Which reminds me of something a friend of mine says: “Why do we spend so much time and energy caring for the one thing we know will fail us – our bodies?”

We are not our bodies, which are nothing more than a collection of cells consisting mostly of space, and held together by consciousness.  Even the cells are not ours as they die off and regenerate.  Over the span of seven years every cell in our body will have turned over and been replaced.

Our bodies are homes – temporary homes – for our spirit.  And just like we care for our home as a way of honoring the people within it, we care for our bodies as a way of honoring our spirit.  But just as with any attachment, an attachment to our bodies pulls us away from an awareness of who and what we really are, we get caught up in the external world – the illusion – of separation, scarcity and lack, and suffering surely follows.

Death is so respected and revered within yogic philosophy that every class ends in it.  Literally translated, Savasana means “corpse pose,” or “pose of the dead man.”  This is where the practice dies…and where we practice dying.  The idea is to let go and surrender so fully, so completely its like dying.  And while it is the simplest pose in yoga for many it is the most challenging, because here we are asked to do nothing.  The more fully and completely we give ourselves over to this, the more deeply we integrate the benefits of our practice.  It is here where old constructs, stuck issues and rigid holding patterns really dissolve…if we allow it.

I once had a healer tell me I was so good at being strong, that I now needed to learn how to fall apart, and that it was the holding it all together that was keeping me from integrating some valuable life lessons.  It is one of the most beautiful moments in life when the ego gives way.  Old constructs dismantle, outdated beliefs and habit patterns unravel.  Which is why Marianne Williamson says, breakdowns are highly underrated.

A friend of mine spent much of his adult life going from relationship to relationship, merely segueing from one to the next without ever integrating the lessons learned and the growth inherent in them.  When he finally had enough he stopped, not because there was no longer anyone new and interesting out there, but because he was ready to let an old pattern die, and knew that he had not yet fully integrated that.

While I often say to students of yoga that the asanas (postures) are a great way to get out of our heads and into our bodies, it is the space between the asanas that is most rich.  Because there we experience a sense of timelessness, and even if for just a moment, we feel our connection with everything.  There is beauty in that void.  Within that void is pure consciousness.

Even on a cellular level, the dying is as valuable as birth, and must happen in order for new life to occur.  Death is nothing more than a shedding of the body, and of the ego, and we are returned to pure consciousness, pure potential, pure energy.  A basic law of physics states that no two things can occupy the same space at the same time.  What are you ready to let die in order to let the truth live?  With every ending there is a new beginning.  What is waiting to be called forth into your life as soon as you make room for it?  As soon as you let go of what is blocking it?

Before we learned that we were anything but love, we knew we were connected to everything. We were in awe of life, of nature, of every bug, animal, and living creature, as well as rocks, shells, and blades of grass. Everything was a curiosity, and we wanted to explore and experience all of it. And just like our parents, and their parents before them, we lost something that was beautiful and rich and true. We lost our natural innocence.

It’s not difficult to imagine why. From our earliest memory we hear the words, watch the role models and participate in the rituals that have brainwashed us into believing we are inherently evil, born in sin, filled with guilt and shame, and must now spend the rest of our lives trying to make ourselves pure enough, and good enough, to be worthy of forgiveness and acceptance.

My cousin’s 6-year-old son recently asked, “Mom, how come I feel guilty all the time?” At a loss for words she asked, “Well…did you something wrong…maybe something you forgot about?” Shaking his head, he insisted, “No, I thought about and I can’t think of anything…so how come I feel guilty?”

She didn’t have an answer for him, for how do you explain to a 6-year-old something that we as adults are still trying to understand? I remember feeling the way Joey described as a child, and looking back now I can’t help but wonder at what age I bought into the guilt and shame.

We have inherited a world of guilt and fear. We are educated about it, programmed to identify with it, and taught to look for it. A perceptual lens has been handed to us, and because our head creates our world, we are now filtering everything through that lens of fear.

