Anything that we do on a regular basis can begin to feel stale after a while. Anyone that has been in a relationship can attest to this. The energy that ignites the spark in a friendship or romantic relationship can grow cold with time. Sometimes we lose sight of what it was that generated our interest in the first place; other times we take aspects of our loved one for granted. We may also become distracted and stop putting as much effort into staying connected. Whatever the reason, what once seemed exciting or even exhilarating begins to feel...dissatisfying or dull. The same is true for our yoga practice. If we fail to align our intentions and rediscover our passion, our yoga practice can become as stale and sour as a carton of expired milk.

It is not uncommon for people to stop yoga or look for a new teacher as their interest wanes. Obviously there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. However, it is possible to rekindle your enthusiasm for your daily practice by asking a few simple questions.

• What excited me about yoga to begin with?
• When did I get too comfortable and lose my focus?
• Do I practice yoga to soothe myself or to purify myself?

Doing the work necessary to stay inspired with a daily ritual like yoga usually means that we need to work on changing our approach and allowing ourselves to be uncomfortable again. I say again, because most of us experienced periods of discomfort and resistance as new students. Challenging ourselves to be uncomfortable pushes us to stay alert and engaged in the process. The discomfort doesn’t need to be extreme, in fact, it can be as simple as trying a new class, revisiting the basics in an intro class or jumping into that level 3 practice on Saturday morning. If we only do what we’re comfortable with, then we are never pushing ourselves to grow beyond our current energy state, and what is the result? Boredom.

Another effective tool is setting goals. All too often we fall into the trap of feeling like we have done it before, so how could it be different this time around? Even though we know that every day is different and every practice has its unique challenges, we still get lulled by the day-in, day-out repetition of a regular practice. Maybe instead of being content to stay in our backbend for five breaths, we set our sights on staying up for 30 or 40 or 60. Perhaps it is learning how to take the shape of a new posture or be still in a longer meditation. Whatever the challenge, goals can help us refocus and rediscover lost enthusiasm and interest.

Finally we need to make space for balance in our practice. This is something I learned very early in my life as a swimmer. Both the body and mind respond with renewed vigor to variation. In other words, if we only engage in vigorous yoga practices we may not be giving ourselves the opportunity to experience the equally important equanimity that can emerge from long periods of stillness in seated meditation. Balance is essential to maintaining a longterm practice and without it we can easily become to attached to a single approach. By balancing motion with stillness in the larger context of our overall practice we double or triple our opportunity for finding a fresh, invigorating perspective.

Staying engaged in anything over the longterm takes effort. The question we all need to ask is how much are we willing to commit to ourselves, our personal power and our inner wellbeing. Yoga is about tuning into the deepest core elements of our psyche over a lifetime. We never arrive at our destination; we are always seekers on the path. The challenge is to remain hungry and to continue to seek out those opportunities for greater self-awareness both on and off the mat.

Several years ago I took a group on a retreat to Costa Rica. During one of the group discussions, the issue of suffering emerged as a topic. It was fascinating to witness how difficult it was for the majority of participants to “admit” that they experienced meaningful suffering in their day-to-day lives. Many students only seemed capable of defining suffering in terms of issues like poverty or disease in third-world countries. For them it was as if the day-to-day struggles of being human weren’t credible examples of “true” suffering. I suppose this type of attitude isn’t difficult to fathom when one considers that we live in a society that idolizes the glamor of celebrities and athletes alike, and worships at the feet of youth and beauty. Suffering in all its many forms is fairly mundane and certainly not particularly chic.
The commonplace quality of suffering is what makes it so important and powerful. We all suffer and sometimes that suffering is striking in its magnitude – for example, terminal illness or the loss of a loved one. More often our suffering is more subtle in nature, emerging through the existential thingness of being a human – loneliness, fear of growing old, social anxiety, etc. Rich or poor, celebrity or Haitian orphan, we ALL suffer. To claim that we don’t suffer is like saying that we are somehow remarkably immune from being human. In so many ways suffering is one of the common threads that binds us together as humans regardless of location, age, station or class.
To admit that we suffer is to accept that we are just like everyone else, no better, no worse. More importantly, allowing oneself to work with suffering “is a tremendous affirmation that there is no need to resist being fully in this world, that we are in fact part of the web.”* Suffering, in all its forms, is the road to compassion and can lead to greater understanding and inner peace. Many spiritual teachers knew this; you need look no further than the teachings of Buddha or Christ for examples of how coming to terms with suffering can alter the landscape of self-awareness. The point I’m trying to make isn’t that we should all collapse into a heap and bemoan our existence. My point is that if we deny or try to avoid suffering, we are effectively cutting ourselves off from one of the most essential qualities of our humanity and in turn limiting our ability to connect with a partner, child, friend, or stranger. Suffering doesn’t have to be a negative particularly when we reframe it in the context of connecting compassionately to other people. Compassion and suffering are intimately bound together in what it means to be a conscious human. Denying suffering within ourselves is to deny our basic humanity.

