Yoga with Melissa

Yoga for Insecurity

Insecurity is defined as a lack of confidence or a state of uncertainty or anxiety about oneself. That sounds bad doesn’t it. In fact it sounds very bad. If I was feeling that way about myself, that sounds like a feeling that I would want to get rid of. The definition goes on to say that insecurity is lack of protection. That also sounds worrying. If I feel into that in my body it creates a growing sense of self-doubt, uncertainty and fear. Insecurity is also defined as the state of being open to danger or threat.

Our response to insecurity is to get rid of it or to establish security. That is, to do everything within our power to make our corner of the world more secure. The problem with this approach is that we continue to change our lives and paint ourselves into a corner until even the most trivial experiences in our life cause us an incredible amount of anxiety and stress. Trying to change and control our external environment is a recipe for more anxiety, stress and insecurity.

Insecurity is not a problem. We will all experience insecurity in our lives. We will all encounter circumstances in our lives that make us feel insecure. That is a normal part of being a human being. Our everyday existence is intrinsically insecure. We could lose our jobs, the stock market could crash, we could face a health crisis, our relationships could crumble, everything is temporary and transitional.

We continually try to find solid ground, but we can only rely on the groundless ground. Earth cannot be permanently fixed. It crumbles, slips, levels out and rises up into mountains. Nothing is certain except uncertainty. Change and dissolution continually undercut us and we take it personally, but it is not personal.

Insecurity is a normal part of our lives. Constant change is natural. Opening to impermanence can create some spaciousness around the fear and anxiety of insecurity. In other words, it is only possible to find security in accepting insecurity.

Yoga Postures/Asanas: Bridge Pose or Setu Bandhasana, Cat Pose or Marjaryasana, Tiger Pose, Tadasana or Mountain Pose, Chair Pose or Utkatasana, Tree Pose or Vrkasana, Warrior One or Virabhadrasana One,Downward Facing Dog or Adho Mukha Svanasana,  Upward Facing Dog or Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, Dying Warrior, Crocodile Pose

Props: yoga blocks

Thank you so much for your donations Viola from Italy, Donna from Kansas, Leah, Cornelia, Donna from Oklahoma,

If you want more support in opening to insecurity, each Monday we meet in our live classes in our membership community for guided meditations. I give a teaching talk and then lead a guided meditation. You have a chance to ask questions and receive support for your practice. This is an amazing part of our community and we would love to have you.

Membership Sign-Up

Weekly Yoga with Melissa 393 Photos of Yoga Poses

Yoga on Generosity

If you haven´t done the first classes in this series, go back and start there. This series is cumulative and so you will need to do the classes in order.

Episode 390 - Click Here

Episode 391 - Click Here

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨ Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen

The emotion that we are going to open to this week in our Yoga for Emotional Healing Series is generosity. This week we are going to be open and present to the energy and emotional experience of generosity. How does the boundless expression, the direct experience, the sensation of generosity feel in your body? Where do you feel it in your body?

Reflect on when you have received the gift of a listening ear, a compliment, time, or just the right words of encouragement from another. Remember how that feels in your body. You can literally feel your body shift, change, soften, let go, open, and blossom.

When you have the gift of time, energy, wisdom, kindness, friendship, unconditional caring, support, and nurturing to give to another, reflect on where you feel that in your body. How does it feel? How does your body shift and change? What opens and blossoms in you as you connect with your inherent generosity?

When you connect with your own innate wisdom, self confidence, dignity, kindness, open-heartedness and internal sense of generosity, what does that feel like in your body? How does the physical sense of your body shift and transform in response to these feelings? Do you feel more spacious and effervescent?

It is not possible to lack generosity, because even if we have very little, we can always connect with our inherent generosity and find something to give. We can give our smile, our full attention, our sympathy, our company, our time, our energy, our wisdom, our reputation, our self-confidence and our kindness. Cultivating the recognition of our inherent generosity we are always able to flow in a generous way.

