Life Needs to be Lived in Spontaneity

The word Grace has such a welcoming vibration. As Annie Lamont would remind me, “To summon, Grace, say ‘HELP’ and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn’t leave you where it found you.”

Yes, be prepared to truly let go and let life in. What changes us, heals us, and what ultimately transforms us is the release and then allow the chaos to begin.

I have no idea how one year later we got here! It has been a ride and yet together I feel our community has supported the journey here. We are opening the doors and raising the windows as we return to those sweet spontaneous moments of saying hello. To be able to hear laughter, smell the scent of some passing aroma whether it is hair conditioner, a familiar yet forgotten oil, or just the smell of some wonderful fresh detergent, I want to return to smell, taste, and seeing the unexpected of life in full togetherness.

Zoom serves a great purpose for our survival, but the hunger I have for a genuine hug is my devotion to keeping humanity alive. Life needs to be lived in spontaneity. The freedom to overhear a conversation and learn something new —or be included in a conversation that arose out of some mutually shared moment. To pause and listen as others pass by and to feel belonging in a shared space.

I miss the alive energy of shared souls. I know I am not alone in this desire to be together and hopefully, the inspiration to come back into our sweet center will happen as May begins. We have added some new classes and new teachers, and hope that new faces will soon feel the urge to begin a practice at YAF.

Thank you to everyone who is willing to get the vaccination, and we appreciate the respect of each student that continues to care for one another regardless of bias and learned patterns. We are so fortunate to be at this place now. 

Blessings,

Laura Jane

Tears to Laughter: May We Embrace All of Life

Practicing being human starts each day as I accept my limits and then try to expand my horizons with compassion and forgiveness for my struggles.  My soul is fully alive as I embrace all the emotions of living large.

I was brought to my knees as I grieved with the world for the loss of 157 lives exploding into a fire in Iran and the tragic death of Kobe Bryant, his sweet young daughter, and nine other special beings. And my deep sadness wallowed over the passing of Ram Dass, my personal inspiration for 40 years.  

Life and death are constant, and yet we avoid the persistent fear that exists whenever we are reminded that our physical life is so uncertain. I am confronted with the fragile space between each breath as the conscious acceptance that death breaks our hearts open again and again. Being fully alive, I accept all of it and to offer up the deep moan, the bitter cry, and anger for the depth revealed in this empty space.

While collectively we embrace all the families, friends, communities, nations, and the entire world with loving empathy for the profound losses, each of us becomes greatly aware of our own mortality. Heartbreak is the gateway for initiation to the soul and to inspire a desire for greater effort into the journey of the heart. To become mindful in the present moment as this pain arises, as a purely human experience, is honoring the gift of being alive. Allowing the soul to cultivate deep compassion for all humanity is awakened through grief. To block, avoid, to push back on this sacred doorway only creates the mind to suffer more pain.

To inhabit the ease of releasing resistance is my daily practice. Falling into the grief allows for a profound unfolding of love to be revealed. I am fully in love when I embrace the impermanence of my life in this physical body. I’m only here for a short while in the grand picture of humanity and yet I have been blessed to live in this time and space with great self-love and to embrace it by nourishing my soul daily.

Death is also a part of living. I know this is not the conversation we invite nor is it a comfortable topic for the average day as we play our various, daily roles of identity and function. The mind resists any idea that brings up the shadow of our being. Stress will keep presenting itself in the moods of depression or anxiety and then the habits of hiding begin to form. All my additive behaviors flourish in secrets and tend to hide the light of my soul from shining.

However, I am choosing today and every day to embrace and celebrate the possibilities of miracles that are available in the presence of living fully in the NOW. I am waking to gratitude for this day and appreciate the sweet fragile spaces between each breath. I choose to live fully with each opportunity to tell someone that I care, I see you, and I am listening to your heart.

I must practice to remember that perfection is a curse of my need for love and not the ability to be the love. As I accept all of myself with all the faulty parts, I can embrace the wholeness for life. Only from this perspective can I see how to navigate the mystery with all its hardships and blessings. I choose to be in love with life with all the messy pieces. I practice forgiveness that I am human while knowing I have the ability to choose my thoughts, my words, and my actions.