The way back to the pure innocence and joy and peace that we experienced as children is to free ourselves from perhaps the greatest lie ever told – that there is something intrinsically wrong with us.

*This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, due out later this year.

Finding your way onto your yoga mat, even when it’s the last thing you want to do, may be the best way to let go of the fear and anxiety that bubbles to the surface during these stressful times.  Emotions are energy in motion.  Failure to move that energy allows it to get stuck – lodged in our muscles, organs and tissues and causing us to contract around it.  Movement combined with deep, conscious breathing, frees that energy to flow through you, rather than getting stored.

Mentally, as we relieve tension in the body, so, too, do we experience more ease of mind.  There have been dozens of studies that prove the mind and body are linked.  It is not possible to truly relax the body and not have the mind follow.  The opposite is also true.  A simple way to test this theory for yourself is to sit tall, close your eyes, rest your hands in your lap, and breathe – deeply.  Do this for a full five minutes, letting the breath begin and end deep in the belly.  This simple practice will instantly relieve stress.

Yoga helps prepare the body and mind for meditation, another powerful way to find a place of stillness within.  In that space we can choose to drop down below the emotions, and the story that created them, and dwell in a place of peace.  That is a choice.

We don’t control the world, we create our realities based on the way we choose to interpret and respond, but there are much larger forces at play.

To believe we control life is dangerously arrogant.  At the least it is used as a more insidious way of judging ourselves and others.  At the very extreme, it can cause us to cease listening, operating under the belief that if we believe something strongly enough, we can bend life to our will.

How damaging and presumptuous of us to tell a rape victim, or a mother who has lost a child, that they created that experience, somehow inviting it into their lives.  Or that the victims of 9/11, and their families, are somehow to blame for their demise.  And while these men, women and children may one day be able to find a gift borne out of that experience, it is compassionless to rob one of their right, and their need, to feel and process their experiences in order to come out on the other side of it.  We are not machines quickly calculating the benefits of every life event without the need to experience any emotional fallout.   Nor would we want to be.

Life is a much more complex web of interwoven laws and theories, and it seems like a gross over-simplification to say anything we are experiencing is a result of our thoughts alone.  I believe in the Law of Attraction, but I also believe in the Law of Gravity, and no matter how much we tell ourselves we can fly, if we jump off of a building we are going to fall – at least at this stage in our evolutionary journey as human beings.

I’ll never forget the lack of compassion I once heard in a fellow yoga teacher’s voice as she shared the story of a friend who was murdered.  While going through a separation and potential divorce, and the disappointment and re-grouping that kind of life change invites one to engage in if they are going to keep their life real, she was attacked and killed by an intruder.  I cringed as I heard the story-teller share her suspicions that the victim may have been depressed, which would explain why in her weakened emotional state she could attract such a thing into her life.  I neither felt, nor heard, any true or genuine compassion in this person’s voice as she espoused her newly acquired belief so confidently.

Then there’s the new-age guilt this engenders for anyone on the conscious path who is trying so hard to create with conscious intent only to realize they have created something else.

It makes light of the human journey, and is most doggedly professed by those who recently found the power of positive thinking, and just haven’t been disillusioned yet.  It’s a better-dressed form of judgment and blame, almost imperceptible in its new duds.  This new-age pop-psychology feels like such an improvement over the old victim-mentality, because if you’ve been walking through life hitting yourself in the head with two hammers, and suddenly you realize what you’re doing and drop one of them, it feels like a dramatic improvement, but you’re still hitting yourself in the head.

Sometimes the honesty is the work, not the changing of the mind.

If I kept believing that I controlled life with my thoughts alone, I may have put a lot more time and energy into bending the reality of my experience when I was in the corporate world to fit some ideal in my mind, maybe almost convincing myself that I loved it when I genuinely didn’t.   I could have used visualization techniques to manifest more or less of something, almost buying into the belief that I was getting what I truly wanted.  And while to a degree I may have been successful, it wouldn’t have been in alignment with a deep, inner truth that there was another, richer path for me to take.  I would have missed out on the gentle nudges of spirit – of life – encouraging me in a new direction.  I would have missed out on the wonder and beauty of the last ten years.