There was a time, early on in my spiritual development, when I thought there might be answers to the big questions presented by the serendipity of a conscious mind. As an adolescent the BIG questions, for me, perpetually centered around my own mortality. It wasn’t necessarily the death of my physical body that disturbed me so much as it was the existential crisis presented by the emptiness seemingly inherent in ceasing to be conscious. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around why/how we humans were blessed and cursed with the awareness of our own mortality.

Looking back, I can see how my unusual childhood tuned me to this sometimes dark fascination which was further amplified by an inherently artistic temperament. By my late teens and early twenties, I was primed to spend a large portion of my energy as an adult seeking answers, looking for truths and generally being earnest. I explored the problem from a variety of angles, imbibing various substances in an attempt to dissolve the self imposed barriers between me and everything else. I resolved to fight a pitched battle to unlock my chest and hips through hours of asana practices. I meditated alone and in groups, for hours and sometimes days, staring into the eyes of another human. I repeated my mantra and chanted or sang with passion. I read the sacred texts, the histories and philosophies, the self help books and the reflections of great minds. In short I searched in earnest.

More than two decades later, I haven’t found The Answer and more than once I have cast about in confusion, wondering what it is I am searching for. After all this time, with no apparent goal in sight, I can’t help but wonder from time to time at the futility of my efforts. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been great benefits to all this effort. There certainly have been, but most of them are as transitory as the seasons. Most profoundly and possibly importantly, I no longer feel the existential angst as deeply.

So the questions remain but so to do the lessons. The most lasting lesson has been the realization that all the striving and searching we do as humans to have the answers, to garner ownership over this fleeting experience we call a life, is just another form of grasping and attaching. Although the searching we do is perhaps somewhat more ephemeral than our attachment to external things, the end result or the net effect on us energetically is the same - tangible or intangible, in the end we must release it all.

My searching will continue, not because I believe I will ever find the answer, rather because I see now that being blessed with consciousness means being entangled in living. We are forever grasping and releasing, grasping and releasing. Living is poignantly beautiful and distressing all in one breath. There is no answer to this predicament. Regardless of chaos or the promise of a bright future, life looms before us and demands to be lived. I don’t know about you but I will likely continue to cling and become attached. I will also continue to celebrate the practices like yoga and meditation, running, swimming, walking, loving, nature, dogs, etc. that cultivate a lasting sense of peace within me.

What moves us, what inspires us, what in our experience of life provides us with the spark to transcend? No matter how much or how little we have, the inherent repetition of life can dull our appreciation for its singular beauty. Sometimes we are jarred awake by tragedy or catastrophe and become painfully aware of living in the present. Other times the majesty of nature or the deep sense of belonging when we are connected to others, provides us with the spiritual nourishment we need to stay inspired. Rather than pointing us toward experiences that encourage a wider and deeper perspective, the consumer culture of today reinforces acquisition of things as both the primary activity and meaning behind existence. The result is a kind of spiritual bankruptcy or at the very least a kind of cultural dysthymia. As a society, we over-work and over-eat and generally reach for anything that will stave off the boredom or emptiness.

Last summer I had the distinct pleasure of walking through several old European cathedrals. As I crossed the threshold into each and every one of them I was struck by how the din and chaos in the world outside faded into the background. Believe what you will of Christianity but they absolutely understood the inherent need within all of us for an inner sanctum and how to tune the mind to that space through light, architecture and iconography. As I sat in the pews of Sacré Cœur in Paris I was moved and inspired, not because I have some need to be saved by god with a capital G, but rather because I was reminded that the meaning (with a capital M) is within all of us all the time. It helps to sit in silence before a gorgeous stained glass rose window, but whatever the catalyst, finding peace and deeper meaning expressed externally through art or music or nature is essential. Ritual in all its forms is a powerful force in every life. It can produce both rapture and discontent. I have often said that for me personally yoga as ritual is my cathedral or church. The sometimes halting, sometimes graceful movement of my body through space makes it possible to better align my mind to the hearts fluidity...thereby making my internal space an external expression. What is your yoga practice? How do you find inspiration?

