Love, Love, LOVE (February 2021 Newsletter)
Did you know Rosa Parks practiced yoga? This Black History Month check out this Yoga Journal article, The Story Behind Rosa Parks and Yoga.
Photo: Library of Congress
This month we celebrate love. When the article is titled ‘love’, and it’s February, we think of Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is an important day, and it comes once a year just like birthdays. Celebrate it! And celebrate it with a wide group of people of family, friends and acquaintances.
This article is not about Valentine’s Day, however.
Consider today these three loves: Love for oneself, love towards whom that emotion doesn’t come so easily and Love Divine. Each of these is our way of staying healthy and happy.
Love yourself. If you are filled with guilt, a sense of failure, or negativity, you are not alone. Often these feelings have been with us since childhood and hard to shake off. Look at yourself and reassign the ‘F for Fail’ to ‘A for Acknowledge’. We cannot deal with emotions buried in the subconscious. A regular practice of Yoga will raise these to the surface of your consciousness allowing for them to emerge in dreams and nightmares and so to heal you. Self-worth is worth it!
Love others. Those who are not so lovable in your mind. Forgiveness is the only way to get out of constantly ruminating on the wrong or wrongs done to you. Do something about it. Send a card, perform an act of kindness. It may not resolve the issue, and they may not respond but you will find you no longer care. Holding onto negativity eats you up inside. Literally. Immunity declines and the toxins in your mind metastasize into sickness and disease. Healing becomes slow and uncertain.
Love Divine. This has nothing to do with one’s faith or religion or culture. It is a deep feeling of connectedness that a regular practice of yoga and meditation with a focus on awareness, acceptance, love and compassion will ultimately and without exception bring you. It’s as simple as that. In the words of Godfrey Devereux, “(Practice) is a way of experiencing life that brings great joy, peace and complete fulfillment. It is an experience beyond the power of external forces. It draws up sources of vitality and strength that ordinarily lie hidden from our perception but that underlie all religious and spiritual endeavor. Some call it knowledge of God; others call it enlightenment.”
It is not enough to practice now and again. Especially now when life is so topsy turvy and things are not as they seem, yoga/meditation should be one certain activity you take time to do as often as possible. You don’t even have to go anywhere. Where you are is where you need to be.
Namaste,
sipra