Dedicating your practice

We do yoga for all sorts of reasons. For stress relief, exercise, strength, a mood-lift, to help an injury recover, to get lost in a moving meditation... All of these reasons, physical, mental and spiritual, are good ones. The idea of dedicating our practice can take us one step further. When yoga is used to work on dissolving the Self, there is then tremendous energy available that can be turned outward for a genuinely positive effect on the universe.

Often, in our daily lives, we are directing energy outward already, but it is the energy of fear, anger, mistrust, or other negative states that our society unfortunately supports and engenders sometimes.

So first, we learn how to work with positive energy in our yoga practice; how to start it flowing in the body, and then how to radiate it outward.

We can dedicate this energy in a number of ways. Many of you already do so. Here are some of them:

Dedicate your practice to someone or something you are grateful for. A traditional meditation practice is to keep a running list of all people (& animals!) you feel gratitude for - and to extend this list by one every time you practice.

Dedicate your practice to someone in your life, who is struggling or suffering. Visualize your own efforts freeing up some energy for this person; gifting them some extra prana. In particular, you can offer challenges in your practice - and your willingness to face them - to this person, as an act of compassion and connection.

Dedicate your practice to your teachers, including not just your formal yoga teachers, but all the people and experiences in your life that "teach" you every day, by providing you with an opportunity to learn, change, reflect, grow, and practice.

Once we begin regularly dedicating our practice, it becomes an essential component of our yoga. From there, it is an increasingly easy transition to dedicate your time and attention positively during the rest of your day. You can meditate during time stuck in traffic, and send positive energy out to anyone you know who is feeling stuck or trapped in their life. You can bag your groceries at the grocery store and dedicate that energy to all the people who helped bring you that food - farmers, laborers, truckers - a string of countless interconnected people now involving you. You can listen with full attention to a child's description of all his favorite cartoons that you've never heard of, dedicating this compassionate attention to both the child and to yourself, for all the times you were not listened to by grown-ups. So this outward flow of energy does not come at your own expense! On the contrary, as you radiate this loving energy out to the world and everyone in it, you will begin to see and feel it everywhere. We are all Bodhisattvas walking this Earth, if we only stop and remember.