“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” ~Guillaume Apollinaire

Yoga is great for stretching. If you do it enough, you can touch your toes and improve your parallel parking skills by twisting to see behind you.

But, it’s also great for stretching and expanding things beyond your muscles—namely your mind. Through concentration and meditation, in particular, the mind becomes stronger and more agile, in the same way our muscles are strengthened by a Vinyasa class or trip to the gym.

Another way to stretch our minds is through svadhyaya or self-study, which encourages yogis to be students of their practice and the world. One easy way to do this is to read. Since you’re reading this now, you’re off to a smashing start. BRAVO!

I recently had a request to share my favorite yoga and meditation books, so here’s a quick sampling of the ones I turn to most.

Modern yoga resources:
Living Your Yoga (Judith Lasater)
Eastern Body, Western Mind (Anodea Judith)
Yoga for Emotional Balance by my friend Bo Forbes
Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga by the late Georg Feuerstein
Mudras: Yoga in your Hands (Gertrud Hirschi)
Anything by B.K.S. Iyengar…
Classical yoga texts (each with multiple translations):
Bhagavad Gita
The Upanishads
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Meditation books:
Wherever You Go There You Are by mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn (and dad to one my dearest friends).
When Things Fall Apart by no nonsense Buddhist nun Pema Chodron
As an English major, former English teacher, writer, and proud nerd founder of the Om Gal Book Club, it’s no secret that I’m a major bookworm. I even have the knots in my shoulder and neck to prove it from lugging 2-3 books in my handbag at all times. I think it’s time for an e-reader…

And since they’re not all yoga books (not even close), I’ll share what else I’ve been reading lately and what I plan to read next.

Lately…
Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers by the inimitable Anne Lamott
Lean In by Facebook COO and feminist superhero Sheryl Sandberg
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, also known as the book that changed my life most this year. (If you don’t have time to read the book, watch her TED Talk).
Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield
Buddy: How a Rooster Made me a Family Man by my friend and editor of the Boston Globe, Brian McGrory.
Undiet by Candian gal pal and nutritionista superstar Meghan Telpner
New & Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (which I could read every day and still have my breathe taken away at least once on each page).
Up next…
Learning to Breathe by my friend Priscilla Warner
Running with the Mind of Meditation by Sakyong Mipham
A literature heavy hitter… like Infinite Jest or Anna Karenina. If I start now, I can finish by Christmas, right?
The September issue of Vogue—seriously, have you seen this thing? Magazine doesn’t cut it. Definitely a book.
What about you? What are you reading? Which yoga and meditation books expand your mind, and which works of prose or poetry stretch your soul and fill your handbag?Originally published on my website, Om Gal.

