Blue Moon

Celebrate the new moon ...the blue moon...

Join me for Blend on thursday Dec 31

Dear Yoga Friends and Blend Friends,

Please join me to celebrate the New Year for our final Blend Class of 2009...

Join me at Indigo Village on 2nd and J Street at 9:15 am

Come at least 10 min early for set up and registration...and please bring your own mat!

If you need a mat call me at 760-707-7610...you can buy a used mat for $5 wash it and it's new for you!!!

My regular scheduled Thursday yoga class is canceled at soul of yoga for the holidays...returning next week...if you're off work on Thursday...you can receive yoga and more by attending this wonderful class...meeting new friends or re-acquainting with old ones...

See you on the mat!!!

Happy New Year!!!

Summer

join me today for yoga

I'm teaching at yoga vista today at 4:30 pm

"Restorative"

Join me as we open and receive through the nourishment of this wonderful class!

more wise words from my teacher Pema

Three Methods for Working with Uncertainty

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Today at 4:03pm

1. No more struggle
Whatever arises, train again and again in seeing it for what it is. The innermost essence of mind is without bias. Things arise and things dissolve forever and ever. Whatever happens, we can look at it with a nonjudgmental attitude. This is the primary method for working with painful situations.

2. Using poison as medicine
When suffering arises, we breathe it in for everybody. This poison is not just our personal misfortune. It's our kinship with all living things, the seed of compassion and openness. Instead of pushing it away or running from it, we breathe in and connect with it fully. We do this with the wish that all of us could be free of suffering.

3. Regarding whatever arises as awakened energy
This reverses our habitual pattern of trying to avoid conflict, trying to smooth things out, trying to prove that pain is a mistake that would not exist in our lives if only we did the right things. This view encourages us to look at the charnel ground of our lives as the working basis for attaining enlightenment.



Excerpted from Three Methods for Working with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön, Shambhala Sun, March 1997

yoga Teaching schedule

Dear Yoga Friends,

Please join me...

Monday Dec 21 at Soul of Yoga
9:00 am subbing for Monique
all levels welcome

Monday Dec 21 at Yoga Vista
6:00 pm my regular class
Winter Solstice practice
all levels welcome

Tuesday Dec 22 at Soul of Yoga
5:30 pm subbing for Monique
all levels welcome

Thursday Dec 24 and 31 at Soul of Yoga
5:30 pm my regular class
canceled due to holiday schedule
Join me Tues Dec 22 as I sub for Monique

Saturday Dec 26 at Soul of Yoga
9:00 am subbing for Tom
All levels welcome

Sunday Dec 27 at Yoga Vista
4:30 pm subbing
Restorative

Friday Jan 29 at Yoga Oceanside (NEW)
5:30pm Community class rotation/donation
all levels welcome

Regular class schedule for Yoga
Monday 6pm at Yoga Vista
Thursday 5:30 pm at Soul of Yoga (will resume Jan 7)

Namaste,
Summer

Love story

Please view this inspirational story about love...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGODurRfVv4

more love from Pema

Vast Blue Sky

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Yesterday at 8:14pm

I was doing an interview with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche recently, and I asked him the question: "Rinpoche, you have been living in the west for some time now, and you know western people well. What do you think is the most important advise you could give to a western dharma practitioner?"

And he said "I think the most important thing that western dharma practitioners need to understand is guiltlessness."

I said "guiltlessness?"

He said "Yes. You have to understand that even though you make a lot of mistakes and you mess up in all kinds of ways, all of that is impermanent and shifting and changing and temporary. But fundamentally, your mind and heart are not guilty. They are innocent."

So guiltlessness is very important in the subject of dissolving or burning up the seeds of aggression in our own hearts and our own minds.

Most of the striking out at other people, for us in this culture, comes from feeling bad about ourselves. It makes us so wretched and so uncomfortable that it sets off the chain reaction of trying to get away from that feeling. It's some very very habitual thing that happens.

If you got hooked, and then someone was to give you four seconds, or a minute, and then tap you on the shoulder and ask you what that feels like, it feels really bad, it feels like "bad me" and the aggression is turned against yourself.

Maybe if you waited four minutes and tapped them on the shoulder, what it feels like is - they are really wrong, and they did this to me, and its their fault that I'm in this situation.

But somehow, if at that moment, you were to pause, and start breathing and let the whole thing unwind and unravel, and hang out in the impermanent yet ineffable space - if you were to do that you might realize that all of this blaming of other people, when you went into it deeper, you would see that the seed of it was really some deep discomfort and aggression about yourself.

And if you went more deeply into that, you would probably find sadness.

And I quote this so much, this Poem of Rick Fields, where he said:

Behind the hardness there is fear
And if you touch the heart of the fear
You find sadness (it sort of gets more and more tender)
And if you touch the sadness
You find the vast blue sky

This is really what I am encouraging is the next time you feel yourself hooked, if you pause and you breath with it, and you don't act out and you don't repress, but you think of this quote, and you think the ones that will create the new culture that is needed are those that are not afraid to be insecure.

Whatever it is that you think at that moment, maybe this is what it feels like to be burning up the seeds that have caused all the pain on this earth - this is what that feels like.

I always feel that somehow you have to reframe that bad feeling - so that you see it as a doorway to liberation, as an opening to the vast blue sky.

A teaching by Pema Chödrön
excerpted from a talk entitled "Practicing Peace in Times of War"
published by Shambhala Publications