Silvia's Blog
ACCOUNTABILITY
MARCH 27, 2010: Your life is the way it is because of YOU. Can you imagine a world in which everyone holds themselves accountable for the quality of their life? I dreamed of a place where no one places blame on anyone else for the circumstances of their life. There is no longer a victim mentality or as Rusty Wells said, Yoga is the anti-victim mentality. Your life is the way it is because of you.
When I first figured this out as part of yogic teachings the thing I was most blown away by was that this meant I had to work at my own development, happiness and spiritual growth. This in yoga we know as Sadhana, we work daily as a practice on our own inner evolution. This evolution is where we take responsibility moment by moment for what we say, how we act, how we breath, what we think.
This active living of life or as a best dear friend always says, “Try Life. Live it.” Makes it clear that we are living and learning from the experience of life moment to moment. And that this is true living of life is only taking place in the present. We can too easily fall prey to lamenting the past and pushing blame on things that have expired or forecasting some neurotic tendency towards the future. If we are taking full responsibility then we are living on purpose right now. Everything we do is on purpose or with conscious intent. Even something like kindness, where I go to sleep each night and say to myself “tomorrow I am going to be 11% kinder” requires me to stay present to each situation, person or thing that I encounter and see the best in it.
Kindness takes work. Taking responsibility for one’s life takes work. But the good news is that then we get all the credit too.
Every time we come together in yoga class I realize that my dream has come true. What we do person to person on the mat is hold ourselves accountable pose to pose and at the end we celebrate by resting in quiet meditation known as savasana. Well deserved too! So join me on the mat, become part of my dream…more importantly become part of my reality of making this world the best place possible. Love! Silvia
TRUE SELF IS OUR BEST SELF
OCTOBER 23, 2009: It is a Spiritual Truth that TRUE HAPPINESS REQUIRES HONEST SELF-REFLECTION. THE MORE HONEST YOU ARE WITH YOURSELF, THE GREATER HAPPINESS YOU WILL EXPERIENCE. So let’s start by simply blessing ourselves for being present enough to give thanks for the opportunity to be ourselves. Enjoy these words of John O’Donohue.
I give thanks for arriving
Safely to a new dawn,
For the gift of eyes
To see the world
The gift of mind
To feel at home
In my life
I often say in class the hardest pose we do is being ourselves. The body does not lie so in a pose on the mat its just us, we have no one to point fingers at we can’t make excuses there is nowhere to run. We have to come home to our lives in that moment. And whether its hard or easy is irrelevant. The greater purpose is through the breathing and postures are you learning how to be honest with what you are feeling instead of denying it. The sooner we are courageous enough to be our TRUE SELVES then this inherently is being our BEST SELVES. And the more we are ourselves the greater happiness we will experience. Start today, love yourself, love your day, love your life! Silvia
A great exercise I offer you from Robert Holden who wrote Be Happy is this:
- Self-Awareness. You will always feel like something is missing, you will always feel inadequate until you learn to know yourself better. Life isn’t about getting more it is about being more of who you really are. Authenticity is the perfect antidote to split desires and to negative comparison. And the more real you are with yourself, the more you will realize what you really want. This is important because as Eric Hoofer put it “You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.”
- Self-Acceptance. For as long as you do not accept yourself, you will always want more than you have. If you will not accept that happiness is your true nature, you will search for happiness for the rest of your days. And if by chance you discover some happiness, you will not let yourself enjoy it unless you have learned to accept yourself. The fact is, more of anything or everything will not be enough until you choose to be happy.
- Self-Accountability. If you think something is missing from your life, it is probably you. The idea that something is missing in your life, in your relationships, in your work is a projection. This projection is based on the fact that you are not fully present. True happiness requires you to participate fully in your life now. Do a self-inventory based on three questions: 1.) What am I not being? 2.) What am I not giving? 3.) What am I not receiving?