The sun showers our earth with a warm and radiant glow with warmth and hospitality. The sun shines on everybody and warms us all equally. The more we connect with our inherent generosity the more we see we really do have all we need and that we are secure in the primordial nature of our being.

Yoga Postures/Asanas: Supported Fish Pose or Salambha Matsyasana, Half Happy Baby Pose or Ardha Ananda Balasana, Mini Sun Salutations, Downward Facing Dog of Adho Mukha Svanasana, Sun Salutations or Surya Namaskar, Reclined Twist or jathara parivartanasana, Savasna or Corpse Pose, chaturmukha mudra

Props: Yoga Bolster, Blocks

Thank you so much for your donations Hannah from the UK, Peige from Italy, Nickie from West Virginia.

We appreciate your generosity. And I just want to take a moment to express my gratitude to the generosity of our carriers of the teachings and guardians of the community in our membership community. Each and every day they give of themselves selflessly to carry the teachings forward into our community in our Daily Yoga Connection, the Moonstruck section, the devotional section our meditation community, with nourishing recipes and our book club. We all appreciate your support so very much. If you would like to be a part of our awesome community, you can sign up here:

https://www.melissawest.com/membership/membership-sign-up/

Weekly Yoga with Melissa 392 Photos of Yoga Poses

Yoga on Generosity If you haven´t done the first classes in this series, go back and start there. This series is cumulative and so you will need to do the classes in order. Episode 390 – Click Here Episode 391 – Click Here ¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. […]

Yoga on Generosity

If you haven´t done the first classes in this series, go back and start there. This series is cumulative and so you will need to do the classes in order.

Episode 390 – Click Here

Episode 391 – Click Here

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨ Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen

The emotion that we are going to open to this week in our Yoga for Emotional Healing Series is generosity. This week we are going to be open and present to the energy and emotional experience of generosity. How does the boundless expression, the direct experience, the sensation of generosity feel in your body? Where do you feel it in your body?

Reflect on when you have received the gift of a listening ear, a compliment, time, or just the right words of encouragement from another. Remember how that feels in your body. You can literally feel your body shift, change, soften, let go, open, and blossom.

When you have the gift of time, energy, wisdom, kindness, friendship, unconditional caring, support, and nurturing to give to another, reflect on where you feel that in your body. How does it feel? How does your body shift and change? What opens and blossoms in you as you connect with your inherent generosity?

When you connect with your own innate wisdom, self confidence, dignity, kindness, open-heartedness and internal sense of generosity, what does that feel like in your body? How does the physical sense of your body shift and transform in response to these feelings? Do you feel more spacious and effervescent?

It is not possible to lack generosity, because even if we have very little, we can always connect with our inherent generosity and find something to give. We can give our smile, our full attention, our sympathy, our company, our time, our energy, our wisdom, our reputation, our self-confidence and our kindness. Cultivating the recognition of our inherent generosity we are always able to flow in a generous way.

The sun showers our earth with a warm and radiant glow with warmth and hospitality. The sun shines on everybody and warms us all equally. The more we connect with our inherent generosity the more we see we really do have all we need and that we are secure in the primordial nature of our being.

Yoga Postures/Asanas: Supported Fish Pose or Salambha Matsyasana, Half Happy Baby Pose or Ardha Ananda Balasana, Mini Sun Salutations, Downward Facing Dog of Adho Mukha Svanasana, Sun Salutations or Surya Namaskar, Reclined Twist or jathara parivartanasana, Savasna or Corpse Pose, chaturmukha mudra

Props: Yoga Bolster, Blocks

Thank you so much for your donations Hannah from the UK, Peige from Italy, Nickie from West Virginia.

