Can the source be absent from its bloom?

Yoga is not about touching your toes. It's about opening your heart.

I teach yoga not as a religious system but as a breath-based practice of physiological transformation that has shifted my experience from body image to embodiment. I teach it because it heals and changes me, drawing my awareness back into the home that is my body. It is an antidote to the cultural obsession of looking for perfection. It invites us to notice the perfection that is already right here in this moment, in this body, in this breath. Every being embodies the same essence. We all have 5.5 liters of blood. We all have fingers and toes and feelings and dreams. We're all as beautiful as this breath.

Yoga draws me because it offers an active practice for shifting thought-based living to sensory-based living. When I fully feel the body and its breath, my mind doesn't tie itself up in knots of emotional and mental holding patterns. Thoughts settle into my body like snow gently falling, and feelings are transformed on the wave of the breath.

Through yoga, I have explored how my body holds onto emotional states and how when I lift, bend and open my body in all directions it promotes a release of these states. There is a quieting that happens in the mind, a soothing effect in my nervous system, a deep settling in the heart. In this space, my body becomes my ally.

I am not alone in this discovery. Study after study reveals that yoga engenders amazing health benefits. Our nerve cells are the home of our vital energy. When challenged, we draw on their bio-energy and can feel anxious, upset, frustrated, angry, exhausted and depressed. Yoga postures offer an antidote to the inherent overstimulation of our lives as a result of complex media and life stressors. They facilitate the flow of blood, oxygen and nutrients to every cell of the body... restoring strength to the nervous system while promoting the relaxation response with sensations of well-being and emotional vitality.

Scientific studies on yoga abound. A study at the Children's Hospital in Seattle states: Yoga reduces obsessive concerns about weight associated with eating disorders. The Wall Street Journal reports: A 2003 study by California State University, Los Angeles found that yoga improved students' behavior, physical health and academic performance, as well as attitudes toward themselves. In yet another UC Berkeley study, Jennifer Daubenmier of California's Preventive Medicine Research Institute states: Through yoga... women may have intuitively discovered a way to buffer themselves against messages that tell them how only a thin and 'beautiful' body will lead to happiness and success. If backed by further research, yoga may help prevent and treat eating disorders. Studies go on and on, but the most authentic study you can trust is your own experience on your yoga mat.

Yoga practice should not be a struggle. It should be steady and comfortable, strong and alert while soft and receptive. Our goal is that which is already here, that which we already are: intimacy with life conducted by the breath. Let the breath be fertilizer for the heart. Let the inhalation fill you. Let the exhalation soften you. The most important moment of our lives is now.

Be not afraid of your power, your strength and your beauty. There's no forcing a blossom.

Stand strong and shine on,