Recently the CDC released research into the trend towards obesity in both adults and children in the USA ( cdc - http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/2009.2014). The prevalence of obesity has been steadily increasing in the USA since the mid-1970’s. Today more than a third of the population is battling obesity and its associated illnesses of heart disease, diabetes and other metabolic disorders. It is common knowledge that exercise can have a profound effect on weight loss, controlling blood glucose and reducing triglyceride levels in the blood. Some recent research is showing that interval training, intense sprint sets followed by brief rest sets, can kick start a stalled metabolism and make a good workout regimen even more efficient and effective.

The idea behind interval training is to alternate effortful short burst activities with short, slower recovery periods. Interval training has been used by professional athletes to improve performance for decades. Modern research is indicating that these fast-slow workouts with steep peaks and valleys can dramatically improve cardiovascular fitness and generally increase the body’s potential to burn fat.

Studies published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and research performed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario found that interval training doubled the endurance of test subjects, increased the amount of fat burned during moderate exercise by 36% and increased cardiovascular fitness by 13%. By comparison, volunteers in the control group not doing interval training, but who did engage in regular moderate exercise, didn’t see similar benefits. Even more striking is that the overall fitness of subjects didn’t change the benefits of interval training. Borderline sedentary subjects and college athletes alike had similar increases in fitness and fat burning from interval training.

The idea behind interval training makes a great deal of sense. When we work hard or when we confuse our muscles by exposing them to a novel exercise, the body is forced to access new muscle fibers. Accessing unused muscle fibers means that the we are tapping into new energy reserves. The benefit here is twofold. First, once activated, these newly engaged muscles fibers will now be trained and available to burn fuel even when we are doing less intense activity. Second, these newly activated muscle fibers stimulate the mitochondria, the energy centers in cells, encouraging them to convert more fuel into energy and causing them to burn fat first. This change takes place across all exercise we do, even during lower intensity workouts!

Lasting benefit can be achieved from interval training by adding only a single session to your weekly workout regimen. If your interested in experimenting with interval training we will be starting two classes at onlYoga on Tuesdays beginning February 16th - 6 - 6:30pm & 6:45 - 7:15pm. Everyone is welcome. The cost is $10 to drop-in, free for unlimited students. See you there!

There was a time, early on in my spiritual development, when I thought there might be answers to the big questions presented by the serendipity of a conscious mind. As an adolescent the BIG questions, for me, perpetually centered around my own mortality. It wasn’t necessarily the death of my physical body that disturbed me so much as it was the existential crisis presented by the emptiness seemingly inherent in ceasing to be conscious. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around why/how we humans were blessed and cursed with the awareness of our own mortality.

Looking back, I can see how my unusual childhood tuned me to this sometimes dark fascination which was further amplified by an inherently artistic temperament. By my late teens and early twenties, I was primed to spend a large portion of my energy as an adult seeking answers, looking for truths and generally being earnest. I explored the problem from a variety of angles, imbibing various substances in an attempt to dissolve the self imposed barriers between me and everything else. I resolved to fight a pitched battle to unlock my chest and hips through hours of asana practices. I meditated alone and in groups, for hours and sometimes days, staring into the eyes of another human. I repeated my mantra and chanted or sang with passion. I read the sacred texts, the histories and philosophies, the self help books and the reflections of great minds. In short I searched in earnest.

More than two decades later, I haven’t found The Answer and more than once I have cast about in confusion, wondering what it is I am searching for. After all this time, with no apparent goal in sight, I can’t help but wonder from time to time at the futility of my efforts. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been great benefits to all this effort. There certainly have been, but most of them are as transitory as the seasons. Most profoundly and possibly importantly, I no longer feel the existential angst as deeply.

So the questions remain but so to do the lessons. The most lasting lesson has been the realization that all the striving and searching we do as humans to have the answers, to garner ownership over this fleeting experience we call a life, is just another form of grasping and attaching. Although the searching we do is perhaps somewhat more ephemeral than our attachment to external things, the end result or the net effect on us energetically is the same - tangible or intangible, in the end we must release it all.

