Wherever You Go . . . There You Are

Ibiza group

I’ve always loved the quote from Ram Dass, “wherever you go there you are”. – I like to add, so you might as well make where  you are a great place to be. That place being inside of you of course.  I’ve just got back, (sort of, on a plane right now), from the Dutch book tour of Yoga Helpt, that’s Yoga Cures  for us English speakers. It was loads of fun. I met hundreds of people, did lots of yoga, gave a few talks, made a lot of friends, and fo course, thankfully, learned a lot.

First off, I was so excited to go for a book tour in Amsterdam, Belgium, and Spain. Super exciting. And it was so much more than I expected. People were really really into it!  Everything was super over booked with waiting lines of people wanting to do yoga, of course in the fun, open way I present.  For me, how I present yoga is how I’ve always felt, it so it’s nothing new for me.  I don’t claim to invent yoga, or the approach I take, I know that I was able to tap in from my first memories, and experience what has always been there.

I take for granted, the approach isn’t what has already currently existed linerally in time.  A lot of forcing, pushing, rules, lines to stand in to gain inner peace, and tolls to pay, and gurus to go through to achieve any essence of experience. To me, that behavior and tradition, has felt like the classic tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes.  Thankfully, more and more people are chosing to see the Emperor has no clothes, and the answers are actually inside each of us, where they always were resting and waiting for us to tap in.

I feel like open, movement based yoga, with permission for each person to connect how they feel a connection, is as natural as water, air, fire, and earth, and it was super overwhelming to see my European friends go wild for it. I gave talks on how everyone is a yoga guide, gave classes on moving with ease, and doing hard poses easily, because, why does life and yoga for that matter have to be so complicated? It’s more efficient to find your own alignment within a traingle pose instead of me telling you where exactly your gaze has to be. Maybe today it feels funky to look up at your fingers, and maybe tomorrow looking up feels just dandy. You have the permission to move with ease, as long as you give it to yourself. When you have the permission to find the yoga for you, and have your own experience, you not only move outside the box, but the existance of the box disappears from space and time and you are left with the full potential of yourself.

Happinez Festival Lecture

I know the Strala family is super excited to share this approach globally and expand the open source and experience of yoga to millions more.

I’ve been reading a lot of physics studies and the biography of Paul Erdos, a Hungarian mathematician, on the plane and during my small amount of down time late night in the hotel in Amsterdam. Erdos had an idea that all math already exists from the divine source, it is the job of a mathmetition to uncover, or find it.  The more elequent the formula, the closer it is to the divine.  When a proof was sloppy and long, although possibly technically correct, Erdos proclaimed it was further from the divine. He strived to “find” formulas as close to the divine as possible.

This past week I was in Boston helping to present our Fall / Winter 2013 line at Reebok, and of course I also led a bunch of yoga classes. A guy practicing for the first time was having problems with a forearm stand. I gave him a little pointer, walk your feet closer so you don’t have to jump, you can lift.  He immediately lifted off and balanced in forearm stand for what seemed like forever.  He didn’t want to come down.  When he finally came down he proclaimed, “I found it!” Pretty good for the first try and more evidence for Erdos’s ideas that math comes from the divine. I don’t think it is much of  a stretch to assume that Erdos surmised that all information comes from the divine.

I wrote a little musing on the topic on the flight from JFK to Madrid in preparation for some of my talks. It’s just a musing, free form thoughts. Enjoy! Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

xo Tara

Going for a Swim in the Sea of Consciousness

"Violet Flame Angel" by Walter Bruneel

Yoga is a reductionist practice in which the participant strengthens, heals, and frees up discomfort in the body to allow space for the mind to calm and travel inward.  When the mind begins to travel inward, the participant begins to experience existence in a sea of consciousness, floating freely in the potential of information and gains access to an unlimited amount of raw resources.

The more calm and at ease the participant can become during practice, the more insight and resources are able to be collected, gathered, and stored.  The more comfortable the participant is in bathing and lingering in this state with an aware, focused mind, the more capable they become at translating and interpreting the available information in forms of new ideas, ways of being, thinking, and forms of art.  The information experienced in the sea of consciousness, is not new, but the means of interpretation is specific to the interpreter’s experience, psychology, and goals. If translation, post experience becomes possible, the translation can produce unique expressions of art, music, science and so forth.

