Lina, a friend from the Westport Community Gardens, grows kale and other vegetables for the sole purpose of donating it to the local homeless shelter. This is a beautiful, selfless act.

Any donation, I’m sure, is appreciated and useful. But donating something that takes time, energy, and love is amasing. Instead of donating a box of sugary cereal or a can of processed food, Lina donated organic, fresh, local leafy vegetables ~ one of the best things a human being can ingest.

Think of all the time spent tilling the soil, planting the seeds, composting, and watering…. all for the benefit of someone else, someone in need. Lina donated in an intentional, thoughtful, loving way.

Thank you Lina, for introducing us to this lucid practice.

Two Life Lessons from the Great Teachers

Father Juan stood before the group speaking from the heart in a heavy but understandable Guatemalan accent. The topic was love and by the end of his homily, tears were rolling down my cheeks.

A traveler was walking from Jerusalem to Jericho and was attacked by robbers who stripped him and left him half+dead in the street. A priest and a Hebrew man passed by without helping him. But a Samaritan (at the time Samaritans were seen as society’s outcasts) stopped and cared for him, by taking him to an inn where he paid for the beaten man’s care and stay.

This is of course, the story of the Good Samaritan. Father Juan had an interesting interpretation. Everywhere we look, he said, there are those who represent the half+dead man in this parable. He pointed to the marginalized of society.

He encouraged us to consider suicidal individuals, racial minorities, women considering abortions, and orphans. There are people that need our help. Help them. Show love to the marginalized members of society without regard for the differences that may exist between you and them.

When Jesus told this parable, his message was simple: “Go and do as the Samaritan did.” Father Juan’s message in his homily, “We are all human beings. People need our help. Look into your heart. Go help.”

As I sat with my eyes tearing up and a smile across my face, I came to a conclusion: the more we study the great ancient teachers…. Jesus, Buddha, or the more recent greats…. Gandhi, Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela, the more we see that they are preaching two of the same lessons:

1. Love.

2. We are all one.

Has a spiritual passage, a homily, a teaching, or a simple conversation ever touched you in a similar way?

“Love is who we all are, not a quality we possess.”

“To love is to recognize yourself in another.” –Eckhart Tolle

“Is success just being able to do what you want to do on your own terms?”

Positive Energy Can Change Your Life

I know from first hand experiences that positive energy can change your life. There are so many benefits of bringing positive energy in every day life. Here’s a small piece of my story to help you understand how positive energy can change your life.

My Early College Years

I played American football in at Union College and my team was my life. In the beginning years, I was tight with everyone on the team and tended to shy away from people who weren’t on the team. Sure, after the “big win,” I would go out and celebrate and open up to others but alcohol induced interactions aren’t necessarily genuine or meaningful. I was the guy wearing the my football sweatsuit around campus with my hoodie up and with no interest in meeting others.

Opening Up to Positive Energy

In my last 2.5 years of college and grad school, something changed. I started to open up and meet new people. I started having authentic, intentional, meaningful relationships with people. I started reading books about philosophy, life, and business.

I started practicing yoga because there was something about it that made me feel connected with my true self and others around me. I showed genuine interest in other’s lives and I reached outside of my circle of American football friends. Most of all, I started helping others. Whether it was something as small as holding a door for someone and smiling (do this 20x in one day and let us know how good it feels) or something as major as starting a community service group, I did it all.

Meeting New People Increases Positive Energy

I met as many people as I could from all different backgrounds. I reached out to everyone I came across. I mean it, everyone. I was on a first name basis with all of the employees at the college cafeteria, the school’s maintenance crew, the local gas station attendants, exchange students, professors, and more. For those 2.5 years, learning about their backgrounds, their families, their struggles, and their experiences was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

I learned a ton about myself. I had some of the best experiences (which I will encapsulate in future posts) and formed life+long relationships. I met my amasing girlfriend and some of my best friends (see below picture in Thailand with Jim) in the world all as a result of bringing positive energy into the world. When we bring a positive outlook to relationships and facilitate real, meaningful discussions and form a genuine interest for other people, magic happens.

Brian, me, and our new friend Jim Siri from Siri Guesthose in Chiang Mai, Thailand

My friend, the Ashtangi as an Example of Positive Energy

I have a friend who brings a tremendous amount of positive energy into his life and the life of others. My friend, an avid Asthanga yoga practitioner, was low on money. By chance, through some of the positive energy relationships he has formed over the past few years, he was introduced to a local Ashtanga yoga instructor.

My friend Quinn the Ashtangi posing at Sunrise, Photograph by Danielle Lussier of Lucid Practice

I don’t think the instructor had any knowledge of my friend’s financial situation (or did he intuitively?) but for whatever reason asked him to come practice at his studio for free. The instructor said that the studio welcomes people like him — people who are eager to learn, people who are genuinely kind, people who uplift others, and people who want to connect with others in a meaningful way.

The instructor’s invitation was contingent on one commitment — one Ashtanga principle: commitment. The instructor welcomed my friend into the studio but said that my friend must be there for practice at 5:30am 6 days/week. Like Sharath Jois often says with a smile, “Ashtanga is for everyone. Except for the lazy.” As you can guess, my friend was there every morning because that’s the type of person he is.

If it Changed my Life, Positive Energy Can Change Your Life too

My “body of work” on campus and in the community during those 2.5 years represent my proudest life accomplishments. Watching our community service group projects blossom and having people thank me for changing their lives by sharing the positive energy philosophy — these are things that I will always cherish especially because it seemed so implausible 3 years prior to their occurence.

I share these stories in the hopes that people will consider embracing this way of life. Put good out into the world and good will happen unto you. The greatest part is that no matter what we’ve done in life up to this point, we can change whenever we want. Including right now.