I have come across those in my travels that only see the value in feeling good, and won’t stop long enough to be real, even with themselves, out of the belief that the mind is so creative that to allow anything other than bliss is an error.  But how real can that really be?

We think an average of 60,000+ thoughts per day, and it would be impossible for us to monitor all of them.  But if we can learn to become aware of the energy that is moving through us, to recognize and allow rather than stuff or deny what is happening for us, and then strengthen our ability to let go and transcend our fluctuating emotional state rather than try to deny or control every one of our thoughts, we stay real…we stay honest.

There is no light without shadow.  There are those that live in houses where everything you see is neat and in order, but you look under the bed, or open up their closets and you find a chaotic mess.  It’s the same new-age “guilters” that would have you believe there is no value to anger, sadness or grief – some of the emotions with the greatest gifts to share.

Our emotions always have a message for us, and if we tell ourselves there is no true value to certain ones, we are more inclined to pretend we aren’t feeling what we’re feeling.  All of this can lead to completely missing the message.

Author and speaker Marianne Williamson says the Universe is simply here to agree with us.  Do we really think we can fool the universe into believing we are happy and positive because we portray only that to the outside world?  True humility means recognizing that life is at least as smart as we are.

The real work is not avoiding difficult emotions.  It’s getting quiet enough, and honest enough, to recognize what is old, egoic stuff looking for a fix of drama and suffering, and what is spirit talking to us, inviting us into another moment, another opportunity, to be completely and uncompromisingly honest with ourselves.

But while we are focusing on filling our roles as employees or business owners, parents, spouses, caretakers to our parents, responsible neighbors, involved community members, politically proactive persons and homeowners, there is little if any time left for the most important relationship we will ever have in this lifetime…the one we have with ourselves.

As life around us has reached warped speed, it is easier to clamor for a quick fix, a way to self-medicate, an opportunity to numb out, than it is to simply stop, breathe and check in with ourselves.  In a time and place where slowing down or stopping altogether is judged lazy, weak and unproductive, the innate desire to do just that has become shrouded in guilt.  We think to ourselves, why should I be the one that needs to step back and re-evaluate the quality of my life, when everyone else seems to be doing just fine?

And that’s the biggest misconception of all.  Everyone else is not doing just fine.  We’ve just learned to keep going…to wake up, put on the social mask, and go through the motions.

When you start to become more aware your Self and look around you at others standing in line at the grocery store, sitting in traffic, at colleagues, friends and neighbors going about their lives, you begin to see that the vast majority of them are on automatic pilot, too.  While pumping gas they are thinking about an interaction with the boss the day before, or mowing the lawn while reliving last night’s fight with the spouse, or driving home from work while stressing over where the money is going to come from to pay this month’s bills.  Have you ever arrived at your destination only to realize you have no recollection of the drive?

So distracted are we by the thoughts, worries and fears filling every crease and crevice of our minds that we have lost touch with the present moment.  For the most part inner peace and happiness are fleeting feelings, often closely linked to some external event in our lives.

I have allowed myself to be pulled from my center more than once, and have floundered about, looking for peace and connectedness outside of myself, feeling angry and disappointed when it doesn’t present itself, or when it does but for a short time before evaporating into thin air.  Quick fixes never last.  And true peace and lasting happiness will never be found outside of ourselves.

After a lifetime of moving through life virtually asleep, it’s time to learn to sit and be, without the constant compulsive behavior of doing…moving from one distraction to another.

In yoga, there is an asana (posture) called Tadasana, or Mountain Pose. Here you are encouraged to stand tall and intentionally; to elongate your spine and lift your heart toward the sky; letting your shoulders relax down your back, all the while grounding yourself as you become very aware of your feet touching the Earth. It’s a very confident, powerful stance – like standing at attention, but without the tension.

