!

Once you Register

Once you register, you'll receive a welcome email with information about:

• Specifics of the challenge

• Live meditation times

• Many forms of meditation you might choose to do

• Downloading the app

• A catalogue of guided meditations, both my catalogue of recordings as well as literally thousands of others on Insight Timer, which you can keep to help support you on your meditative journey.

• Receiving supportive emails

What does this cost?

I'm more interested in you building a powerful 2019, succeeding in your meditations, and the world becoming more mindful than I am making money, so here's what I'm offering:

The 31-Day Meditation Challenge costs $31, so that you'll commit to it. And everyone who completes the challenge – meditates every day for the 31 days using the app for 15 minutes or more – can opt to get a FULL refund of their tuition. No hassle. No questions.

So, essentially this is free! My deepest desire is that I don't make a dime on this project!

I invite you to visualize an outstanding 2019 and commit to your own personal, mental wellbeing. I know you can do it and I'll support you every step of the way. Join me!

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