BYC Newsletter #21

Dear Yoga students and those interested in Yoga,

No Stress Here
Thought for the week

Put your welcome mat
at the door of your mind.

Greet each thought/feeling
with openness and curiosity.

If the thought is pleasant,
enjoy it without guilt.

If the thought is negative,
be open to its possibility
for pleasure.

In this way,
whoever comes to your door
will be your friend.

This is a very deep practice, one that sounds good on the surface: "Yeah, we should do that." But putting it into practice is the actual liberation of the human spirit. Imagine, what would it be like to live without suffering. Oh, there is physical pain, but we're talking about psychological suffering. This runs from the small irritations we experience with almost everything, to the major personal disasters, such as loss of jobs death, etc. The practice is the same.

The Welcome Mat practice is effortless. When pleasure comes, either in the form of sense perceptions (a great piece of pie), or experiences in getting desires fulfilled, don't grasp them. Make no effort.

If a negative comes to your door, make no effort to avoid it, label it, or in any way reject it. Just accept it as what is. In this way you give the "negative" the space to turn into its own opposite: pleasure. But, remember this: you can't by effort turn a negative into a positive, or pain into pleasure. One can only perform this magic trick through non-effort.

This is so easy to do that we think it is too hard. If you have the thought that you can't do this, you have just pulled your welcome mat back from the door of your mind. If you just open your mind and accept this thought without judgment or reaction or even desire, then you have already begun practicing the Welcome Mat.

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The No Stress Here workshop is slowly reaching for its limit of ten. The shape it will take is manifesting like a pot on the potter's wheel. "So...that's what it's going to look like." I can tell you this so far. The workshop is going to be about how to transform your work at home or abroad into your spiritual practice. Our civilization, which includes us, has divided the world into two contradictory halves: the sacred and the profane, or religion and everyday, or whatever division you personally see. We believe we have to go to church or a retreat or practice yoga to be spiritual. No so.

But the truth is that the world, our personal world, is whole and it is already spiritual. We just don't believe it is because we have taken our intellectual knife and cut it right down the middle like a side of beef. So, naturally, our world looks spiritually dead. We have just killed it and cut it open. That leaves us in the hopeless task of looking for our lost spirituality or life in the world that we have just killed. And we can't find it! It's like looking for a living heart in a corpse. It's like the Mayan in Mel Gibson's movie as the priest tears out the living heart and yells: Here it is!

No Stress Here is going to be about remembering our lost world—since it is still here. It was never killed in the first place. You can't kill spirituality because spirituality has no form. Bullets go right through it. Our world is still whole, still beautiful, still sacred and ready to give us all that we need. We just think we killed it, that's all. This is like suffering all our lives for something we did as a child when we didn't know any better.

No Stress Here is a statement of fact. There is no stress here...in this world...but first, we have to disbelieve in the world we have created. This is the practice. A path going to where we started.

Thank you,
Ed
Om Peace
1/7/07
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