Yoga Meditation

To any helpful person, my questions:-
I’m looking for a “sticky” mat that is used to practice Yoga. I’ve seen these mats but have not been able to locate one in my vicinity. I would appreciate some direction to lead me to a source which sells these
convenient mats. To be honest, you could buy a non slip carpet liner 6′ x 9′ at Home Depot and cut it in to 3 or more mats. It won’t be as pretty, but it will be 75% cheaper.

What i have found is this: organized religion houses some great philosophy. In Hinduism, Buddhism, catholicism, and many other organized religions, the philosophy is housed in stories giving practitioners examples to follow. Often, many spend too much time focusing on the example and missing out on the core, spirit, philosophy, or Truth housed within the story. This is what turns a lot of people off, and this i greatly understand! Do you need organized religion to discover or practice these spiritual philosophies? most likely not. For some, it is a way to discover and implement more quickly what they inherently know, and for others it becomes a hinderence to their own spiritual growth.

As for practicing yoga without getting involved in the religous aspects of it, this can be done. Begin by simply trying asanas. if you find or have a good teacher, tell him/her that you are not particularily interested in the religious aspects of yoga practice. s/he should still direct and teach you the postures. from this, you will gain greater self awareness and eventually increased awareness of others. You may also find more of an interest in learning about the philosophies of all religions, the core spirituality that each holds (that is actually the same with every religion, just explained and housed in another context) and discover ways to implement the practices and ideologies into your daily life!

Ive been practicing yoga for about a year now, very inconsistently. Im still very tight and unable to to a complete forward bend or a perfect half lotus position. I find at this time, though, Im becoming more and more interested and excited about the practice of yoga, primarily astanga yoga. I have Beryl Bender birch’s book “power yoga”, as I cannot afford classes, and Ive started to practice most days of the week, for around 20-30min.

so my questions are:
1)can anyone give me a quick run-down of what each type of yoga (iyengar, kundalini, etc) means, and where some good web sites are for yoga lovers? good yoga tapes? books?I really want to learn more, and meet people who are into the same stuff.

2)I love madonna’s toned low-fat look, and Ive noticed, looking at yoga magazines, there are some practitioners who are very toned and graceful looking, and then there are some who look “average” - not noticeably toned or low-fat. (not that I think either is better or worse, but Im talking about my own personal goals). I want to know, do some of you do other workouts as well? I do walk (fast, around 7-10km/hr) 3 -4 days a week and do pilates 3 days, then do yoga 3 days a week for 20-30min, but Im wondering if I should walk more and do more skipping along with my yoga practice (I skip rope around 1-2 times a week). can you get very toned with more yoga, say 1 hour a day 5 days a week?and how much yoga:cardio is best for an amazing body? I dont want to sound like Im too superficial, but I really admire the bodies of celebrities like Madonna and Jenna Elfman (Dharma from Dharma and Greg) and know they do yoga. but what else, and what type of yoga, for how long?

“If a man marches out of step with his fellows it may be that he hears the sound of a different drummer or, perhaps, that he has a poor sense of rhythm.”
From Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”

True merit; like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
Lord Halifax

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

W. Heisenberg (German Physicist, 1901-1976)

“Everybody has enough personal power for something. The trick for the
warrior is to pull his personal power away from his weaknesses to his
warrior’s purpose.”

-Carlos Casteneda, Second Ring of Power.

In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing.

Apollonius Tyanaeus (Greek Traveller, 1st Century CE)

“The idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth.”
——–>Stephen Miller

“In a cat’s eyes, all things belong to cats.” English Proverb

I couldn’t wait for success . . . so I went ahead without it.
Jonathan Winters

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
- Thomas Szasz

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

- D.H. Lawrence

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
–D.H Lawrence

“The best time to make friends is before you need them.”
–Ethel Barrymore

I was feeling a lot of grief tonight as I started my yoga practice. For the purposes of this writing, the reasons for that grief don’t matter. All that matters is that the grief was with me, and I was looking to my yoga practice and breathing meditation as a way of nurturing myself, and perhaps easing some of that grief.

Troubled waters are a strange thing. They aren’t very pleasant to be in, but a lot of the most rewarding learning experiences can only be found on that rock that’s stuck out in the middle of that turbulent river. It would be nice if we could just fly out to the rock like my namesake, the seaeagle, but we humans are destined to get ourselves wet struggling through through the rapids to make it to that rock in the middle.

So it was with my practice tonight. I found myself in the middle of that river earlier today, vaguely aware of only some of the things that had led to the capsizing of my raft. I turned to my yoga practice as I have done in the past, hoping it would help me find a rock that I wasn’t even sure was there, but at the same time not really believing that I’d find a rock. (One of these days I’m sure I’ll develop some faith!) As it turns out, my practice did lead me to a rock. At the moment, it’s covered with moss, and it’s a slippery little sucker to try to hang onto, but at least I now know it’s there.

The rock in question is the present. Just like last night’s discovery, this came about through the breath. I was paying a lot of attention to my breath, because of what I’d discovered last night, and as I quietly felt and listened to my breath, I noticed the grief ebbing and flowing like waves on the beach. (I seem to have a water thing going tonight!) It didn’t take me long to notice a pattern to the ebb and flow. The grief ebbed when there was only this one breath, the present breath, and it flowed when I became distracted from the present breath, either by stray thoughts, or by reflections of how the previous breath had lived it’s life, or by expectations of how the next breath will live it’s life.

I spent a little while thinking about that with the back of my mind, while the front or my mind continued to be present with my breath, and I caught a glimpse of understanding about how in this present moment, only this present moment matters. Moments from the past mattered when they were present, and moments from the future will matter when it’s their turn to be present, but for right now, only this moment matters.

If you are thinking I mean it’s ok to go do whatever you want in this moment because it won’t matter in 5 seconds, you’d be wrong. All the moments are interconnected, and what you choose to do in this moment is the culmination of all past moments, and will influence all your future moments. But for right now the moments themselves don’t matter. All that matters is this moment. You can’t change the past moments. Likewise none of us has enough power or knowledge to completely define what our future moments will be before they arrive. And even if we could completely define the path we take to get to our future moments, we still cannot live that moment until it gets here. We must live that moment as it arrives, and it is only as it is lived that the moment becomes completely defined.

I discovered during my practice tonight that the pains of the past and the fears of the future don’t hurt me if I am completely present in this moment, this here, this now. It’s a slippery rock to hold. It’s extremely difficult for me not to spread myself heavily into the past and the future, leaving precious few feathers to keep a SeaEagle’s present warm, but at least I’ve figured out that it can be done. And who knows, perhaps as I survive more troubled waters, I’ll wear some of the moss off that rock, and make it easier to hang on to.