Via Intent Blog

The Internet’s last decade and a half of development as a forum for short, zippy, and often snarky writing has taken place in large part on platforms built by Ev Williams. A farm boy from Clarks, Neb., Williams, 41, dropped out of the University of Nebraska and worked his way west to California, first as a copywriter and then, once he’d taught himself enough, as a freelance coder. He founded the pioneering blogging network Blogger in the late 1990s, giving anyone with a stray thought a way to express it to the vast audiences flocking online. He sold that company for an undisclosed amount to Google in 2003 before going on to co-create Twitter, which initiated the era of disembodied 140-character snippets.
Now Williams, who left Twitter three years ago yet remains on its board, is trying to push the Web the other way. Medium, his year-old startup, seeks to create a home for something all too rare online: well-reasoned articles that can generate meaningful compensation for their authors. (In most cases so far, though, that doesn’t include pay.) “We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say to get those ideas and stories out there, and to tie it into a network where it has more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the audience it deserves,” he says.
The company, backed by Williams and fellow Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who declined to say how much they’ve invested, has 40 engineers and editors in San Francisco and a small office in New York. Employees describe a culture of rapid experimentation: Unlike on most blogs, readers can attach comments to specific paragraphs; the team’s also working on ways to let multiple writers collaborate on an article through the site’s interface à la Google Docs, Williams says. Medium’s audience remains small. A ComScore spokeswoman says the site doesn’t register on her company’s traffic scale.
On Medium’s spartan, mostly white home page, stories are grouped not by authors, but in collections with broad themes like “This Happened to Me,” memoirs of brushes with danger, and “Better Humans,” ideas for self-improvement. The site has been relatively choosy when inviting writers to contribute. On a recent day, its home page featured a personal account by a former Google employee of the awkwardness of leaving the company, a concise analysis of why chewing gum improves cognitive ability, and a 10,000-word story, “The Mercenary,” about an ex-Vietnam veteran investigating a gold theft in the Peruvian Andes. Despite the general lack of pay, writers commend Medium’s ease of use and the level of interaction with readers it provides. “For me, it’s a great opportunity,” says longtime war correspondent David Axe, who uses the site to post eyewitness accounts and photos from Afghanistan. Medium “is a great, solid, easy-to-use platform that deliberately limits style choices in the interest of simplicity,” he says.
Medium doesn’t always choose well. On Aug. 14, Peter Shih, a San Francisco entrepreneur, posted to the site the kind of thoughtless, list-based Internet fare that Williams says he created Medium to counter. Shih’s caustic piece, titled “10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition,” was widely panned for the author’s disgust with the city’s homeless and a misogynistic undertone in his comments about the local dating scene. (Shih withdrew the story and apologized.) Far from expressing embarrassment, Williams says the article filled Medium with intelligent responses from offended readers. “We do not expect every piece of content published on Medium (or even every piece that gets attention) to be thoughtful,” he wrote in an e-mail. “That is incongruent with being open and democratic, which is core to our philosophy.”
In part, Williams says, his two years atop Twitter led him to take another stab at stitching together that kind of longer dialogue. He says he’s disenchanted with the economics that lead news sites to chase reader eyeballs with little consideration for editorial quality. “The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It’s utter crap,” he says. “They create a culture that is superficial and fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are self-destructive and unsustainable.” Williams adds that he’s “pessimistic about the state of media, and that’s why I want to work on this problem. The economics of media are pushing things in a bad direction, but at the same time there’s more great stuff [being written] than ever before.”
Medium isn’t developing a conventional ads-for-page-views model—Williams says he can’t imagine a banner ad on the site. To change the dynamic of online writing, however, the company has to figure out a way to make money and pay its writers. (Matter, a similarly minded science and technology journalism site that Medium acquired earlier this year, charges readers 99¢ per month and pays contributors.) Evan Hansen, a former Wired editor who joined Medium as a senior editor last spring, says the startup is exploring approaches that include reader subscriptions and ad sponsors for specific article collections, a model similar to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet.
There’s plenty of uncertainty about whether the company will offer publishing tools for writers or employ journalists (or both). One of Medium’s more ambitious ideas is to create a marketplace for editorial services, such as fact-checking, copy editing, and photo editing, through which authors or Medium can pay pros to do those jobs on individual stories. Online media consultant Jeff Jarvis says it’s hardly unusual for a startup to experiment its way to a business model. “They didn’t know what Twitter was going to be at first, either,” he says.
Williams recognizes that he faces something of an uphill challenge with Medium. Snarky tweets and gossipy blogs are popular for a reason: They give busy readers a quick, dopamine-style kick and a break from their day jobs. (Gossip site Gawker pulled in about 7.3 million unique readers in July, according to ComScore.) By contrast, Williams says the statistic his team watches most closely is the average time per day its readers spend on the site, which he says is increasing; he declined to provide numbers. “We don’t pretend that we can make people eat their vegetables when there’s potato chips on the table,” he says. “But we want to provide an alternative for those who want some diversity in their diet.”

Via Bloomberg 

“Happiness  seems such a small thing when you have it, but when it’s gone you realise how big it really is.” Gorky

The Yoga approach to happiness is holistic and involves the emotional art of healing the mind in order to bring change to the bodymind and emotions. Happiness with Yoga is a healing process.

The Art of Happiness teaches you how to look deep within yourself, usually in contemplation, to find peace and satisfaction. Sukha, inner contentment, is the deepest form of satisfaction. Experiencing your own bliss is the most profound peace. Our Yoga practice, our Sadhana, supports the process by continually restoring balance in the mind body system at all levels of our being whilst Meditation and Pranayama, breathing practices, bring awareness of how tyranical our thoughts and emotions can be.

This is probably a good place to have a refresher on the subtle bodies of Yoga, where we experience ourselves at various levels of existence, the Koshas, or the 5 sheaths of existence:Annamaya kosha, the physical or flesh body (also known as the pain body); Manomaya kosha, the body of the mind and emotions, the lower mental body (also known as the mundane mind);Pranamaya kosha, the vital body of the breath or prana; Vijnanamaya kosha, the psychic, higher mental body or the body of the intellect, inspiration and wisdom; and Anandamaya kosha, the bliss body, Universal Consciousness.

