Aligning with Grace

Sometimes, a word keeps showing up everywhere you look and everywhere you turn.  Other times it might be an experience. And sometimes, it's both at the same time... The more we practice - particularly meditation - the more we come to inhabit a state of grace. Paramahansa Yogananda in his writings, described how the deeper one meditates, the deeper one can go - the range of depths and experiences can never be plumbed in this life time. We never arrive. There is always so much farther one can go in the practice and in communing with the Divine. I find a certain comfort in that. Both Yogananda, and a gifted therapist I once visited, who was a devotee of Yogananda, asserted that over time, the practice of meditation leads one to inhabit a state of grace, more often than not. In time, the practice can lead to bliss, and eventually bliss will prevail as a state of being. It seems like such an amazing gift to me! Lately, everything I hear, read, or listen to reminds me of the st

I shared in one of my recent posts, that I have been journeying through the attributes of the Divine as themes for my yoga classes of late. This week, my focus is on "ananda" which means bliss, and I am working with "Inner Spiral" - one of the Anusara Yoga Universal Principles of Alignment, as a way of creating more expansion in the body, (more specifically in the hips) and thus, a greater container for the embodiment of bliss. The implication is also to let go of what stands in the way of embodying more bliss as well. I have also been teaching a short course titled: "The Art and Yoga of Happiness," so needless to say, I've read quite a number of books on the subjects of joy, bliss, and happiness in the last couple of months... One of the books I recently reviewed is: Unconditional Bliss: Finding Happiness in the Face of Hardship by Howard Raphael Cushnir, and like Byron Katie, he too proposes two questions to ask oneself to get at the heart of the