You are Perfection! (& Sun-Moon classes below)

***A note to my beloved students: SCROLL DOWN past this post to the next one to see when I'll be teaching at Sun-Moon Yoga, 404 W. Huron close to down town. I will also probably be teaching at the Dakota Building (down Stadium, near Pauline) soon as well. I'll keep you all updated. Yay! :) ***

"Remember, there is no need to strive, there is no need to desire to be that which one is not. We are all perfect in our own way; all completely perfect in our imperfections. That's what makes each of us a masterpiece, created by the Universe." --Osho

Drop your need and desire for goals. That can be part of your career life, or other aspects of your life, but not part of yoga. Yoga is the release of striving, & the process of becoming aware of the expansiveness of the present moment. In each and every practice, each and every pose, you are precisely where you need to be. No goals needed :)

I often stress the point that yoga is a moving meditation. There is a nice article on this subject at:
http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/MeditationExperiences/id/52552
Scroll down a bit to get from the advertisements to the actual article.
It's quite lenghty, so here are some excerpts I found particularly interesting........

Beginning Meditation:
It is sometimes said that the first stages of the meditaion process are the most difficult. The first distraction is the physical body. Sometimes there is real pain in sitting, and sometimes the ego just tries to distract us by creating itches we will want to scratch. Sometimes there is hyperawareness of the physical body: heartbeat, the breathing apparatus, blocked sinuses, digestive discomfort, or some other pain in the physical body. When the body relaxes, sometimes the head fails forward or backward. But over time, meditation not only calms the mind and reduces blood-pressure, it builds up your core strength, just by sitting!

The second obstacle is the mind, which is accustomed to flowing outward and often resents the effort and discipline required to turn our attention inward-it creates all kinds of excuses about why we should be doing something else. Or, instead of being too rajasic, the mind becomes tamasic. Occasionally students report that when sitting for meditation they become unconscious and remember nothing of the experience. The mind becomes quiet and falls into a kind of unconscious sleep, instead of going into dhyana or samadhi. People who experience this state usually describe it as something like this. "I went away somewhere, but don't know where. I don't remember anything. I don't think I was asleep, but. . . ." That's ok. We spend all day with the mind on high-gear. It's normal for it to take a while to calm down - even weeks or months. Be compassionate and patient with yourself. It's an entirely new skill, like learning to ride a bike!

Deepening Our Meditation:
When we begin to spend more time in meditaion, awareness deepens; perceptions of the physical body may diminish while perceptions of the subtle body may appear, leading to a seeming alteration of normal spatial relations. A person may, for example, lose consciousness of the body from the neck down, and feel as if the head is expanding, or as though the body is levitating, or that their body is now facing in a different direction.

One of the most common experiences of meditators is the spontaneous stopping of the breath. When the mind goes deeper, the breath naturally becomes more shallow. In the West we say that this is because the metabolism slows and oxygen demand drops. The yogis say that the brain accumulates more prana and so less breath is needed.

Spiritual Meditation:
According to yoga, the ashta sattvika vikara (the "Eight Purifying Changes" - see http://www.cit-sakti.com/kundalini/experiences-of-meditation.htm and scroll about half-way down the page) occur because the emotions of devotion interact with certain pranic flows in the chakras of the subtle body and begin to purify the body-mind complex. Each of the five lower chakras controls the manifestation of energy into one of the five states of matter: solid, liquid, luminous, gaseous, and pure space. When emotions arise, they interact with the energies of these five centers, and the result is physical expression of an emotional state. When the emotions of love or longing for God or Universality or spirituality arise, the resulting expressions are considered positive because they purify the subtle nerve channels, or nadis. Get that Prana, that life-force energy flowing!!

When we practice meditation, we are creating space for calmness and groundedness. Some people mistakenly believe that this creates instant happiness. This is not true. Happiness and equanimity are not the same thing! What our state of calm, centered equanimity gives us is an opportunity to stay balanced in that state, or to move "up" toward positive feelings, or "down" toward negative feelings. The choice is ours, and we can see the process by which we influence these changes if we observe closely enough. In each moment, watching the breath, ask yourself, "What is my intention here?" If your intention is something other than sharing or inducing peace and good-will, take a moment to reconsider. Your peaceful actions literally make this world a more peaceful place.