Life is a profound journey of healing as we embrace the entire glorious, horrific story

Delight and devastation. We belong to both sisters of the same. Moving through and between. Moving like rivers toward whatever is next and trying not to attach to any of it. Life is a profound journey of healing as we embrace the entire glorious, horrific story. We feel the fear, yet we must move in the direction of the heart. Do it! Live it.

I love the quality of faith rather than the need to hold a belief. Belief implies a preconception about the way reality should be. Faith is the willingness to experience reality as it is, including the shit and the shine of acceptance in the unknown. Belief may impede spiritual unfoldment since my intellect never gets any of this. Faith arises from my heart with its profound broken moments revealing its fragile humanness.

I’m a lesson in vulnerability. To begin to feel the full effect of my crash, life is a moment-to-moment experience in acceptance of uncertainty. I have faith in my healing, yet I don’t believe how this amazing life unfolds. I know. I can not control it, but I can influence my response.

Consciousness is a full-body phenomenon beyond the limits of our small brain stem. There is beauty in the form of the flower, its essence is its scent. What is our essence as human beings? Perhaps it is pure love.

Beyond my thoughts of having to prove my value, maybe my acceptance of other human beings’ cruel actions arises from the fear of letting go. Just hold a puppy, a kitten, or a baby and notice how the limbic system slows down. Touch, feel, and notice how love recomposes the brain.

This has been a harsh year of healing, yet my heart is full of the wonder and the miracle of living it. Pain is not something to avoid; sitting is discomfort, and notice the mind running to get out of it. Breathe into the discomfort and forgive the attachment to fixing; accept the transformation process.

All around me, structures are shifting, bones are breaking, and foundations are asking to be re-rooted in greater integrity, support, and stability. Be still and notice the mind’s need to control the outcome. To avoid the fear, we overdo, push, and bully to survive. This is our human nature, and yet our true essence is greater.

War and peace are the same coins, the inner battle between our little mind of survival and the greater Self of our soul. My mind can be my best friend or my worst nightmare.

The beauty of witnessing my thoughts, words, and actions arise when I CAN SIT. I practice not feeding those thoughts and focus on the vibration of my inner sound, my breath. My pain, my doubts, and my need to fix is my habit.

In the forgiveness of my learned mind, I witness, and maybe, just maybe, I can move in another direction. I can move inward with my mind and establish a relationship with my deeper self. I am love; I am this.

I might never believe it, but this “knowing” leads me to something greater. I can hold the opposites and be aware I have a choice. I choose to love, laugh, and heal my heart one moment at a time. Celebrating new beginnings, grieving endings, and living in the space in between.

This last week, our sweet Joyce fell and suffered a broken femur and is currently in a rehabilitation facility. It would be so healing for her to hear from any of her students. She will be out for a long while so please send your cards to the studio, and we will make sure she receives them. Many of you know that Joyce is also turning 82 on Saturday, January 14 so birthdays cards are also appreciated!

Joyce Eickmeyer Owens

c/o Yoga Among Friends

4949 Forest Ave.

Downers Grove, IL 60515

Love and light,

Laura Jane

Make the Time & Space to Practice Gratitude

Welcome as we enter into the Season of gratitude. Let’s practice the gifts of being alive in the abundant energy that arises when we make an effort to nourish our inner light. It’s the harvest season of gathering and celebrating our bounty.

In our troubled world today, we are seeing the struggles of conflict and the collective distraction of feeding fear and anger. Now my teacher would remind me that I am just being foolish to hold on to my habit of worry. Clinging to worry and doubt, I just deplete my nervous system, which leads to exhaustion and loss of my joy. It takes great effort to move inward and link to my breath when my little mind is distracted by all the noise around.

My inner mantra today is to thank myself for making the time to share these words, “today, focus on what is beautiful. Free your heart from judgment, live simply, give more, expect less, and notice the light in someone’s eyes. Smile and offer to listen with the intention of being present.” These are just words to the mind of intellect that is wired to protect the self-preservation of one’s identity.

We are human beings moving too quickly as the adrenaline pushes us to do more. Pause, put your hands on your heart and just observe the beating. Is the pulse too fast? Slow your breath and just feel the air meeting your nostrils. Notice a simple shift and how it changes everything. Maybe not in the outer world, but something internal has shifted. Now add a thank you. Inhale and say to yourself, “thank you,” and on the exhale, again whisper, ”thank you.” This is the small, conscious choice of welcoming in gratitude for your life.

