Create Something New in Your Life!

This morning my husband and I went to a yoga class together! I've only been doing yoga for a few weeks, and I hesitate to talk about it because I don't want it to become something in my life that I talk about and then stop doing it after my gift certificate runs out! Yoga will become a part of my life!

My goal is to do yoga every morning as a part of my waking up routine. I started doing that this week and it's causing me to have to adjust other parts of my life, like how late I go to bed. There's always a clear choice you have to make as to how you are going to live your life and setting priorities, isn't there!

When I was younger I really wanted to have a big family that loved being together. That wasn't the experience I had in my family, so I knew I would have to find out how to make that happen in my life. We are so fortunate to be creative human beings! We can create anything we imagine. It takes a lot of discipline from the level of thought to the level of manifestation. We need to discipline our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions to become a self-actualized human being.

My quest to create a loving family took me to California and I lived in a community of like-minded individuals. I learned a lot about living in community. I lived with some amazing women, and men! One of the women I lived with had her masters in psychology and had a lot of great ideas for us to connect with each other. Every morning we would eat breakfast together and share what our goals were for the day and how we did on our goals from the day before! That's something I never experienced growing up, and it taught me to develop the habit of becoming engaged with the people I live with. One of the men had his Phd and he had studied directly under Abraham Maslow. He had a great sense of humor, and he taught me a lot about integrating those three aspects of thought, feeling and actions! If you don't integrate these three parts of yourself, you disintegrate as a person! The greatest lesson is that you cannot just think your dream, you need to feel it and act on it!

Fast forward about 30 years and I found myself in the throws of taking care of my aging parents. I did manage to fulfill my dream of creating a big loving family. We do really enjoy being together and we extended that love to my parents who bought the house next to us and we lived next to them for 6 years. It was a very important time for me to love my parents as an adult and to help my children get to know their grandparents and experience the unconditional love of grandparents! Ahhhh...so many great memories there! We had a great time until my dad's diabetes needed to have more careful monitoring and they needed to move into an assisted living center.

I saw my parents deteriorate intellectually, emotionally and physically over the 5 years that they lived in various community living situations. They both died, 11 days apart from each other, last August. As I observed their diminishment over those years, I couldn't help but think of the lessons I had learned so many years ago, and that is the importance of integrating your thoughts, feelings, and emotions! I could see that my dad no longer could have a vision of himself. Even though he had bought nursing home insurance, he really hadn't put much thought into what that reality would be like living in that environment. He felt like a caged animal, and he began acting like a caged animal that just wanted to escape. He used to walk a mile a day, and he gradually stopped exercising to the point where he didn't exercise at all! I saw both of my parents take this path, and it was very sad, and very enlightening to watch their diminishment.

This experience of watching my parents age caused me to think about my own attitudes toward aging and how important it is to have a clear vision of myself and my own aging process. I want to be an integrated person until I breathe my last breath! It all starts with healthy thoughts! About myself, my relationship to my family, to my community and my world. I am going to love myself, love my family and love my world. It's a great thought, but I cannot just think it, I have to feel it. I need to follow the intuitions I get and act on them! When I become aware of emotions that cloud my feelings or block my energy, I can remove them! I'm striving to feel free so that I can act on this love by serving those around me and loving them from deep within my heart!

This brings me back to yoga. As I understand the nature of our energetic constitution, it becomes more and more clear how important it is to keep the energy channels of our body open and freely flowing. I see yoga as a way to keep my mind, spirit and body flowing as one. Having been someone active in competitive sports, I know the feeling of getting your body disciplined and the feeling you get when you have reached the point where it is no longer physical exertion but a meditation. Yoga is not competitive nor is the goal to achieve perfect form through ambition but rather "to experience your own spirituality and the interaction of body and mind in each pose." Kara Singh

I want to be the 85 year old woman who can do yoga on the beach with my beloved! I want to be fully present in mind and body every moment of my life. Yoga is giving me an awareness of my body that I haven't felt since I was a little kid running around free without a care in the world. Somehow as we become adults we lose our connectedness to our bodies. We get so involved with the busy-ness of our lives that we lose touch with who and what we really are. Yoga is helping me connect again to me...physically and spiritually. It's nice to be aware of my body again. My husband's comment to me this morning after his first yoga class was that he was very aware of his back now. He felt a soothing energy in his lower back that he wasn't aware of before! Isn't that beautiful! I feel we are creating something new in our lives as we take this fork in the road together, venturing on a path neither of us has walked before, but with a clear idea that we want to be young forever in our minds, our feelings and our actions.

I hope you can love yourself today and create something new in your life!

I love you, Kathryn