Kasan, a Zen teacher and monk, was to officiate at a funeral of a famous nobleman. As he stood there waiting for the governor of the province and other lords and ladies to arrive, he noticed that the palms of his hands were sweaty.

The next day he called his disciples together and confessed he was not yet ready to be a true teacher. He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king.

He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human. He then left and become the pupil of another master. He returned to his former disciples eight years later, enlightened.

-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

From NBC Sports:

Colts tight end Dwayne Allen is expected to have a big role in the offense this season, and he says yoga will keep him healthy through the wear and tear of 16 games.

Allen said he did yoga almost every day, all offseason long, and he feels the difference in his flexibility.

“Man, a ton of yoga,” Allen said. “I had probably over 100 classes of yoga and it’s helped out a ton. I feel more fluid in my routes, getting in and out of my stance. It’s definitely helped calm me down a little bit.”

Allen, a 2012 third-round pick who caught 45 passes as a rookie, did a lot of his yoga in extremely hot conditions. He said more players are starting to realize can prepare them for sweating through August practices.

“It’s something that’s getting around the league,” Allen said. “A lot of the guys hear about it initially, they hear hot yoga, ‘Woo too hot for me,’ and then they understand that it’s something that’s going to help their game.”

If Allen has a big year, more players may follow his lead and use yoga as the way to stay in shape.

I love reading about athletes who practice.  Lebron, Dwayne Wade, Ray Lewis, Victor Cruz, and Novak Djokovic are just some of the superstar athletes who have yoga in their workout routine. As a former athlete myself, I think yoga prepares you for both winning and losing. It prepares you for being able to go into competition with a prepared, focus mind. There are so many reasons athletes can benefit from yoga, most notably to me, the “willpower to finish” and “loosening of the hips.” As your hips and body open up through the yoga practice (if practiced correctly) your body will practically be forcing you to become a more explosive athlete. There are almost no negatives from an athletic stand point to the practice outside of risk of injury.

I look forward to writing more in detail about the process of yoga and athletic competition as LP goes on.

Ram Dass is a great addition to any team. I am happy to see that I will be reading more of his work on Mind Body Green. If you have yet to read Be Here Now, I highly suggest reading it. I will post a blog soon on my favorite aspects of his masterful text.

Ram Dass, which means “servant of God,” wrote his first blog for MBG last Monday. He hits on some awesome points about “awakenening” to your conscious self.

“Part of the process of awakening is recognizing that the realities we thought were absolute are only relative. All you have to do is shift from one reality to another once, and your attachment to what you thought was real starts to collapse. Once the seed of awakening sprouts in you, there’s no choice—there’s no turning back.

Actually, we all know that reality is relative; we have known it since childhood: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” Life is a dream.

Taming the mind is fraught with paradoxes. You have to give it all up to have it all. Turn off your mind. There is a place in you beyond thought that already knows—trust in that. Jesus tells us that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. That child mind, sometimes called beginner’s mind in Zen, is the innocence of pure being, of unconditional love.

If we are to live in that state of pure being, something within us must die. It’s like when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. The caterpillar does not become a flying caterpillar; it morphs into a butterfly.

This is the pathless path. Where the journey leads is to the deepest truth in you. It is really just returning to where you were initially before you got lost. Shedding the layers of the mind is like taking layers off of an onion. You peel them all away until you come to your essence. The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself. Rather, you are penetrating the layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being.”

We were having a conversation last night about love. Is love willpower? Or is willpower love?  Or is that the same question?