It is not what you do that defines your self-worth, but living in the awareness of an appreciation for who you are. Being kind and being your own friend opens your heart to the world. It takes effort:

• to move in the direction of the heart,

• to focus the mind in the direction of observing the feeling of the breath,

• to meditate on the profound wonder of being present in life itself,

• to make an effort to move away from the habit of creating distractions,

• to make time and space to celebrate a practice on a daily basis.

The collective energy to make a commitment to go inward on a daily basis is a great offering we can do for humanity. It is not easy, and we need a collective community to cultivate these tools.

YAF, together with all our teachers, is sharing in the abundance of this life energy as we say “THANK YOU” for being a part of our collective journey. The path of healing and nourishing the inner light is in all of us. May we come together this Season by sustaining these thoughts, as my mentor, Joseph Campbell, would inspire, “Be the JOY in the sorrows of the World.”

Blessings,
Laura Jane

Imagine a life free from pain and sorrow—infused with joy and tranquility!

As the season unfolds and I return from such a beautiful surrounding in Portugal retreat, I am grateful to come home to our YAF community. I love bringing groups together in shared experiences to go deeper into the philosophies and methodologies of the more subtle tools of breath and meditation. It’s such a gift to witness the transformation of students as the practices reveal so many miracles of experiencing the joy of living.

Over the years, my deepest love is teaching the sutras, which offer the yogic philosophy and practices that have been evolving since at least 3000 BCE, which accounts for their rich complexity and diversity.

Patanjali

In simplistic terms, the two main goals of yoga are to know oneself and to know the possibility of something greater or the Cit, a Sanskrit word for truth. From this understanding, the seeker aspires to know oneself not as just an identity of form or role but to align with a deeper source of consciousness awareness. In other words, one aspires to embrace the soul and to honor the presence of a source or God or Higher Power, whatever the truth reveals in the experience of living one’s yoga. The tools are many, and Patanjali’s yoga sutra outlines practical steps toward this optimal alignment.

These sutras offer us a practice of yoga that have the ability to help ease our suffering of a roaming mind and to calm our nervous systems. Science is catching up, and my life’s work, after leaving the mental health system in the early 90s as a therapist, was to offer the teachings of yoga as a path to heal the physical, mental and emotional layers of the mind and embrace the soul.

For the past two years, I have been blessed to go deeper with my yoga therapy tools and into my own practice. I completed a teacher training in the very practical and yet profound study of Vishoka meditation. The methodology for learning these practices offers beginners as well as long-time practitioners an opportunity to experience the subtle grace of presence.

Sutra 1-36: visoka va jyotismati (by focusing on the light in the heart that never suffers) is a sutra in the section where Patanjali gives us different options for calming the mind, bringing it to a state of steadiness closer to citta-vritta nirodha. This principle of philosophy offers the glimmer of possibility that there is a light deeply hidden in our hearts that never suffers, which is opposite of our learned mind that holds the memory of despair, sorrow, anger, or heaviness. This is the light of consciousness.

We are born into this light, and it is neutral, unaffected by the outer world. However, the effort is in actually bringing the focus of the mind inward instead of turning the light towards external objects and outer experiences. We might not be able to change the outer world at times, but we do have the choice of discernment to shift our own focus and bring our minds home. We can use these tools now as the uncertainty of living is moving so quickly, and our sense of stability is shifting.

Now, I am offering these teachings to our YAF community and create soul groups that come together and feel safe enough to let the resistance of fear move us into the open space of self-love and compassion and celebrate our aliveness. This course is designed to be 6 weeks in 2 hours sessions covering the practices of different skills in yogic breathing techniques, asanas, discussions, and learning the sutras, meeting each student where they are.

We will gradually move into the full body of the Viskoska meditation. Pantanjali asks us to turn this light inward toward the divine resting our attention in our heart. This takes a refined mind of practice as we are so much affected by sukham and durham, or the joys and the sorrows of what we are witnessing. Life is much greater than our attachments to the ups and downs of living through the lens of learned habits or patterns. The light we have is not ours, it belongs to the divine, and all of us are miracles of the profound grace which offers a gateway to thriving.

Our nature is to fear as we cling to maintain our self-preservation. When we collectively connect with that which is our true nature or cit, we rise above the experiences that constantly bombard our moods of anger, frustration, anxiety, overwhelm, exhaustion, and irritability. My teacher always reminds me that when someone is bitten inside with pain, they will bite out. That reactive mind is an unstable mind, and it is holding on to hurt. To heal ourselves is to heal the world. To move into that which is healing takes courage to let go of old patterns. We need each other to support and encourage this journey.

Vishoka Meditation with Sutra Study meets on Saturday from 12-2pm starting October 29. I hope you can join me on this journey and reclaim your inner joy! Learn more and register here.

With love and light,

Laura Jane