The Art of Happiness with Yoga involves trying to understand the nature of bliss, the deep inner peace that is the characteristic of Anandamaya kosha , the fifth level of being. This healing art embodies, actually physically being experienced in the body, the realisation that happiness comes from within and is not dependent on material possessions or actual physical enjoyment.

So many of us have, for so long in our evolution as humankind, associated happiness with achievement of our desires, wants and expectations – and expecting the experience of elated excitement, almost jubilant and ecstatic, and permanent self-satisfaction. And of course the disappointment that follows the discovery that none of these feelings last, brings on a negative downer: we get bitter, disillusioned and tired. We just wear our emotions out in the long run.

Real, and sustainable, inner peace and joy for life does not involve effort or expectation and so never brings about tiredness or fatigue with life. Ancient Yoga texts describe complete happiness as a state of silence, where unnecessary thoughts and fears no longer trouble you: it’s a state of perfect grace, poise and freedom of choice.

Our practice in Yoga gives us our foundation for achieving these wonderful, sacred states of being: think of your inner state following Savasana or Yoga Nidra, it’s perfect for the necessary calmness of mind for contemplation. Think of the breath flowing as you practice your Yogasanas, try to associate this ease of effort and enjoyment with other areas of your life. Try to cultivate and maintain these wonderful states for as long as you can. And then, you’re ready to start the process of identifying consciously what perfect happiness really is.

Step 1: Feelings of Pleasure

Start by analysing what the feeling of pleasure actually consists of as you do something you enjoy. Is it the ease of breath flowing in your practice, for example, or the exhileration in the heart space? Is it the sheer simplicity of sipping hot tea and the calm space you’re in?

The Yogis attain to the fact that our actions bring us pleasure when they briefly evoke the inner silence that defines true happiness. The inner silence comes when all thoughts just vanish, right at the moment, say, when a goal or dream finally manifests or at the very instance of hard won success: your mind seems to “dip” momentarily into the sheath of “bliss”. (It has been described as “the mundane mind crashing down”.)

At the moment of “bliss” we experience positive sensations because temporary channels are opened up to the higher, bliss body sheath of our subtle bodies. This is the source of pleasure, and all likes and dislikes. But this feeling is temporary and can be the source of overindulgence, dependency and habit.

Step 2: Isolate Satisfaction

If you can learn to isolate and remember the brief moments of satisfaction then you can learn that you can generate this from within. This is a subtle action in growing with Yoga, whereby you learn to cultivate your own emotional happiness and satisfaction. You learn to free yourself from dependency on anything external: and this freedom is wonderfully empowering.

This empowerment grows and strengthens over time: it’s a healing process.

Step 3: Maintaining Inner Peace

At first you might not be able to maintain your inner peace for very long, but gradually over time and with practice your vulnerability to negative influences and energies will become less and less: allow them to weaken and your inner peace to strengthen.

With time and practice, your growing awareness of Universal Consciousness will give meaning and a coherence to all aspects of your life – bringing even the subtlest of life aspects together in a whole – as the life-distorting excessive feelings of likes and dislikes become less important.

And with Yoga you develop the art of maintaining inner peace at all times, and in all your actions. This calmness in action is the secret to attaining the “skill” referred to in the Bhagavad Gita. Your happiness is vitally important to your health, and to humanity, as it is part of your harmony with the whole.

Via Susan Ni Rahilly and suZenYoga

50 Life Tips and Secrets

Ryan Calvert first shared this literature with Brian and Brian shared it with me.

Jordan’s 50 Life Tips and Secrets changed my life. I shared it with hundreds of my college friends and friends and family from home too.  The result was always overwhelmingly positive and often times “life changing.” I printed this and plastered it to my wall and asked everyone to read it when they came over. I printed out multiple copies and handed them out to people I didn’t even know.

Why was this shared with 1,000,000 people? Because it’s insanely great work. Powerful yet concise pieces that challenge assumptions and provide value are inherently shareable.

Jordan is a friend of ours and we respect and admire the path he’s taken in life. He’s an outstanding guy and a thought leader for the coming generation. Check out the link below and browse his website for inspiration and thought provoking content. Their mission is bold. And simply put: they’re changing the world.

Now, we’re sharing it with the Lucid Practice Community. Who will you share it with?

50 Life Tips and Secrets