Living Yoga

Today I received one of my birthday presents: a copy of A Year of Living Your Yoga: Daily Practices to Shape Your Life by Judith Hanson Lasater. I am very excited about this book - it contains daily inspirational thoughts and questions to direct your practice and lead you into living yogic principles. Today's entry really hit home, since it dealt with some of the very issues brought up in Stephen Cope's book that I've also been reading, particularly with accessing "the real".

Lasater's September 25th thought reads:

Give up your attachment to the way you think things are, so you can experience things as they actually are. Living Your Yoga: Our beliefs create a screen between what is and how we want things to be. Yoga is a practice to help us let go of that screen and live authentically. What belief can you let go of today?

The "belief" that I am working on letting go of is something that I just becoming aware of --- my attachment to things. I have become increasingly aware that I enjoy shopping and acquiring new things, whether I need them or not - particularly clothes. Even though I have a full closet, I for some reason feel an urge to get something new. It is as if I am defined by what I wear, what I have.

In Donna Farhi's book Yoga Mind, Spirit and Body, she writes,

"The practice of aparigraha also requires tht we look at the way we use things to reinforce our sense of identity. The executive ego loves to believe in its own power but unfortunately requires a retinue of foot soldiers in the way of external objects such as the right clothes, car, house, job or image to maintain this illusion. Because this executive ego is but an illusion created by our sense of separateness, it requires ever greater and more elaborate strategies to keep it clothed. Although the practice of not grasping may first begin as consciously withdrawing our hand from reaching for external things, eventually the need to reach outward at all diminishes until there is a recognition that that which is essential to us is already at hand."

In my yoga practice and life, I am working on adopting the quality of aparigraha (not grasping), of letting go of my attachment to objects and work on developing my own identity, separate from the things around me.

Today's workout:
50 min. run w/ hill sprints (5.38 mi)
25 min. resistance training
60 min. yoga