2008 Regional Yoga Championships!

The 2008 Arizona Regional Yoga Asana Championships will be held, from 12:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., on Saturday, October, 25 2008 at the Arizona Historical Society Museum.

This event is open to all practitioners of Hatha yoga who would like to participate. This event is also open to everyone else! -whether you practice yoga or not- come and watch, be inspired and support our growing yoga community!

For those who want to participate...there are two levels of competition and four champions: a male and female adult and a male and female youth. Regional champions will compete at the 2009 National Championship in Los Angeles.

The yoga championship is not just about individuals competing - but provides the impetus to challenge each to rise and be the best he or she can be. It also is about the promotion and general understanding of yoga throughout the general population. An ultimate goal is to lobby the Olympic committee to create a competition division for yoga.

Yoga competitions have been taking place in India for over a thousand years. In describing a competition organized in India, Yogacharya Dr. Ananda Bhavanani of the International Yoga Federation said: "The aim of this competition is to help the youth of India to understand, explain and express the true meaning of yoga as a way of life, as well as a spiritual path to self-actualization and self-realization."

"Inner peace, grace, composure, charisma, discipline and determination are what create champions. A championship is an opportunity to showcase and celebrate the full potential of a regular, disciplined practice. For those who are interested in taking their yoga practice or anything they do to a new level, there is no better impetus than entering a contest," says Nora Jeanne Walsh.

"The event itself serves two purposes; it propels the contestants to rise to their personal best physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, and, in turn, inspires the audience through their performance," Walsh says, adding, "The overwhelming response from those who have competed has been amazement at both what they were able to achieve and the way the whole process changed their lives. Those in the audience have walked away with a desire to learn more about yoga and some are inspired to achieve similar results."

Complete details and entry information are available through links from this web site. http://www.azyogachampionships.com/

For questions about the Arizona Regional Yoga Asana Championship, contact Nicole Stroud at the Bikram Yoga Paradise Valley Studio, 602-971-6999 or via e-mail.

I hope to see you all there!

"Intiutive Guesstimation"

I saw an interview with "Richard" (a character in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Eat Pray Love) and he was giving his opinion on the topic of soul mates, he said and I am paraphrasing- that a soul mate isn't necessarily someone we are destined to fall in love with and live happily ever after with...as a matter of fact, if we do find them, we may not even like them all that much.

He suggests, our purpose in getting in touch with our soul mates may only be for them to act a mirror for us or vice versa. To point out the very characteristics in each other that need to be adjusted in order to live the life we intended to live coming in to this world. So we feel very drawn to them, yes. But are we meant to live forever with them? Maybe not.

For a while now I have been tossing around this idea...What if we decide before we come into this life experience all of the experiences we would like to have? What if we pick our parents, our status in life, our physical assets or defects, all in a plan to provide us an opportunity to overcome them and or help others? And then, having ultimately been successful at navigating these challenges, the outcome will be that we will rise to another level of higher awareness? One step closer to enlightenment...If that is the case, then this soul mate business would make sense to me.

Its fun to visualize myself (spirit self) discussing this with some other (spirit self) about how we will meet each other in this lifetime and what we would like to learn from each other etc...

On a side note to all this though... sometimes, I wonder why in the heck I went and picked some of the things I have, if I had an actual choice?!

Maybe I will take the next round off and just be a Rock Star! ;)

As an Oak would Be

I believe that it serves no purpose for us to take our emotions too seriously.

Emotions are transient, very transient. They are the most inconsistent part of us. This is the nature of our being, too feel. That is pretty much it. We move from experience to experience, feeling the emotions of it, or rather letting the emotion flow through us. The more experiences we have, the bigger spectrum of emotions available for us to feel and therefore the more life available for us to live.

The graceful-ness with which we are able to "go with the flow" of our emotions identifies our individual level of peace within our own being.

For example, picture a large oak tree in the middle of a field...whether the sun is shining, there is a snow storm, a wind storm, or torrential rain pouring down on it, the nature or state of being of the oak tree is the same. It simply goes with the flow and if for some reason it is uprooted and its' life is ended, then it sinks back into the earth to start again...

I am hesitant to say anything definitively these days but I am leaning less and less on the idea that we need to learn to master our emotions. I think life is more about being able to experience as much emotion as we can. Whether we are warmed by the sunlight of love or our soaked in a sea of despair, all we can really do is just experience the emotion and go with the flow...knowing this is the point of life, to feel.

Fighting against emotions or trying to hold on tightly to a particular emotion causes depression, disease and eventually pre-mature death. I know that sounds extreme but I have no doubt that it is true. So what choice do we have? We must learn to relax and take it easy, to let emotion flow through us without obsessive analysis.

It is unthinking of us to teach our children that they have to be happy and to strive for continual happiness. This cheats them out of their life and can only inevitably cause misery. Lets instead teach them to have as many experiences as they can in this one, very short lifetime and to embrace each and every feeling that gifts itself to them. So, at the end of their precious time, they can look back at all that they've felt and know they've really lived.