We appreciate your generosity. And I just want to take a moment to express my gratitude to the generosity of our carriers of the teachings and guardians of the community in our membership community. Each and every day they give of themselves selflessly to carry the teachings forward into our community in our Daily Yoga Connection, the Moonstruck section, the devotional section our meditation community, with nourishing recipes and our book club. We all appreciate your support so very much. If you would like to be a part of our awesome community, you can sign up here:

Membership Sign-Up

Weekly Yoga with Melissa 392 Photos of Yoga Poses

Yoga for Emotional Awareness

If you haven´t done the first class in this series, Letting Go of Emotional Control, go back and start there. This series is cumulative and so you will need to do the classes in order.

¨Emotions are intelligent expressions of energy that can lead us to our awakened nature.¨ Reggie Ray

Emotions in and of themselves are not a problem. They are simply expressions of awakened energy. Emotional awareness allows us to experience an emotion and let go into that direct experience. We can be immediately present with whatever emotion is experienced in a direct way. We can experience each emotion in a fresh and new way.

What is emotional awareness? It means being completely present and open with the emotion. With emotional awareness we are free in the experience of whatever emotion arises. We are with the straight, undiluted, essence experience of the emotion.

What normally happens however, is that we experience an emotion and then we shut down. We retract from the pure, undiluted experience of the emotion and pull back from it. We do this by trying to figure it out. We try to figure out why we are feeling the emotion and where it came from and how to resolve it. In short we begin to attach a story to the emotion.

About a week ago I was overcome with sadness. The direct experience of the emotion was quite overwhelming. I pulled back from it. I tried to figure out, why am I sad? Where did this emotion of sadness come from? I went back through my whole day and all my interactions and tried to blame my sadness on somebody else as though I caught it like a flu bug. There is no end to finding the storyline, you can go back through your whole life, through your whole childhood, you can go back into your past lives if you want to as well. There is no end to pulling away from the intensity of the direct experience of the emotion. Sadness, like any other emotion is simply a human emotion, a play of energy, but there is a desire to justify them, explain them, attach a storyline to them and most of all to resolve them. In my case, I walked right into the grocery store, bought I family size bag of chips and sat down and ate the whole thing. Then I felt sad but I also had a bigger embodied sensation of a stomach ache that allowed me to cover up the direct immediate, undiluted experience of sadness.

Emotions are not good or bad or indifferent. We label our emotions. We think joy, oh that is a good emotion. Peace and calm, oh those are really good emotions for somebody like me, a yogi to be having, I should be having more of those emotions. Anger, anxiety, fear, those are bad, those are really bad, I should avoid those emotions, in fact as a spiritual person I shouldn´t have those emotions at all! But we are delusional in our confused thinking and constructed stories, explanations, and judgment around emotions. We are distracting ourselves from the experience, labelling the experience, judging and compartmentalizing them. We are simply using our intellect to distract ourselves from our direct experience. Each emotional experience is fresh and new. With emotional awareness we are letting go of our addiction to the thought process about emotions. We are letting go of trying to figure it out.

When we are talking about emotional awareness we are talking about being present to the energy of emotional experience itself. Emotions themselves are boundless expressions of energy and so we exit from the emotion, the sensation, the direct experience, attach a story to it, wrap it up in reason and logic to re-establish our sense of self. The storyline makes the emotional experience small enough again that we feel like we are in control.

Strong emotions can actually open the doors of awareness for us. As Reggie Ray says,

Yoga for Emotional Awareness If you haven´t done the first class in this series, Letting Go of Emotional Control, go back and start there. This series is cumulative and so you will need to do the classes in order. ¨Emotions are intelligent expressions of energy that can lead us to our awakened nature.¨ Reggie Ray […]

Yoga for Emotional Awareness

If you haven´t done the first class in this series, Letting Go of Emotional Control, go back and start there. This series is cumulative and so you will need to do the classes in order.

¨Emotions are intelligent expressions of energy that can lead us to our awakened nature.¨ Reggie Ray

Emotions in and of themselves are not a problem. They are simply expressions of awakened energy. Emotional awareness allows us to experience an emotion and let go into that direct experience. We can be immediately present with whatever emotion is experienced in a direct way. We can experience each emotion in a fresh and new way.