If just one person reads this and decides to bring positive energy to their life: mission accomplished. I’m so grateful for what the philosophy of positive energy has brought into my life — if you haven’t found this way of living, I hope and pray that you will. Positive energy can change your life!

Wright Thompson could potentially be the best sports journalist and writer in the US right now. He delivered this epic portrayal of Michael Jordan at age 50. We featured his last major piece about racism and soccer on Lucid Practice. He has done magical work again. His latest article on Montana, Tom and Gerri Morgan, and fly fishing is all-time.

Check it out — here.

It’s a story set in Manhattan, Montana.

“A man named Tom Morgan lives here, making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He’s revered for what he calls “thought rods,” where the instrument functions as an extension of the mind, delivering the fly where you imagine it will go, not where a series of clumsy physical muscle movements try to direct it.

Tom’s wife? She read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and decided that she needed to make a change or risk living an ordinary life. She looked at a map, found Livingston, Mont., and applied for a job. She felt restless there, too, overhearing the sad conversations in the teacher’s lounge, where her colleagues counted off the years until retirement and the beginning of their lives. Gerri quit and joined the Peace Corps. When she returned, a friend set her up with a newly single rod designer. She noticed that he limped.

“I choose to be happy,” he says.

He’s always been disciplined. In the morning, he plays exactly one game of solitaire, using his voice-activated software. He’s calm at his center, palpably so, making the space around him feel peaceful. Being with Tom is like being with a bodhisattva. That’s what sticks with people who meet him, even more than the inspiration from how he handles his disease with grace. There’s something comforting about him. His discipline and calm allow him to control his world, even his desire to retreat into his memories. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Tom,” his friend Bruce Richards says, “and I’ve seen him down one time, and that I think was the first time I came over and was casting some new rods for him. He was outside on the porch. I was casting. I noticed he had tears in his eyes. He just wanted to cast so bad. He said, ‘I just wish I could do that one more time.'”

With smart phones in our hands and our laptops in close range, every answer to every question is right at our fingertips. We consume great amounts of food, but participation in growing is not something we have time for. We want prolific stock returns, yet we are unwilling to do even basic accounting. In today’s world we have been trained to expect instant gratification.

More often than not, we all want for something. And we want that something as soon as possible.

This is a result of our “western mindset”. This mindset is spilling over into the treasured practice of yoga.

A few months ago I met with a friend and told him that I was going to “be a yoga teacher.” I didn’t then, and still don’t practice yoga six days a week. How could I be a “teacher” if I am not a true student? Honestly, I let the “western mindset” get to me. I sometimes think God will hand me things overnight. I’m writing these words to emphasize to myself that practice is the goal.

All around the world, pop-up yoga studios are certifying “yoga teachers” in as little as 15 to 30 days. A studio hands someone a certificate and that person is considered qualified to instruct you based on what they could have picked up in two weeks. What ever happened to the guru-student relationship? What happened to waking up at 4am to meet your guru for practice? What happened to learning from a lineage of teachers? People travel to India for a month thinking that the keys to yoga will be handed to them. Why?

“Hi, do you guys offer teacher training?”  This phrase would never be uttered a thousand years ago. I heard a story of a guru who made a perspective student walk to his house at 4 o’clock every morning for 100 days straight before he let the student practice with him. Today, many people in our western society are bypassing the lessons learned from respected yoga gurus of the past.  Do people truly believe yoga is something that can be fully understood in less than a month? Streamlined yoga instructors are trying to sell yoga. The truth is that a lot of us are being sold yoga from “teachers” who don’t practice themselves.

We are all students of this world. We are all amazing sources of Love. We might as well inhale, exhale and enjoy the practice of yoga.

Yoga is a transformative process. It’s a meditation. It’s a practice. Most importantly, it’s a union. It’s a realization that when you come to the mat, when you practice asana, you come to unite yourself with everything.

I don’t mean to be negative. I’m of the belief that some yoga is better than no yoga, but I want to help myself (and potentially help you) by reinforcing that the practice is the tapas.

True practitioners can help slow this world down a bit. You can certainly help me. Together, we can help everyone realize that we are already in heaven and that no matter how fast we want success, it’s all coming. Especially if we let life evolve and come to us. Remember, this too shall pass.

Be patient. Let’s gently keep telling ourselves to remember the niyama of santosha (contentment).

Practice life patiently, and all is coming.

Shanti. Shanti. Shanti. Peace. Peace. Peace.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner finds time every day to do nothing. And as one of the most powerful executives in the tech world, it’s certainly not because he isn’t busy: Weiner says that leaving gaps in his schedule is the “single most important productivity tool” he uses.

“As the company grows larger… you will require more time than ever before to just think,” Weiner wrote. “Think about what the company will look like in three to five years; think about the best way to improve an already popular product or address an unmet customer need…”

As Fast Company noted, too much “busyness” can get in the way of doing business well — and the failure to allow time for pausing and thinking could lead to a company’s lack of innovation.

Weiner isn’t the only one to advocate reducing busyness and slowing down as a way to optimize creativity and productivity. Author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss wrote in The 4-Hour Workweek, “There’s a big difference between being productive and being busy. Instead of measuring the amount of work you do, measure results in terms of the amount of time, and eliminate the less important things that take forever.”

In addition to allowing companies be more successful we think “doing nothing” is key to limiting distractions and being content. Doing nothing will allow us to practice listening to ourselves and listening to our breath. It will allow us to acknowledge our Higher Power.

While reading Sharath’s notes from last week I was impressed by how much he talked about limiting distractions and acknowledging distractions around you. Paramahansa Yogananda also encouraged a generation to “do nothing and find God.” Maybe finding the “middle way” between being incredibly busy and not busy is pure for us as humans. Maybe not too…