My searching will continue, not because I believe I will ever find the answer, rather because I see now that being blessed with consciousness means being entangled in living. We are forever grasping and releasing, grasping and releasing. Living is poignantly beautiful and distressing all in one breath. There is no answer to this predicament. Regardless of chaos or the promise of a bright future, life looms before us and demands to be lived. I don’t know about you but I will likely continue to cling and become attached. I will also continue to celebrate the practices like yoga and meditation, running, swimming, walking, loving, nature, dogs, etc. that cultivate a lasting sense of peace within me.

Effects of Hatha Yoga Practice on the Health-Related Aspects of Physical Fitness
Ten healthy, untrained volunteers (nine females and one male), ranging in age from 18–27 years, were studied to determine the effects of hatha yoga practice on the health-related aspects of physical fitness, including muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and pulmonary function read more...

Studies show yoga has multiple benefits
Yoga induces a feeling of well-being in healthy people, and can reverse the clinical and biochemical changes associated with metabolic syndrome read more...

To Stretch or Not to Stretch? The Answer Is Elastic
The truth is that after dozens of studies and years of debate, no one really knows whether stretching helps, harms, or does anything in particular for performance or injury rates read more...

38 Ways Yoga Keeps YOU Fit! "Yoga.Journal"
As it happens, Western science is starting to provide some concrete clues as to how yoga works to improve health, heal aches and pains, and keep sickness at bay read more...

Yoga May Aid Body Image, Cut Eating Disorders
Yoga may make women feel better about their bodies, steering them away from eating disorders, a new study shows read more...

Exercise and yoga improves quality of life in women with early-stage breast cancer
Two studies report that exercise and yoga can help maintain and in some cases improve quality of life in women with early-stage breast cancer read more...

The Role Flexibility Plays In Improving Your Health
Increased flexibility provides you with a number of health benefits. When you are more flexible, you feel better. Your body works better. You are less likely to become injured. You can exercise without discomfort and without getting too sore the next day read more...

A randomised comparative trial of yoga and relaxation to reduce stress and anxiety
Yoga appears to provide a comparable improvement in stress, anxiety and health status compared to relaxation read more...

Sensory Integration Laboratory
Sensory defensiveness is a larger reaction to and less tolerance of typical levels of sound, touch, smell, lights, and movement in the environment that most others would find harmless read more...

Say 'Om.' Yoga and other therapies good for chronic pain, study says
Researchers reviewed 20 clinical trials involving eight mind-body therapies for adults who suffered from chronic, non-malignant pain, to assess their feasibility, effectiveness in pain management and safety.The findings are published in Volume 8 of the journal Pain Medicine read more...

Health, Hope and HIV
"Healing does not come only out of little bottles, as many people want it to," says Jon Kaiser, M.D., a San Francisco HIV specialist and author of Healing HIV: How to Rebuild Your Immune System (HealthFirst Press, 1998). "Healing comes from inside. That's why I strongly recommend that patients with HIV take time each day to practice deep relaxation. Yoga quiets the mind, improves breathing and circulation, and reduces stress. Daily practice can help support the immune system in conjunction with a comprehensive HIV treatment program." read more...

With the start of a new year it is important to restate the intention or meaning behind the practice of ashtanga yoga.   The practice is meant to sharpen the razor of discrimination. With sustained practice we develop razor-like attention that can be used to slice through karmic attachments both latent and active.  The discrimination developed enables one to see through the four primary forms of ignorance, these are: 1) confusing the temporary for the eternal, 2) mistaking the impure for the pure, 3) experiencing misery as happiness, and 4) believing that the limited ego self is the true Self.  Essentially discrimination allows for subtler forms of introspection which in turn shed light on why we suffer.  The first five stages or limbs of yoga hone the razor edge of discrimination, these are: yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara.  The final three stages or limbs of yoga put the finely sharpened tool of discriminating awareness into action allowing for direct unbiased experience. Yoga, much like modern day psychology, is a systematic method for understanding the perceptual flow of the mind.  At its most basic level, discrimination is a process of sorting this from that.  The sorting process usually begins at the most primary level with our relationship to the external world.  We begin to develop discrimination as we practice principles such as non-injury, truthfulness, compassion and contentment.

Q: Why don’t you talk philosophy more when you teach? Don’t you think it would be helpful to give students an idea of what they should be focusing on or thinking about while they are practicing?

