“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

“So who do I have to kill to get some Grace around here?”

When Michelle asked if I wanted to read and review her book, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. There are plenty of yoga “memoirs” out there that seem to be little more than self-congratulatory storytelling and recycled pseudo-spiritual platitudes. But I had read Michelle Marchildon’s work on elephant journal and figured it was safe to assume:

This is not one of those books.

Finding More on the Mat is both funny and honest. If you read Poser and about yawned yourself to death—this is for you. This is what I was hoping for from Poser, but didn’t get. Michelle weaves practical yoga wisdom and life lessons into each chapter:

“Love is just like yoga: You have to have a fearless heart. And you have to be willing to fail over and over again before you get it right.”

I get a little sick of the “yoga will make you a size zero,” articles and memoirs. Is that really what it’s all about? For me, my time on the mat is about finding more, not less. So when I read through Michelle’s stories of parenting, divorce, trauma, finding love and taking all of it in with sense of humor and her own perfectly imperfect version of grace, I nod my head. It’s not about less—of anything. It’s about finding more.

If you take yourself too seriously, don’t make any mistakes, have never gone through anything difficult, have perfect abs and are dying to become a Lululemon ambassador—this book is not for you. It’s for the rest of us. It’s what you wish your yoga teacher would tell you about who she is and what she’s learned the hard way. It’s advice from a girlfriend who’s been in your shoes over some “Haagen Daaz with a vodka chaser,” instead of a “I’m here on the mountaintop” guru-type who conveniently leaves out the fact that sometimes life is full of “Cit.”

It’s about yoga, but it’s about a lot more that that:

“You have to wake up from the coma of modern-day life, to go for what you really want…Desire and discontent keep us off balance. They keep us humble. From that place, we can strive for more in our lives. Living in that in-between place, between what you want and what you have, is uncomfortable at best and miserable at worse. But becoming comfortable in the uncomfortable, or stepping into the natural flow of life without struggle, is finding balance in an off-balance way. To me, that is one meaning of yoga. And above all other emotions, desire is at the heart of my practice.”

If, like me, you struggle to find that balance between desire that moves you forward and contentment in where you are now—both on and off the mat—Finding More is for you.

Via Elephant Journal

Approximately 30-90 percent of cancer survivors report impaired sleep quality after treatment. Now, new research is showing that yoga can help. A recent study found that a low-intensity yoga practice improved the quality of sleep for cancer survivors.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, involved 410 cancer survivors who were suffering from moderate to severe sleep issues. Most of the participants (96 percent) were women, 75 percent of them had been treated for breast cancer.

One group of participants practiced yoga for 75 minutes twice a week for a month using a program design specifically for cancer survivors that included pranayama, gentle hatha and restorative poses, and meditation.

Those who practiced yoga showed more improvement in global sleep quality, as well as subjective sleep quality, daytime dysfunction, wake after sleep onset, and sleep efficiency. The participants who practiced yoga were also able to cut back on their sleep medications by 21 percent, reported MedPage Today. The participants who didn’t practice yoga, on the other hand, actually increased their use of sleeping medications by 5 percent per week.

Though the research showed yoga as a promising intervention for cancer patients with sleep problems, limitations included a homogenous group of participants and a large number of participants who dropped out of the study prematurely. Researchers also cautioned that more strenuous styles of yoga may not be beneficial or appropriate for cancer survivors.

Via Yoga Journal

Gladwell and his “10,000 hour rule” from the book Outliers has been questioned by David Epstein in his new book The Sports Gene. 

Epstein says the study that’s the basis for Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule is flawed, the assertion that practice matters is meaningless, and your biological setup determines how much practice you need to put into a task to master it.

Gladwell responded to Epstein in last weeks New Yorker. 

Check it out — here.