When I feel unsettled, or somehow not quite in the flow, I realize that in some way, I am in resistance to what is. So I go inside and practice non-resistance. Here is what I do. Give it a try if you like. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, if you notice you feel disconnected, immediately pause. Notice that you feel unsettled, and begin your non-resistance practice. Start simply, with just looking at your surroundings, and noticing what you see. Just watch, without adding stories to things. For example, you see a tree out the window. Just watch it. Notice the tree, the dancing leaves, the light and the colour. Should you hear a car drive by, just notice it. You hear it drive towards you then past you. So it is.
Then feel your body within your surroundings. If you are sitting, feel your body on the chair. If you are lying down, feel the weight of your body towards the ground. Just notice how you feel. Notice the softness or hardness of the surface supporting you. Then draw your attention to your breath. What does it feel like? Breathe in. Breathe out. Move your awareness inward and just notice. Feel the quality of breathing. Is it heavy? Is it light? Is it easy? Is it restricted?
In this, everything begins to settle and you feel not limited to your thoughts, to the sense of being separate in a body. You begin to feel divisiveness dissolve, replaced by energy, flow and abundance. You feel connected and interconnected. You feel flow. Just stay with that, watching. When you start to think about what you will have for dinner, or if you will get that call, notice you are going into thinking. Simply and gently bring your attention back to the feeling of being rooted and expansive, here and now. #parvati #positivepossibilitieslady #yem #yoga #yogini #yogaasenergymedicine #yogateacher #yogaquote #energywork #breathwork #selfhealing #grace #lifeforce #nature #oneness #consciousness #health #namaste #meditation #meditate
When we have a super busy life, we may immediately react to the idea of meditation by perceiving it as just another thing we have to fit into an already packed schedule. Since meditation is a practice, the more we put into it, the more we get out of it. Every moment spent in quiet sitting meditation has always yielded many inexplicable jewels for me. As I say, the more I meditate, the more time I have. My mind is quieter. I see more clearly. I act with greater insight and confidence. I get more done. I feel happier, more energized and more relaxed. #parvati #positivepossibilities #positivepossibilitieslady #positivepossibilitiesreminder #lightworker #dailyreminder #dailyquote #guidance #personalgrowth #spiritualgrowth #wisdom #lifemakeover #universe #cocreation #breathe #universe #personaltransformation #happiness #love #joy #clarity #calm #meditate #meditation #namaste
I heard in public and private messages that last week’s blog post about Facing Stress with a Meditative Mindset touched a chord with a number of people. Thank you for letting me know it spoke to your heart! That is the main reason I share my heart each week about Life in the Positive Possibilities.
Image credit: Hartwig HKD THE GIFT OF WITNESSING (Continued from Willingness to Disarm the Ego) The meditation practice known as witnessing provides powerful insights into the ways in which we are attached to our perceptions. It has shown me the parameters of my active ego with extraordinary clarity. Witnessing has provided lasting shifts in the way I think and perceive. It has helped me move from being attached to painful thoughts, to living with greater freedom and joy. Witnessing is an essential part of any sincere meditator’s practice. It is at the heart of yoga and spiritual development. Witnessing is not the same as observing. Because witnessing is rooted in non-attachment, it flowers from the understanding that our senses are limited and do not contain the full picture of reality. Our perceptions are temporary, as they change with circumstance and are subject to our moods and whims. What and how we perceive is coloured by the ups and downs of our ego’s dramas. Through witnessing practice, we meet the moment as it is, without any overlay of how we want it to be. This occurs when we move beyond our attachments to our perceptions, which happens only once we understand that they are not the whole truth. There is a substratum, a deeper unchanging truth, that…
Hello Friends, It has been an exceptionally busy fall as I prepare to launch a new website early in 2015, which includes an online TV channel full of inspirational content. The new not-for-profit, created in response to the Arctic seabed bombing, is now official! We got our incorporation papers just before Christmas. Our mission is to “work to support a healthy environment and healthy people so that we have a healthy world.” We now have a placeholder page in place at parvati.org. We are building it out behind the scenes right now! Please go there to sign the petitions, if you have not done so already. Also sign up to get notified when the full site goes live and of actions you can take in support. If you would like to help stop seismic bombing in the Arctic Ocean now, please email me at parvati@parvati.org. Specifically we are looking for those who can research the companies involved and those who can support marketing the campaigns. Our strategy is peacefully economic, rather than political. We wish to show the oil companies that consumers will not support seismic testing. This is why we need to know the companies involved that deal with the public. For more about this, please email me. In light of this recent call to…