Tadasana is a great opportunity to notice how we hold ourselves in relationship to the world around us. Through our bodies do we energetically meet the world from a place of inner strength and confidence? Or are our shoulders rounded, head bowed forward as we buckle under the weight of life, our posture an indicator of just how exhausted and powerless we feel?

And when you add language to the mix, choosing words to communicate your inner reality, you further define yourself for, and to, others. The way others treat us is in direct response to the way they see us treating ourselves. If we honor and respect ourselves in all ways, others will do the same. We set the standard. We create our reality. If we are hard on ourselves, berating and blaming ourselves for mistakes or when things do not go as expected, others may feel comfortable doing the same. In other words, if we are willing to blame ourselves when things go awry, they may be willing to as well. If we are kind and gentle with ourselves, honoring and respecting our humanity and remembering that mistakes are what help us grow, others may see that in us as well.

One thing we can be sure of, nobody is going to give us anything we are not willing to claim for ourselves. If they did, we wouldn’t be able to receive it anyway.

We teach people how to treat us. Everything we do and say, every mannerism, speaks volumes about who and what we are. Every choice we make conveys a message about us. Without even necessarily saying a word we are communicating with those around us. Consciously or unconsciously, we are always communicating.

Start by noticing your posture, and how you hold yourself. Next time you are standing in line at the grocery store, washing dishes in the kitchen sink, or brushing your teeth, take a moment to check in and notice how you are standing. Make a conscious choice to stand tall, and confidently claim your space in the world.

Then choose your words, and your actions, wisely. They send messages to the world around you, and like powerful magnets attract the people, circumstances and opportunities that can meet you at your level. If you want to change your reality, start by being conscious of the way you are showing up in your life.

From the Sea of Infinite Possibilities a seed of raw potential is planted, and shows up in our mind as an inspired thought. If the mind is open enough to receive it, that thought begins to take shape, formulating as an image in our minds. That image, brought more and more into focus – like the fine tuning of the lens on a camera – becomes a vision in our minds.

If we believe in the vision and in ourselves enough we start to put it into words, speaking it into existence in the minds of others, as well as our own. If the audience is chosen wisely, and our vision is supported, the energy around this possibility strengthens, and we start to feel it as a possibility. If our heart is open, and we give ourselves permission to feel it happening, the energy continues to solidify, and we start to take action. Those who lack heart will not take the steps necessary to call this idea forth into existence, and the energy will fade, the flame dying out. This is where the saying “all talk and no action” comes in. The heart has to be on board, then we must be willing to move, to take action, to do what needs to be done, and to have confidence in our ability to do so.

The next stop – or go – in the channel of creation is recognizing our inter-dependence on each other. We need each other. If we are healthy, open and aligned, we will attract all the right people, circumstances and opportunities needed. The health of our life is a direct reflection on, and extension of, the health of our relationships. And the health of our relationships is a direct reflection on, and extension of, our relationship with ourselves. We are all in this together, and nobody has ever accomplished anything great without the love and support of others.

And finally, if the energy is still moving, alive around this possibility, and we are grounded and stable and focused enough to give birth to it, this inspired thought which was nothing more than an idea is born through us.

We are creative beings. Allowing energy to move through us is to create, is to be alive. If we are not creating, energy is not moving, eventually getting hung up…stuck. And if energy is not flowing outward in a creative way it is being turned inward, driven into the nervous system. If this continues long enough, that energy eventually collapses in on itself. I know far to many people who are just making it through life, essentially waiting to die, their lives lacking spark because their internal flame has so diminished it has very nearly extinguished.

Life isn’t something to be gotten through, it’s something to be celebrated. If we aren’t celebrating, more than likely we’ve stopped creating.

Only creative people are happy.

OSHO

Allowing this slippery slope to occur in your relationships sets you up for disappointment, and the relationship either becomes painfully dysfunctional, or dies a slow and agonizing death. In the end you are left feeling lost, abandoned and confused, and your self esteem plummets to an all time low.