What is emotional awareness? It means being completely present and open with the emotion. With emotional awareness we are free in the experience of whatever emotion arises. We are with the straight, undiluted, essence experience of the emotion.

What normally happens however, is that we experience an emotion and then we shut down. We retract from the pure, undiluted experience of the emotion and pull back from it. We do this by trying to figure it out. We try to figure out why we are feeling the emotion and where it came from and how to resolve it. In short we begin to attach a story to the emotion.

About a week ago I was overcome with sadness. The direct experience of the emotion was quite overwhelming. I pulled back from it. I tried to figure out, why am I sad? Where did this emotion of sadness come from? I went back through my whole day and all my interactions and tried to blame my sadness on somebody else as though I caught it like a flu bug. There is no end to finding the storyline, you can go back through your whole life, through your whole childhood, you can go back into your past lives if you want to as well. There is no end to pulling away from the intensity of the direct experience of the emotion. Sadness, like any other emotion is simply a human emotion, a play of energy, but there is a desire to justify them, explain them, attach a storyline to them and most of all to resolve them. In my case, I walked right into the grocery store, bought I family size bag of chips and sat down and ate the whole thing. Then I felt sad but I also had a bigger embodied sensation of a stomach ache that allowed me to cover up the direct immediate, undiluted experience of sadness.

Emotions are not good or bad or indifferent. We label our emotions. We think joy, oh that is a good emotion. Peace and calm, oh those are really good emotions for somebody like me, a yogi to be having, I should be having more of those emotions. Anger, anxiety, fear, those are bad, those are really bad, I should avoid those emotions, in fact as a spiritual person I shouldn´t have those emotions at all! But we are delusional in our confused thinking and constructed stories, explanations, and judgment around emotions. We are distracting ourselves from the experience, labelling the experience, judging and compartmentalizing them. We are simply using our intellect to distract ourselves from our direct experience. Each emotional experience is fresh and new. With emotional awareness we are letting go of our addiction to the thought process about emotions. We are letting go of trying to figure it out.

When we are talking about emotional awareness we are talking about being present to the energy of emotional experience itself. Emotions themselves are boundless expressions of energy and so we exit from the emotion, the sensation, the direct experience, attach a story to it, wrap it up in reason and logic to re-establish our sense of self. The storyline makes the emotional experience small enough again that we feel like we are in control.

Letting Go of Emotional Control

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨

The teachings offered in this series, yoga for emotional healing are simple, yet deep and meaningful. By opening to our emotions we can free ourselves from our suffering caused by obsessive thinking, compulsive actions and the endless anxiety that underride our experience.

When it comes to emotions we often think these are something that we need to control. In doing my preliminary research for this series when I searched for yoga videos on emotions I found several that offered to control your emotions as well as release them for you.

When it comes to emotions many of us have resorted to imposing our will. Taking refuge in the will or a tyranny of the will as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say. It seems like if we control our emotions our life will seem a little less chaotic.

The very idea of opening to emotions might sound like a terrifying idea, especially if we find our emotional landscape anywhere along the spectrum of dangerous to inconvenient. The idea of opening to the free-flowing quality of our emotions just may seem like a completely dangerous one, especially if our lives are already feeling chaotic.

As Tim says, Melissa, people don´t want to rip off the band aid. What is underneath the control, the suppression, the tyranny of will be too gruesome. It might be too difficult for us to handle. We might have to let go of safety nets that we have come to rely on. This reminds me of a great Chogyamn Trungpa Rinpoche Quote, ¨The bad news is you are falling without a parachute. The good news is there is no ground.¨

We have this core belief, that for life to be smooth and undisturbed, it is a good idea for us to keep our feelings under strict control. This takes all kinds of forms, from not burdening others with our feelings, to having a stiff upper lip and chin up! The problem with control, is that all of our experience becomes dull and lifeless. We get cut off from all feeling - not just the emotions we don´t like, but the ones we want to feel as well.