Yoga is living in the presence of the mind’s attention to focus inward. It takes continuous practice to learn the tools that allow for the activities of one’s mind to become stable and focused in order to see clearly in navigating the various choices and challenges of daily life. Our many classes offer wonderful opportunities to continue thriving as the teachings must be experienced as a living transformation. Please check out all the upcoming workshops and classes we are proud to present!

May you be led forward for the highest good of all as you go about your crazy day filled with great joy!

With love and light,

Laura Jane

To Name It is to Lose It

I always say in my teachings of yoga, “to name it is to lose IT .”

What is this IT that I refer to? It’s my deepest desire to communicate something that is beyond intellect and reason of thought, but has a quality of IT that arises into a pure felt experience. An experience that loses the little mind of reason and words into an empty space of pure being.

The confines of language and words limits my unlimited space of pure existence. I get in my own way by trying to ever explain to the intellect. How difficult teaching yoga becomes without the gift of feeling the somatic experience of just being present. My words only create an imagination or memory linked to what my little mind knows.

In other words, my limits are learned through my living in this body and mind. I have no understanding of what might be possible without the practice of letting go of words.

Try to sit and relax. The mind will wander into conversation of words. There always exists an inner communication that holds the mind from falling into the focus of simply being present to the feeling of the breath. There’s no outcome to the conversation. We think too much. We need to feel more.

To name it is to lose it. When teaching yoga, we must use the physical body, asana, to bring the mind into feeling. Then, by adding breath to the movement refines the focus, and bringing in sound allows thought to drop into pure awareness. A sound that the mind can purely feel. Vibration has no language; energy has no limits.

Language has great power. Watch the frustration of a baby without words. To misuse words can be harmful and yet to speak the truth can cut like a sword.

Where does thought arise from? Does it arise from my fear and inner need for survival to preserve my life? Or is something greater tapping into some inner landscape? Without words, there arises within the invisible space a beckoning, a pulsation that awakens IT, a pure inner knowing that has no words to give definition to it.

My role as teacher is to share these ancient tools. I must use communication skills that I have learned; and yet, it is my vibration of energy communicating love. My heartfelt enthusiasm is not to change anyone, but to inspire the possibility that we might be prisoners of our learned habits, thoughts, patterns of family blood, and beliefs. These are the walls created and formed to hide and protect our true self, and we might suffer trying hold on to them.

But what if there is a gateway into our inner wildness? To journey into a new frontier of possibility by listening of our soul. To go beyond confinement is to rediscover and connect to IT. To belong to life, and not the confinement, can be a lonely journey since the world colludes in holding up personas and habits of bias opinion as walls. Our own walls separate us from each other in forming true bonds of friendship, regardless of gender, social economic or race.

We always say that we know our yoga practice is working when our relationships are improving. To be courageous takes energy. To have energy takes the desire to let life in. And to let life in, we must be willing to let go. It can be painful to sit in uncertainty. Yet this is the gateway to the soul. By looking into the wildness of our inner frontier, we can drop the armor of protection and become kinder to our selves.

When we stop projecting outward, we accept our learned behaviors with forgiveness. A true friendship is a powerful presence in helping to see the prisons within, to inspire without judgement, to shift the landscape from outer to inner, and to support the journey with compassion. A true friend trusts the soul to find the light, to loosen the grip and open the way for grace to unfold. The Celtic word for this is “anam cara”, soul friend.

I am on my Celtic journey next week for a retreat in Ireland with an amazing group of friends, who have welcomed the desire to let go and embrace a sacred path home to the self. The teachings of yoga are my gifts to share, but the experience is open to the mystery of what will be revealed to each of us. That secret landscape is inviting and I hear the call.

Please listen to your inner knowing and remember that our words can trick us into staying confined in the familiar. Be willing to listen with your heart and go forward in love. Our yoga community is the welcoming of all soul friends to feel, be seen and embraced.

Blessings,

Laura Jane