Follow Your Bliss

When you follow your bliss...doors will open

where you would not have thought there would be doors,

and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
-Joseph Campbell

This is a powerful and simple quote. If anyone has ever read the works of Joseph Campbell, they may also now that this was advice that he experienced personally. For in every way, he sought to bring to his readers the greater truth of reality that IS the Source of All That Is.

That is Yoga.

The bodymind complex seeks happiness. Always. One could even say that humans are geared - evolutionarily - for this singular purpose. For indeed, what greater satisfaction is there than happiness?

And just how easy is happiness to attain? How easy is it to follow your bliss? Simply point your bodymind in that direction.

Often, in Yoga class, my students here me say, "Close your eyes. Breath deep and slow. Look within." When we close our outer eyes, our inner eye opens, so that our attitude changes. We are no longer external beings, but internal ones. This simple act - closing your eyes, breathing deep and slow, being still - is all you need to achieve Yoga.

Yoga, like water, is not something you hold in your hand. For the tighter your grip, the more it slips through your fingers. Nor can our bodymind complex - the container, the bowl of our essence - be filled if it is already full. After all, the phrase is not, "Hold your bliss", or "Grasp your bliss", but "follow". And speaking of journey's .. take no baggage!

Yoga is a blissful practice. One that shows us where our tension and stress resides, where we hold mental and emotional pain. Often, during Yoga poses, the mind becomes flushed with ideas and thoughts and situations and its as if the floodgates have been opened!

Good!

Let the flood come. And with it, let it wash away all that which we grasp and contort and restrict. When we allow the free flow of prana - the life force - within us, the healing occurs. And when healing occurs, bliss is quick to follow.

Why? Because the body and mind are connected.

The divine essence that is you, knows what it needs to be whole. So follow your bliss!

Aum Peace!
Yogini Valarie Devi