A: A Yoga practice is like a Rorschach inkblot test in action. It is important to give students plenty of time to really sink into the thickness of their own thoughts. As they do this they will project a great deal of their own internalized struggle and resistance onto the experience (the practice). If a teacher is always “proselytizing” or espousing beliefs, then students will ultimately not have the “thinking” space to befriend their own mind and gain a deeper understanding of their own very personal mental habituation. Simply put, there is a significant difference between having someone tell us we are stuck, or being reactive, versus reaching that conclusion in our own time. We are far more likely to take ownership over our own realizations! I also believe that most of us tend towards taking life far too seriously and we bring that limitation with us onto our mat. We turn our yoga practice into another way to avoid the sometimes heartbreaking inconsistencies and injustices of being mortal humans. I believe that learning to truly be uncomfortable and...make it through to the other side of that discomfort is a big part of what yoga has to teach us. Having someone croon dogmatic pleasantries while we are attempting to pull our senses inward seems counter intuitive at best, if not wholly egocentric. What about inspiration? One of the most profound concepts I was ever exposed to in my life is that motivation comes from within. A good teacher learns to step out of the way so that students are able to find their own inner cheerleader.

This isn’t to say that the philosophy of yoga is unimportant. Certainly it is possible to fill in some of the shadows cast by one's own mind and gain a much deeper understanding of the overall yoking process by slogging through an original source like the Yoga Sutras. However, unlike other philosophies, yoga is relevant only to the degree we are willing and able to put its ideas into action in our practice. It is primarily for this reason that I continue to practice Ashtanga yoga, it is philosophy in action and in many respects an artful recipe for living a rich and delicious life.

-John Merideth • Director and Owner of onlYoga

Swim Smart

Stepping to the front of the mat and attempting to surrender to the idea that for the next 90 minutes we are going to practice "relaxing effort" can present something of a conundrum in our practice. Since yoga is at least in part a physical experience we often assume that without struggle we wont reap its many flaunted benefits. So we hold on tight, contract our mental muscles and launch ourselves into the "work" of making it happen. Instead of floating, we bang and stumble our way from one practice to the next. I refer to this as the "hard work" paradigm and it is mostly about affirming what we already know about our physical experience? Since the effort we exert sometimes allows us to muscle our way through yoga postures that seemed unreachable a few months ago, this paradigm can be difficult to shake. Inevitably though we hit a plateau and begin to wonder why we are working so hard all the time. We begin to wonder if this is it...and for some of us it is. We have simply affirmed what we already knew - our bodies are finite structures.
When I was swimming competitively one of my coaches, Jack Nelson, used to go on and on about how important it was to swim smart. He employed many “fascinating” techniques to make his point (most of which ended with a fairly large portion of the team treading water). I thought I understood his point then but it wasn't until I began suffering through my yoga practice a few years later that his words really clicked into place. “Muscles can help you float or they can drag you down. Brute strength and effort don’t win a race. Efficiency and awareness can make a mediocre swimmer great. Swim smart!”
In life we often approach a situation with our full compliment of attachments, habits and preconceptions about who we are and how we are. Before we say a single word, take a single breath or make our first move we have predetermined the outcome of the experience. Pema Chodron calls it our story line - the self-perpetuating tale we weave to maintain the status quo. Relaxing effort means that we allow the story line and its limiting internal definitions to fall away. Essentially we attempt to move or love or breath or eat or work with intelligence. The key to this form of intelligent action is nonjudgmental observation. We watch, we notice and we make small adjustments that keep us asking questions about where we are. The real practice then is in learning how to allow the experience to live us so that ME stops getting in the way. I have found over the years that intelligent action can infuse an otherwise stale, flat practice with new life and tons of fresh energy. Suddenly we are like children again curiously exploring and playing through what we previously identified as “work”. So the next time you step to the front of your mat don't try so hard to be who you think you are, instead relax the effort and swim smart!

