Yoga as a Full-time Job

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Friends - As many of you know, I am a yoga nut. And this weekend I am in Tucson, getting a teaching on the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a 500-year-old yoga text, the basis of what many of us in the West see when we see yoga. Lama Marut is a great teacher and today he shared with us the recipe for practicing yoga all day, every day. I’m passing it to you to share with your pals. Don’t feel like you need to do it all, but you might incorporate one idea, just to see if it works. -J

Making Yoga Your Full-time Job:

1. Get a good night’s sleep. That’s the first priority. Seven, eight or even nine hours. Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re busy. I’ll get to that.
2. Wake up and do ‘lolling’ meditation on leisure and fortune. For ten minutes or so, just lie in bed and consider how fortunate you are in all ways. You have a bed, in a house, in a relatively peaceful country, with food in the fridge, electricity, heat, windows. You have time, money, teachers, health and every book possible just a few clicks away. Marut says our good fortune is off the charts. No one, ever, has lived as well as we have. So don’t wake up stressed about all the things that need to be done. Practice ‘not suffering.’ Wake up happy and thankful. After that, consider how little time you have left to live. Its called Death Awareness. Consider that you have been given just one short life and think about how you are going to spend that life. “Is it going to be in some dead-end job where six months after you leave, no one will remember you?” Admit to yourself that this great state won’t last and you have a limited time to kill the caterpillar and emerge as a butterfly. (He means getting enlightened, the goal of yoga.)
3. Meditate, for some time, up to an hour for more advanced practitioners.
4. Move your body. Asana, taichi, running, whatever. Get the energy stirred up inside.
5. Be alone, quiet, and get used to it. Get comfortable keeping your own company. At least for a little time each day. Ask ‘how will I maximize my day?’
6. Check your morality. This is where the six-time book comes in, it’s a book where each day we list six vows and every two hours check in and see how you are doing keeping a specific vow every day. (More about this another time.)
7. Go to work. Try to keep it to 25 hours a week. This is the renunciation part of the equasion. Live with less, buy less, spend less. Downsize. Have more time. Arrange your life to support your spiritual practice. Make achieving happiness your full-time job.
8. Do something for someone else, no matter how small. Do it anonymously so you don’t trigger that selfish need to be thanked. Practice random acts of kindness.
9. Couch Potato Contemplation - After work, spend a few minutes in the lounge chair and envision what it will be like when you are enlightened. No more suffering. Get specific, how you will look and feel. What would it feel like to be in a perfect place?
10. Study a sacred text. Doesn’t matter what, any book that teaches you how to become happier by being less selfish and more selfless.
11. When you go to bed, recount the good things you did that day to help others. Don’t wake up to a clock radio blaring at you. Get rid of the alarm if you can.
12. Once a week, take a day off. Practice only that which makes you happy. Go to the movies, chillax, Refresh your mind and body.
13. Once a month, do a one-day retreat where all you do is rest, study and meditate.

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Comments

[sanjay]

yog sadhna
hai, i m teaching yoga in india, i think yoga is not only a job its comleat sadhna marg. pls visit. www.foundationoflife.net thanks sanjay