Image / hermione13


“A yogi is one who leaves a place just a little nicer than when they arrived!”

"I like this statement for its simplicity and down-to-earth recognition of yoga being something that benefits not only the one practicing it but also the world around them. We may hear someone refer to another person or themselves as a yogi. But what is this statement based upon? One may practice asanas beautifully or know many Sanskrit texts or do much chanting, but those things in and of themselves do not equate to being a yogi. 
The act of practicing or following a path of regulation requires discipline, but that is only part of the formula. The preferred practice system or method that we perform, is really nothing more than a gardener tilling the soil to create a fertile plot of earth. The more we practice the more fertile we become, but it does not mean that we are spiritual or a yogi. It just means we are fertile. The choices we make next are the seeds that we plant in this fertile ground. If we choose to plant an ego there, it will grow even larger than the average person’s due to our fertility. Practice itself does not determine whether one is a yogi or not. It is what that person does with the positive energy they gained from their dedication that will determine their maturity of understanding. When one applies the benefits they have gained in a positive manner, then the aforementioned definition comes to fruition and the world around them is benefitted.

If we wish to ask ourselves if we are a yogi, I think the question could be this one:
“Is the world a better place by our presence in it?” "

- David Swenson


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / Michal Bednarek


"Members of some Jaina sects in India wear a mask to filter the air, lest they should unwittingly inhale and take the life of small creatures. This is a religious custom that few of us would find practical to follow. Nevertheless, upon closer inspection this extreme discipline suggests a useful lesson: Our life is built on the sacrificial death of others. With every breath, we are involuntarily murdering creatures - a massacre that not even a mask can prevent. For, we constantly annihilate billions of invisible microbes, so that we may live. We ourselves are a link in the great food chain of life, destined to die and be food for microbic creatures.

We need not stop breathing or feeding ourselves, or constantly "turn the other cheek," but we must appreciate how we owe our life to other beings and how they owe their lives to us. When we truly see this vast interconnectedness, it becomes very easy for us to cultivate an attitude of reverence for life, which is essentially an attitude of nonharming and of ego transcending love. Yoga means to sensitize us to the fact that we are not alone in the universe but are interdependent cells of a vast cosmic body. Spiritual life is largely a matter of taking responsibility for our destructive aggression, as it reveals itself to us in ever subtler forms. As Patanjali states, nonharming must be practiced under all conditions, which means in thought, word, and deed. Our self inspection can begin with our active life."

- Georg Feuerstein, from Yoga Morality


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

-
"I'll tell you something very strange about oppression, a very simple metaphor: If you put me in jail, you've got to have someone to keep me in jail. That means there are two prisoners, you and me.
Our situation is precisely that.

What is crucial here is that we are confronted with the results of it. Not me more than you.
White people have oppressed me, yes indeed, but they have destroyed themselves in the act.
That's the crisis.
What do you do? Out of your oppression of yourself?
That's the crisis.

What do you do with your guilt?
You do with your guilt what anybody who hopes to grow up does with his guilt: you recognize that you'll be guilty until you drop dead. So that's classified, that's taken care of.
Then what you do is operate despite it.

Guilt is easy. Responsibility is hard. And action is even harder.
Because it does mean, for you and for me
(and I'm talking to you as a white woman and me as a black man):
In order for us to establish this cross-fertilization,
or rather to redeem this cross-fertilization, because it's already happened,
you will have to give up many things. And so will I.
This is true of any real connection.
People modify each other, that's what's called love."

- James Baldwin


**For support and guidance in seeing into yourself and your conditioning more deeply, and in taking responsibility for your participation going forward, I highly recommend this free resource.

Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / Burmakin Andrey


You who let yourselves enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

- Rainer Maria Rilka, from Sonnets to Orpheus 1, 4
Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / Dima Zahar  


One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

–Mary Oliver


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/