Letting go of emotional discipline means releasing the repression of emotion and indifference to pleasure or pain - in other words as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨stepping off the tight-rope walk of tight-lipped stoicism.¨ The price we pay for emotional discipline is an inability to sympathise with anybody. We start to ossify and harden like bone.

The price of the emotional lobotomy for the promise of emotional control is too steep. We have dulled our sparkle. As as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨I know that life is a bit limited now that I´ve decided to put myself in this wheelchair, but at least I´ll never sprain my ankle again.¨

It is illogical to think that we should rise above our emotions as if human feelings are some kind of spiritual disability. According to as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨We are not looking to reject our emotional personality in favour of some kind of spiritual calm - a state in which the pause button has been securely depressed, where there is no chance of feeling anything at all.¨

We cannot vaccinate ourselves against life by rising above our emotions, this is not what it means to be spiritual. This is flying away to an imaginary land of rainbow and unicorns and escaping our very real lives of love, loss, regret and emotions.

In the coming weeks we will explore opening to our emotions as fluid fields of energy worthy of our exploration. For today, let´s focus completely on letting go of emotional discipline.

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨

Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen

Letting Go of Emotional Control ¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨ The teachings offered in this series, yoga for emotional healing are simple, yet deep and meaningful. By opening to our emotions we […]

Letting Go of Emotional Control

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨

The teachings offered in this series, yoga for emotional healing are simple, yet deep and meaningful. By opening to our emotions we can free ourselves from our suffering caused by obsessive thinking, compulsive actions and the endless anxiety that underride our experience.

When it comes to emotions we often think these are something that we need to control. In doing my preliminary research for this series when I searched for yoga videos on emotions I found several that offered to control your emotions as well as release them for you.

When it comes to emotions many of us have resorted to imposing our will. Taking refuge in the will or a tyranny of the will as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say. It seems like if we control our emotions our life will seem a little less chaotic.

The very idea of opening to emotions might sound like a terrifying idea, especially if we find our emotional landscape anywhere along the spectrum of dangerous to inconvenient. The idea of opening to the free-flowing quality of our emotions just may seem like a completely dangerous one, especially if our lives are already feeling chaotic.

As Tim says, Melissa, people don´t want to rip off the band aid. What is underneath the control, the suppression, the tyranny of will be too gruesome. It might be too difficult for us to handle. We might have to let go of safety nets that we have come to rely on. This reminds me of a great Chogyamn Trungpa Rinpoche Quote, ¨The bad news is you are falling without a parachute. The good news is there is no ground.¨

We have this core belief, that for life to be smooth and undisturbed, it is a good idea for us to keep our feelings under strict control. This takes all kinds of forms, from not burdening others with our feelings, to having a stiff upper lip and chin up! The problem with control, is that all of our experience becomes dull and lifeless. We get cut off from all feeling – not just the emotions we don´t like, but the ones we want to feel as well.

Letting go of emotional discipline means releasing the repression of emotion and indifference to pleasure or pain – in other words as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨stepping off the tight-rope walk of tight-lipped stoicism.¨ The price we pay for emotional discipline is an inability to sympathise with anybody. We start to ossify and harden like bone.

The price of the emotional lobotomy for the promise of emotional control is too steep. We have dulled our sparkle. As as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨I know that life is a bit limited now that I´ve decided to put myself in this wheelchair, but at least I´ll never sprain my ankle again.¨

It is illogical to think that we should rise above our emotions as if human feelings are some kind of spiritual disability. According to as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨We are not looking to reject our emotional personality in favour of some kind of spiritual calm – a state in which the pause button has been securely depressed, where there is no chance of feeling anything at all.¨

We cannot vaccinate ourselves against life by rising above our emotions, this is not what it means to be spiritual. This is flying away to an imaginary land of rainbow and unicorns and escaping our very real lives of love, loss, regret and emotions.

In the coming weeks we will explore opening to our emotions as fluid fields of energy worthy of our exploration. For today, let´s focus completely on letting go of emotional discipline.