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

The Space Between

Fall Equinox, the season of balance. The holding of opposites between the illuminated light and the dark night. It’s a season of sustaining the awareness that light and dark are needed for our inner balance as we move away from the sun in our western hemisphere. Hard to believe summer is coming to a close, and Labor Day once again reminds of us of our outer duties returning to school or work. And for many adventures that present new frontiers of acceptance.

As for me, when this newsletter comes out, I would have dropped my daughter off for her freshman year at college and returned home to an emptier house. As I write this, I am sitting with the full awareness that the energy will be different, and I, too, will be venturing into a new beginning. Seasons change, life goes forward, and the beauty of living is to appreciate it all as one huge wonderful ride!

So I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on how sweet the journey has been, be it way too fast. I yearn to slow down and truly appreciate the hours spent being her mom. Yes, I can miss her. I know that parenting is never over; it just shifts. I am willing to parent with a long extension cord, and not a smothering grip, as I transition into my new role as parent to an adult. When do we become an adult? I sometimes question myself ever reaching that milestone even as my chronological age is given the title of senior citizen!

I’ll keep questioning my learned habits and patterns, stay open to possibility that I’m a work in progress, and know that life is always presenting new opportunities to learn and thrive. I will embrace change as a gift of staying open to a new season.

When we reach an ending, we must be able to accept the gift of grieving. The intellect fights it but the soul demands it. Personally, I know I will moan, but that primal sound is my ability to absorb the opposite which is my joy. The joy of loving so deeply. The wonder of letting go and allowing the new to come in. What is being presented now? What awaits?

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Our Global Yoga Therapy Day back on August 14 was a huge success! Over 25 students came in throughout the day. Sharing individually with a private therapist, they each received a personal practice and were able to feel connected in a heartfelt experience. The day was filled with hope as we shared a collective space for healing.

By offering the various tools of yoga, we find new ways to return to a state of balance as we go deeper into the more refined ways to calm the nervous system, and appreciate the ability to focus the thoughts. This is our gateway for the tools of meditation.

Like all good habits, meditation requires regular effort to make it a part of a healthy lifestyle:

• the ability to live life with greater creativity and increasing patience and tolerance

• the ability to reduce our inner frustrations and negative emotions as we gain new perspectives on stressful situations.

Please continue to join our year long commitment to meditating on the heart by sharing with me on Monday evenings as we practice together. Anyone can join as I guide a practice at 7:30 in the small room. My commitment is to stay balanced and go into the fall season with light and hope and lots of hugs.

And remember that all our wonderful teachers offer their profound wisdom as they guide you into a practice, by sharing the teachings that help cultivate and inspire living in our vibrant, youthful enthusiaam for the path unknown.

Be willing to be present to what is being going on in the NOW as we embrace this new season in all it’s glory of endings and beginnings. My favorite poet, David Whyte, expresses it beautifully, “inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.”

Blessings,

LJ