To be consistently growing in the midst of life's changes, charges and challenges,
we must constantly check with ourselves:
"am I committed to feeling good, or am I committed to growing?"
Then remember, growth does not always feel good,
and feeling good does not always provide growth.

There must always be a balanced conscious coordination between
the sensations of your emotional and physical worlds,
and the sensibilities of your evolutionary progress through this world.
The physical and emotional bodies speak in a temporal language of selfishness . . .
a drive to comfort and pleasure . . . a primitive means of survival.
This is not a bad thing, if it is not the only thing,
but it should never be more than one third of your life's focus.
The mind's conscious expansion and your spiritual fulfillment
are to make up the other two thirds.

A baby is completely body centric, but as we grow, we are supposed to balance this out.
Are you growing? There is an old saying in yoga about this:
"Everybody grows old, but very few grow up."

Without releasing the shackles of this body centric need —
which honors feelings over growth — you will be forever dancing to the
uncommitted beat that progresses only part way toward your goals.
We call this the "halfway-dance" and it takes place in the
"comfort lounge" on the "first floor" of your "halfway house."
It is in fact, a sub-primitive human nature — it arrived with the conceptual mind
around one hundred thousand years ago and has been developing ever since.

Without engaging the primitive drive to survive, or the exalted drive to grow, commitment cannot be engaged and the pain from lacking fulfillment becomes life's entire focus.
Everything 'halfway' becomes the theme . . . the perfected obsessions of life.
Civilization supports this theme in order to maintain the illusion of
'concept replacing experience'. it is why today's youth are into extremes
(sports, clothes, tattoos, piercing, video games, etc.);
they are in search of experience in a world obsessed and driven by image and concept.

The halfway dance has been mastered and marketed over the centuries.
It dances for all who will pay attention and anyone who will pay the fee. 
Life has become about earning a living,
rather than living and experiencing the life already earned.
Image has become more important than connection and with this —concept out-plays content.
The halfway "market" fills with participants who are making a killer living on this halfway dance, but never really living [as alive, ecstatic and conscious beings].
Fear has become the feeling of guidance because separation always requires feeling.
This "safe-zone" has become the most dangerous place to live . . . especially if you die in it.

It is time to turn over the leaf . . . live in the risk of total commitment.
It is not about the mirror's reflection being right (the image);
it is about the projection being you (the reality).
Make it your routine on a daily basis —
look into a mirror and challenge yourself to be YOU and nothing less.
Smile and be vocal in this exercise.
This may start out very serious, but it will soon turn joyful.
You will find yourself in front of your SELF, standing at the mirror on the edge of each morning, grateful for a relationship that has become extremely REAL . . .
from one that was assumed and granted.
Then take this real-time relationship out into the field of the life you are living . . .
into the risk of commitment . . .
reproduce it with enthusiasm for the greatest possibilities of your life.

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YOGA OF THE WEEK

 

Mercury has now gone direct - Time to build anew!