First Class Free

JUNE 17, 2009:  I consider myself a LOVE ANTHROPOLOGIST.  I have been studying love all my life.  While I was in Tuscany last week through mere observation I gained even further insight into LOVE.  I was surrounded by it!  The way people casually touch each other in conversation, the way folks eat and make love to their food, the way folks talk about their romance with wine and even how folks are in relationship to the earth herself.  You feel that there is less self-criticism I never got that vibe from any woman “I shouldn’t eat that, this will make my but look big” Essentially I observed no declaration of self-abuse or withholding.

Instead it was all open armed embracing. You can sense folks love themselves.  So right now bring your right hand to your belly and your left hand to your higher heart.  We all have within us two hearts, the beating heart and the intuitive heart.  So feel right now the energy of these two hearts with your hands.  Through that connection and self embrace feel the flow of love first for yourself and all the beautiful things you love about yourself, then expand that love for others until everyone is hugged in. 

Swami Satchidananda says, “Real love is possible only when you see everything as yourself.”

This is supported in the yoga sutras Chapter 1 verse 23, “Boundless love and devotion unite us with consciousness.”  Yoga unifies, it brings us into embrace with all the world.  Love begets more love.  Or as Neem Karoli Baba says, “love everyone, serve everyone.”  This has been my mission.  But in Tuscany I could see that it was everyone’s mission!  Even some scientists are now labeling the heart as an organ of perception EQUAL to the brain.  Spiritual leaders have always known this and shared it.  You see the universe intended for us to have a joyous loving experience on earth.  This is the state from which we are created – It is our natural state of being.  There is nothing natural about living a life filled with stress and anxiety, having feelings of aloneness or despair. 

Two key learnings I gained from Tuscany were that sharing this awareness of universal love, just like our breath is universal, doesn’t mean that life is without some ups and downs or the unexpected.  A spiritually mature consciousness addresses these waves with compassion.  Nischala Joy Devi writes, “The word compassion is such a beautiful word, soft and gentle.  It is comprised of two parts: “com” meaning with and “passion” meaning any intense emotion either pleasurable or painful.  Compassion is a form of infinite love, in that nothing can affect it or limit it.” 

So as we ride the waves or windstorms of life if we face it from the heart of compassion we will see others as ourselves or as the Dalai Lama suggests, “Through compassion you find that all human beings are just like you” When I had my heart broken once I remember my friend David saying to me, just know that there are people all over the world same as you having this exact experience of heart break.  They too are in what he calls “the pain chamber”.  Just being reminded that I was not alone in my human experience made my time in the pain chamber less hard to bear.    

Join me in living with more compassion to face the windstorms:

“To love means never to be afraid of the windstorms of life;

Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would

Never see the beauty of the carvings.”  Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Please above all else wake up to the love that surrounds you everywhere!  Listen with your heart to Rumi’s suggested self-observation: 

What happens when your soul

Begins to awaken
Your eyes
And your heart
And the cells of your body
To the great Journey of Love?

What happens indeed?  I love myself, I love you all, I serve with my whole heart.  Silvia

JULY 28TH, 2008:  In the Yoga Sutras HEALING is written about as:  A process of rejoining; A rejoining body to heart; A rejoining of spirit to consciousness.

What does HEALING mean to you?  What it means to me is a letting go of hurt or angry feelings, an absence of conflict, relief from pain, and a belief in miracles – that things WILL GET BETTER.  Too often folks get bogged down in thinking they are alone and stuck in the pain forever, or as Author Alice Walker says “we are being consumed with our suffering.”  But we don’t have to be.  Yoga gives us that opportunity to realize the healing for ourselves, to self-comfort.  Even right now take 5 breaths and use your thoughts to keep your energy on healing whether it be directed at physical or emotional healing or both.  Then replace any and all despairing thoughts with the mantra ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. 

This will go far to remind us that miracles are happening all the time…St Thomas Aquinas writes “MIRACLES ARE SIGNS NOT TO THEM THAT BELIEVE, BUT TO THEM THAT DISBELIEVE."  I love that. So please help me change the world a down dog at a time….heal your heart and from there help promote the belief in miracles every day in every way!  Say to yourself I believe anything is possible!