The sea and the information resting in the sea of consciousness are available to everyone with a desire and means to access it.  Open source information available to those able to quiet the mind and travel inward.  The experience of traveling inward is a deep feeling of contentment, and security in the feeling that all is right with our lives, and all the information and feelings of connectivity are inside, we simply have to quiet the mind in order to access our selves. With a constant racing mind, we get fixed on external circumstances and tossed around in a rough current of fears and anxieties that sweep us deeper into discomfort.  If discomfort persists without the reversal process initiated, disease develops and does its best to destroy the body and mind, so possibly the spirit, and our ability to quiet and swim can be freed beyond this life.

Once critical mass is able to access and translate the sea of consciousness regularly, the universe will experience a major shift according to the intentions and coloring of the interpretations.

Regular practice of yoga as meditation, when practiced with ease as apposed to force, shapes the participant to lean toward self-healing acts after the moments of literal practice are complete.  When yoga is practiced with forced, goal oriented posing, healing is reduced to a minimum.  A regular participant of ease is more likely to behave in ways that perpetuate and feed the feelings and emotions that are brought up during floating consciousness experiences while practicing.  The participant that swims regularly behaves in the means to get back to the swim as soon as possible. Lingering in the sea becomes a priority and life gets planned accordingly.  The more you practice, the better you’ll feel.  Feeling good often is a useful practice.

Psychology and personal goals can occasionally over-ride tendencies and behaviors that steer participants toward healing, and can create feelings and entitlements of superiority over individuals that haven’t experienced, or rather claim not to have experience the sea of consciousness.  Superiority complex diagnosed in one-time swimmers results in superficial actions, tendencies, and goals. Holding the experience of swimming over others has been common in spiritual and religious communities and constructed toward control, and fear based actions.  A useful way to dilute corruption of the spiritually elite is to help more people learn to swim.

Most individuals at some point in their life, whether practicing yoga or not, experience floating in the sea of consciousness, and either decide to communicate or not communicate their experiences, leaving the more extroverted individuals free to claim superiority and ability to swim in the sea above others without being challenged.  The one-time superior swimmers can be dissolved by a rise of mass acceptance, willingness, excitement, and determination to take a dive in the sea of consciousness, and keep coming back for more.  The strong swimmers can help the more cautious, tip toe dippers to ease in and feel comfortable in the sea of potential, which is ultimately, accepting our own potential.  Once we accept our own potential, insecurities and abusive behaviors dissolve. Mass swimming will favor translation of information into useful works favoring healing and life.

Since everyone has consciousness, everyone has the potential to swim in the sea of consciousness and thus download whatever interesting information they see fit, and translate into the forms they chose.  Reasons more individuals aren’t able to swim in the sea are physical ailments that cloud the mind from being at ease, abuse and addiction to food, drugs, and alcohol, which fog the mind from focusing. Although mind altering substances have been used to reach and swim in the sea, and have helped people to understand, gain confidence, and find a voice to interpret their discovered information, they also lose their potency after the first few dips.

Practices other than yoga have been known to induce consciousness swims such as playing or listening to music, other forms of exercise, mainly repetitive motions that can be meditative, or walking and being with nature.  Whenever the individual is able to quiet the mind from daily chatter, and dissolve the body of tension, the possibility for a swim occurs.  When the individual is trying for a swim, the swim is less likely to occur, and swims tend to happen spontaneously during practice.  If the individual begins to notice they are swimming, they are likely jolted out of the sea.  A fundamental problem of consciousness is observation.  We can experience but not observe experience while experiencing.

When the individual settles into the experience of swimming in the sea of consciousness without an objective, conditions are ideal for a good harvest. For the sea to be useful to people in the healing and advancement of life, translation is required.  Translation is different for each individual based on range of emotion, situation in life, psychological disposition, and circumstances of life.  The ego must be temporarily placed aside, but not forgotten for the most useful translations.