Namaste • John Merideth • Director onlYoga

Light - The God Of Generosity
For longer than recorded history, native cultures living in the northern hemisphere have recognized that December brings with it ever increasing darkness.  The days grow steadily colder and shorter and the age old drama in the war of light against darkness takes on a particularly poignant significance.  In late December (this year December 21),  the sun seems to hover in the sky in its lowest arc of the year.  The winter solstice (meaning standing still sun) brings with it the shortest period of daylight during the year and historically has been the most hopeful and conversely the most dreaded time of the year.
Cultures from across the globe watched and recorded the movement of the heavenly bodies to assure they would be prepared for and able to predict the time each year when darkness would appear to rule over light.  Humans have struggled with the darkness during the winter months for millennia.  Complex and often lengthy rituals were developed to ensure the triumph of light over darkness.  To this day the Hopitu Shinumu, or The Peaceful Ones, a native culture from the pacific northwest, practice the Soyal ceremony.  The ritual begins on the shortest day of the year and is a time for offering prayers and wishing prosperity and health in the coming year.  During the Soyaluna ritual, the most powerful humans of the Hopi, the warriors, intreat the Sun God to turn around and return to the earth.  This ritual represents, among other things, the start of another cycle of the wheel of the year and is one of the most important periods of purification.  Prior to the Christian era the Roman solar cult had its major festival on the winter solstice, December 25th.  This date of the invincible sun was carried into the iconography of Christianity as the birth of Jesus and the story of a brilliant star that lit the sky symbolizing life over death...light over darkness.
Although science has given us a precise and clear way for understanding the decline of the sun during the winter months, light continues to play a significant sub-conscious role for us during December.  We continue to mimic age old customs of building bonfires, burning candles and celebrating festivals of light by wrapping our homes in glittering reminders of the transition taking place during this season.  The lights of December are an invocation of the coming warmth and brighter skies of Spring.  This time of year is a reminder that just as light follows dark, great joy often follows and flows from deep sorrow.  Satisfying some primal instinct within each of us, light, the Giver God, brings with it comfort and hope for life’s renewal. 

Namaste • John Merideth • Director onlYoga

The Auto-Familiar
One of the most difficult tasks of teaching a movement based practice like yoga, is getting across to students that they must unmask the assumptions they carry within them around what it means to fully be in their body. Some of the assumptions we use to shape our experience of ourselves are obvious; gender, age, weight, height, etc. Many, many more are far more subtle and often require fairly intense study to uncover. The difficulty is in illuminating how years of conditioned action have brought us to our current level of self-awareness. Movement and posture, not unlike language, can take on a very auto-familiar quality within the closed sphere of our own experience. The range and vocabulary of our movement can feel limited to what we have previously experienced or known. Movement based practices like yoga or dance are in many ways like learning a foreign language. By demanding that we stay present, they dislodge us from our assumptions and quite literally propel us into the possibility of redefinition. From the vantage point of a new vocabulary of movement, we can envision being in our bodies in a fresh way. The known is a powerful and safe place to reside. Stretching beyond our comfort zone into a new vocabulary of experience is how we shake free of the assumed prejudices we hold about ourselves.
“Taken by itself, each language is auto-familiar: it has its own concepts, its own system of thought which, within it, condition the thinkable. The way we think and speak arises out of decisions our language has already made for us: language discreetly dictates to its users - in an invisible manner - self-evident assumptions and proscriptions that are inscribed in its grammar (which is, by definition, imperceptible from inside the language.) In order for grammar to appear as such one must dislodge one's language from its self-presence, from its assumptions and proscriptions, by subjecting them to the otherness of a different grammar, by putting them in question through the medium of a foreign language.”
Felman, Shoshana. Writing and Madness. pp 18-19.

Our ability to see into things, to see the truth, is intrinsic. We can extract happiness and meaning from life despite our awareness of our own mortality. This is a universal quest that crosses time and culture. By practicing yoga we learn to rein in the tendency of consciousness to gravitate toward the impermanence of external things. As consciousness settles, it takes on a transparent quality and our experience of time becomes more spacious and less personal. With more time and space the drama of life becomes less compelling. At this point consciousness begins to experience a less personal way of seeing and a problem emerges. We are faced with a conundrum - the very action and energy propelling us to seek clarity is itself an obstacle on our path. The more force we use, the more it feels like we are doing something. It is at this point that we must develop the ability to rest in the stillness of the moment. However, first we must learn to identify the point of focus. Once we can identify the stillness, we can learn to return to it without exertion. There are many important issues that allow us to reach this juncture but two stand out above the others. The first is motivation or the genuine energy we bring to liberating our mind (effort). The second is intelligent orientation or our willingness to continually place our consciousness before the divine mirror of life (effortless). Motivation requires energy but truly seeing the sublime beauty in a sunset is intrinsically effortless.

John Merideth • Director