To avoid this relationship pitfall, a healthy relationship requires you to honor You, and to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate who you are and who you are not in relationship. Redefine your relationships and recognize them as incredible opportunities to grow and evolve to higher and higher levels of self awareness. Set appropriate boundaries, learn to say “no” if something feels uncomfortable and does not honor you, and spend time alone, cultivating the most important relationship you will ever really have – the one you have with yourself. Doing so sets your feet on firmer ground, allowing you to be more centered and balanced in your relationship, and less needy, clingy and dependent.

Making these choices, consciously, increases your feelings of personal power – which will also be felt in other areas of your life. Conscious and healthy choices raises your self esteem, and cultivates and nourishes a sense of inner security that is unaffected by the actions of others.

Keep a strong network of friends, continue to grow as an individual both outside of and inside of the relationship, speak your truth and practice deep listening. When we see relationships as the opportunity for personal growth that they really are, we can avoid de-valuing ourselves by making somebody else the center of our world. Allow your self to be self-centered – not in a selfish, egotistical way, but in a self-full and self-loving way. Being centered in your Self and coming from love within is also honoring and loving others. Because it allows you to be more grounded, secure, honest and real. Respecting your Self requires others to respect you. Strive to discover and become your authentic Self in all of your relationships and they will become enjoyable, enduring and deep.

Now take the raw data that came at us throughout our lifetime, and add to that the interpretations we made, often erroneous, about what really happened. And like an old record stuck in a groove, we keep replaying a song over and over again, bringing into our current reality recycled experiences of our past. The players may change, but the story line is the same. Everyone else in our life simply becomes a foil for us and all that we have yet to learn. This continues until we finally have our fill of that old story and decide to break out of the pattern of thinking that recreates it over and over again.

Then there’s the unconscious programming that has been passed down through the lineage, from one generation to the next. I remember when my grandmother died her sister, whom I barely knew and had only met maybe a couple of times, came to her funeral. That evening as I walked around the corner into the dining room, I stopped short and took a double-take as I was sure it was my grandmother sitting there at the table. Her sister was holding her head in the same tilted way my grandmother did when she was listening intently to someone, and her gestures and mannerisms were almost identical. What’s more, I realized I engage in the same ones. Somehow, these mannerisms had been passed down through the family tree without any conscious intention. This often makes me wonder, if simple hand gestures and facial expressions could be mimicked and learned so easily and subtly, what other familial beliefs, thought patterns and behaviors have been inherited? And could this be why some habits are so deeply ingrained they seem nearly impossible to break?

Not to mention the karma that is passed down from previous lifetimes. They say matter cannot be created or destroyed, so every cell that is in you and me now has always been in existence. So now we are dealing with cellular memory that is so deeply ingrained, its in our DNA. I have witnessed more than one past-life regression where someone with a current condition in this lifetime was able to trace it back to an experience from a previous life while in hypnosis.

And it is from old programming, deeply ingrained in an operating system that is beyond our conscious awareness, that our interpretation of current events is made. Knee-jerk reactions happen quickly, often leaving us feeling embarrassed for having lost control in such a manner, guilty because it happened yet again, or angry because we can’t seem to control it and therefore it becomes easier to blame the other person…and the cycle continues.

But our feelings stem from our thoughts, not the other way around, and our thoughts are generated from a belief system that is so deeply ingrained we buy into it as if it is absolute truth. Those beliefs are a product of everything we’ve ever been taught, told, experienced or witnessed.

The way our of this reactive, disempowering loop is to become aware of our assumptions. Even with the awareness I have gained of how the subconscious mind works and influences everything about our perception, I still find myself, when I’m not careful, engaging in an old storyline. I know I have done this when I feel myself contracting, shutting down, and judging myself or another as right or wrong, good or bad. Judgment is a sure sign that we are stuck in a story line.