Meeting The Moment Without Stress Fifteen or twenty years ago, I heard someone say that if you are stressed, you are in your ego. At that time, I had no idea if that were true or what a life without stress would look like. But somehow, the words stuck in the recesses of my mind. They have acted as a backdrop to the ongoing spiritual experiment that is my life. As I have been in the recent process of honouring an unstoppable force moving through my life, a new vibration has begun to reverberate in my cells. I now feel closer than ever to understanding what a life without stress means, and what it looks like to live in effortless ease in every moment, every day. Through my Hatha Yoga practice and teaching, I have come to know that any form of movement that arises from wanting is one that perpetuates or creates karma. Whether we push into a pose and reach for some elusive sense of externalized perfection, or move out of a pose feeling uneasy or even repulsed by what we felt in it, we are acting from an unyogic, that is, non-unified or divisive, state of mind. This will only generate suffering for ourselves and others. At its heart, Hatha Yoga is not…
KEEP THE CHANNEL OPEN I recently posted a three-part blog series on Karma Yoga and selfless service. I have been contemplating for some time what service truly means. For much of my life, I thought of it as something external, to serve “others”, to act for someone or something “out there”. I am beginning to understand service as being most simply about presence, being connected to the fullness of this moment as it is. When I am present, I feel connected to others and to all things. In that presence, if the energy arises to act in service, I act accordingly. I am now also finding my own self in this picture of service. The energy to serve arises through this body. It is my job to honour and listen to it, selflessly. I play small when I do not listen to that impulse. I interfere, get in the way, and become an obstacle to service. I understand more fully that to be in I Am presence is to be in service to the creative flow. To be present is to be our unfiltered, fully expressed magnificence. The great modern dancer Martha Graham, who is said to be like the Picasso of dance, once illustrated this point so beautifully. She said: “There is a vitality, a…
My daily morning meditation practice is the foundation of my life. Each day I sit and do my best to meet myself as I am. Some days, I struggle with what I find. Others, I am able to embrace what is without resistance and blossom into a new relationship with myself, this moment and the world. Whatever the sit brings, I find that it serves to dissolve any notion of separateness between who I am now, what I am meant to be, who I was and where I am going. Through meditation, I find a meeting of the past and future in the fullness of the now. My body is always a great teacher in learning to be present. Over the past few months, I chose to burn the candle at both ends and meet the opportunity to co-direct my first music video. It has been fabulously exhilarating, pushed my buttons to no end, felt perfectly on path and challenging in many new ways. Growth for sure! This past week, I felt the cumulative toll of the many late nights and very long days. So my body has been letting me know, right in alignment with budding spring, that it is time for a shift in my life rhythm. As I went deeper today to meet…
When I am not on tour, my life is busy preparing to go back on the road. These past months have been full on with new musical releases, video and show production and website launching. Thankfully, I have a dedicated meditation practice that helps me revitalize and keep a big picture while being able to be present in the here and now. Every day, as soon as I wake up, I wash up and head downstairs to my cushion to start my day from a centered place. When I arrived at my meditation seat the other day, all I could feel was my pounding head. I had not had enough sleep, and woke up with a headache. For most of us, our knee-jerk reaction to pain is to either try to push it away with denial, medication and temporary pleasures, or run towards it by projecting judgment or anger at it, as though it were a roadblock to our happiness. In a meditative mood, I welcomed my headache into my field of awareness and allowed it to be part of my practice. After all, it was what this moment contained. Sitting quietly in a relaxed yet attentive manner, I opened to it, as though it were trying to communicate something to me. I did not prod.…
I just returned from being in England over the past few weeks. On a professional level, it was an excellent, full on time performing and teaching, moving my projects forward, meeting great people and finding out more about the world and myself. But what I learned was beyond all of this. The day after my first show at the Mind Body Spirit Festival in London, I developed severe laryngitis. This may seem like a tragedy for one who uses her voice to perform and teach. But for one who has made a promise to the spiritual path, I know that the universe has an amazing way of keeping us honest and on path. Adversity is nothing other than a gift in disguise. As I allowed myself to soften into the physical and emotional discomfort I felt having absolutely no voice, I found myself inundated with memories from what seemed to be a past life memory in London dying of consumption (tuberculosis). At that time, my lungs were full of fluid. I could not breathe, and I felt silent in my ability to voice feelings of powerlessness. In the present, what lingered was resentment of having died in a state of sorrow. So I welcomed these feelings as part of healing my laryngitis. However, my memories did…