Blackstone Yoga Center Newsletter

The Yoga Plant

I heard from the Boss this morning at the hot tub, and was told to simplify my Yoga teaching and customize each routine to fit the needs of each individual. Recently, I found a great Yoga manual that teaches comprehensive routines from easy to challenging, and also specialized routines for bad back, headaches, asthma, tension, and work stress. I feel confident that they can help us find a Yoga plant that will grow in our personal home gardens.

Our classes here should become more like the old one room schoolhouse where every child is given instruction at his or her level. One formula doesn’t fit all in a one-room schoolhouse, or on the Yoga mat. So many of you, especially those who are senior like me, may have felt that maybe Yoga wasn’t for you because what was being planted didn’t feel comfortable in your soil.

The Blackstone Yoga Center was created to bring the miracle of Yoga to Southside Virginia, especially Blackstone, which is my adopted hometown. Blackstone has given me a center where I have been able to discover my essential life, and now that I have, I want to return the gift.

When it comes to communicating what our essential Self is, language fails because language is an abstraction and not the real thing. The word orange is only a sound, not the orange. But we think we know our Self, if we can think about who we are, but thinking is also language, and we end up living in an abstraction and feeling that life has left us.

Not true. Life has not left us, because we are Life. We are just not experiencing in depth what we already are. That is where Yoga comes in. Yoga is the daily practice, both in the mind and body and breath, that effortlessly puts us in touch with our essential Self, which is life.

For those who have experienced the flower of the Yoga plant, they report that they begin to experience themselves as joy, and that no matter what the shape their life situations, they remain seated in an unmovable sense of well being and fulfillment. The Yoga plant has routed them in Life. Then life situations become just the leaves and not the plant itself.

Those who begin to experience the flower of Yoga also report that their life situations, where once were experienced as unproductive weeds, suddenly changed to beautiful flowers or healing herbs.

But, first one must go to a Yoga greenhouse, pick out the Yoga plant that will grow in your garden, take it home and water it each day with your undivided attention (it doesn’t need much), and sit back and enjoy the beautiful fragrance that soon begins to fill your life…..and that fragrance will be you.

I feel like I’ve just got a load of fresh Yoga seeds and now there is a whole new bed of delightful Yoga plants taking root in our greenhouse during these cold winter months.
This reminds me of the way I see our great Victorian Home here on South Main Street. No matter what I want to do, the house embraces me like a Great Mother, and says lovingly, “I’ve got just the place for you.”

And that is the way I would like you to see this Yoga Center, which says to you, “I’ve got just the Yoga for you.”

Thank you,
Ed
Om Peace
2/7/07
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