The mind, like a computer, is programmed to look for patterns that are familiar, and it is so good at doing this we see things even when they are not there. Even when only pieces of the puzzle are present, we will often fill in the rest with our imagination in order to complete the pattern. So it is helpful for us to check in with ourselves often and ask, “is it true?”, and begin to challenge our assumptions.

When a pattern repeats itself often enough that we are finally able to see it, there’s a gift in that. Because only then can we decide if we are truly finished with that reactive loop.

Think about a habit pattern in your life of which you are ready to be free. If you can trace the feeling back to the sponsoring thought behind it (and this part can be tricky because it requires you to be uncompromisingly honest with yourself), then you can acknowledge that thought and bring it forth into your conscious awareness. Now that you are willing and able to look at it, consider for a moment what the underlying belief is that generates that thought. If this is a belief that does not serve you, that is ultimately harming you and wreaking havoc in an area of your life, are you willing to replace it with a new belief? One that serves you better?

There’s an opportunity here to pull the plug on those outdated, erroneous beliefs. But whenever you let go of something in your life you are creating a space, and if you aren’t deliberate about what you fill that space with, you will likely fall back into the old pattern. Replace the old belief with a healthier, more empowered one. Stop feeding energy to those thoughts that don’t serve you, and start feeding the ones that do.

One of my favorite quotes is:

Watch your thoughts, they become words.

Watch your words, they become actions.

Watch your actions, they become habits.

Watch your habits, they become your character.

Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

Use this awareness to consciously create your life. Start by knowing what you want, then focus your thoughts and energy on that. Pay attention to where you are going, not where you have been. See what you want, and feel it as if it is already happening. Keep moving in that general direction with all of your thoughts, decisions and actions. You will be amazed at what starts to show up.

Feeling stuck? Consider this: What are you more afraid of? The belief that you don’t create your reality, or the belief that you do?

Think back to your most recent mistake, a choice made that resulted in an inconvenient or even disastrous outcome. Now muddle through the memory all the way back to the original thought, the point of choice that led you in that direction as opposed to another. If you are able to become uncompromisingly honest with yourself, and strip away any face-saving story that may have been weaved around that decision, chances are you knew there was an element of risk involved, but ventured down that road anyway. Somewhere, either in the recesses of your mind, or even floating around frontally, the information was there; the information that warned of potential danger. Yet you made a choice to see it through, in spite of the inherent risks.

Why, then, when things go awry do we beat ourselves up and succumb to guilt and shame? Or, worse, act like a victim taken painfully advantage of? Imagine if we could choose to look at our lives more honestly and objectively, without all of the emotional excuse-making and denial we, as humans, tend to engage in. Wouldn’t we live more freely, and with less angst, if we could forgive ourselves for our mistakes, and recognize that it is those mistakes that have ultimately enriched our lives the most? Sometimes it takes some time and perspective before we are able to take this powerful step. But without it, we can stay painfully and stubbornly stuck in the past.

A life not lived is the tragedy, not the mistakes that we make. The mistakes are gifts, opportunities to grow and expand and evolve in new ways. If the area in us that is most challenged by our mistakes didn’t need development, we would never have felt the need to go down that rabbit hole to begin with. On some deeper level, we were inviting the universe to put our next lesson before us. Some of us learn that lesson more painfully than others. And however we choose to make the trip – be it kicking and screaming, or grounded and with our eyes wide open, we can be sure that it won’t be our last. Life is full of moments of choice, and there is no way of knowing exactly how something is going to play out. Sometimes it is worth taking a chance, for without taking risks we may end up with a life not lived.

And regardless of the outcome, peace of mind comes from how we frame something in our minds. We get to choose who we are going to be in relationship to the mistakes in our life. We can let it beat us and break us down, or we can choose to acknowledge the lesson learned and let it strengthen who we are at our very core. Knowing this, perhaps we can take accountability for our actions in a way that builds character, and then forgive ourselves and let it go. Whatever we choose, we can gain some peace if we can remember, even if for just a moment, that mistakes are what keep life interesting.

Which begs the question: Were they ever really mistakes?