Change Your Lens

Daily Reflection
We all view life from our own personal lens. We see life through the filters we have. It can be very challenging to see someone else's point of view or why that person made a particular choice because of the lenses we are looking through. It can be helpful to us if we change our glasses. If we put on a new set of lenses from time to time to try to experience life in a different way. For example, if I am experiencing difficulty in a particular area of my life, instead of continuing to struggle, I need to change my lenses. I need to look at life through a different pair of glasses. This can be very powerful and can help you get unstuck from those places where you are stuck.

In your journal today talk about one area of your life in which you feel stuck. Now, try on a different pair of glasses and look at the problem again. Try looking at the problem through the eyes of your partner, your friend, your mother, a child. How would each of these people see the problem? Now, try looking at the problem through the eyes of The Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Oprah, or any other mentor or teacher you find powerful. Record all of these thoughts in your journal. Choose the lens that best suits your needs to work with the problem.

Swami K

Do Your Choices Limit You?

Announcements 
We will be kicking off our new year with a focus on service work. If you live in the area and wish to join us for service oriented projects throughout the year, please join http://www.meetup.com/Volunteer-South-Florida/ Our first event, a meet and greet, will take place on January 8th. For more events, please check out the events page.

Starting in February there will be a weekly audio meditation and teaching available for a $5 donation. A portion of the donation will go towards a different charity organization each week. Funds raised and donated will be tracked on our giving back page.

Daily Reflection
Today, we will reflect on whether or not our choices limit us or nurture us. Take out your journal and do some freewriting. Record 10 choices you have made in the last month. They can be small choices, like what you had for breakfast, or they can be bigger choices like that brand new red car sitting in your driveway. After each choice write down whether or not your choice limited you in some way or nurtured you. Your journal should look like this:

I practiced yoga 3 times this week - nurtured me
I volunteered to help with the Valentines party in my child's classroom even though I didn't want to - limited me

Keep going and see if you can find a pattern. Do you make more choices that limit you or more choices that nurture you? Your goal this year should be to make more choices in your life that nurture you.

Swami K

The Accomplishments of 2013

Visiting for the First Time? Read Me First

Perhaps one of the most important parts of a strong spiritual practice is the practice of tarka or reflective journaling. Reflection upon your inner and outer life is essential if you wish to progress along the path. These reflections on your life can help you see your mind more clearly. Your relationship to yourself, the world, and others is revealed in each journal entry. We can sometimes be blinded by our own beliefs or trapped in a cycle of thinking that is unhealthy for us.

Tarka can help us to illumine the way before us, discard old beliefs, and change our attitudes and ways of thinking.

This blog is designed to help you reflect upon your life and examine your mind so that you may travel the path of enlightenment with greater ease and harmony.

Set aside a little time each day to write in your journal and respond to the prompts in the blog.

The benefits of a strong tarka practice will reveal themselves over time, particularly if you take some time out each month and reread what you have written in your journal. You will find patterns in your life and your examination of these patterns will help you make the changes in your life that you are striving for. The wisdom you gain will help you live the life you seek.

Daily Reflection and Journaling Prompt

As we all reach the end of 2013, most likely we are considering what we accomplished (or didn't accomplish) during 2013 and how we would like our lives to be different in 2014. These next two weeks are a great time for reflection. I urge you to spend a little time to make a list of all you have accomplished this year. Most of the time we tend to only think about what we did not achieve, so now is the time to give ourselves a pat on the back for those things we have done well.

The Gifts of Life

Visiting for the First Time? Read Me First

Perhaps one of the most important parts of a strong spiritual practice is the practice of tarka or reflective journaling. Reflection upon your inner and outer life is essential if you wish to progress along the path. These reflections on your life can help you see your mind more clearly. Your relationship to yourself, the world, and others is revealed in each journal entry. We can sometimes be blinded by our own beliefs or trapped in a cycle of thinking that is unhealthy for us.

Tarka can help us to illumine the way before us, discard old beliefs, and change our attitudes and ways of thinking.

This blog is designed to help you reflect upon your life and examine your mind so that you may travel the path of enlightenment with greater ease and harmony.

Set aside a little time each day to write in your journal and respond to the prompts in the blog.

The benefits of a strong tarka practice will reveal themselves over time, particularly if you take some time out each month and reread what you have written in your journal. You will find patterns in your life and your examination of these patterns will help you make the changes in your life that you are striving for. The wisdom you gain will help you live the life you seek.

Daily Reflection and Journaling Prompt

What you have done in the past does not matter. Every day is a great gift that you can choose to use wisely and harmoniously.

What will you do today to add to the bounty of life?

Swami K

Day 20 - What Would You Like to Manifest?

Today's Tarka Practice
My yoga teacher asked me the other day - what would you like to make manifest in your life right now? I was surprised by the question. It is something that I think about all of the time because I understand that we have the power to create anything we want in our lives. It is not a power that I often talk about with others and so her question made me come out of my own head (which was swirling with thoughts) and try to capture these thoughts in a more tangible way.

Sometimes, when we wish to create something in our lives, it is a good idea to talk about what we wish to create with other people. This can bring the creation from just thoughts to taking action. I often think about this in terms of a big pool of possibilities swirling around in the Brahman and that I have to just reach up and choose something. In yoga, we call this phenomenon aham bramasmi or I am the creative principle.

For today's journal entry think about and then write down 3 things you have been thinking of doing. Have you been wanting to add more to your yoga practice, change your eating habits, take a walk everyday, write a book? Take a look at your list and choose one thing that you would like to make manifest in your life right now. Write it down on a notecard that you look at everyday. Talk about it with other people and then observe how just setting this intention begins to bring what you need to make this manifest into your life.

Shanti

Day 23 - Taking Care of Yourself

Today's Tarka Practice

We often don’t take good care of ourselves. We tend to work long, hard hours, put others before ourselves, sleep less than 8 hours a night to catch up on our to-do lists, and as a result, we are exhausted and irritable. The problem is this – by exhausting ourselves in this way, we can’t be fully present for others. If we are tired and irritated, we are more likely to yell at others, act out of frustration, be quick to anger and it is very difficult to listen to what someone is saying to us. Concentration and focus are difficult when we are so busy that we don’t have time to take care of ourselves.

 

For this week’s journal entry, I want you to reflect on how well you think you take care of yourself. How much time do you dedicate to your own personal needs and interests? How much sleep are you getting? Do you have enough relaxation time set aside in your day?

 

After answering these questions, I want you to give yourself permission to take better care of yourself this week. Just for one week, see what you can do to make time in your schedule for you. If you have a hard time finding time in your life right now, just set aside 15 minutes to begin. If you can set aside an hour for yourself, that is even better. An hour a day would be superb. After taking care of you first for a week, write down what you experienced in your journal. Did you find you were less irritable? Was it easier to reach out towards others in understanding? Easier to listen and help others? These are the benefits of this practice.

Day 24 - To Yoke Together

 

Today's Tarka Practice
 

Our focus this week will be on the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is one chapter out of the Mahabharata, which is one of the longest Sanskrit epic poems from ancient India.

To begin, the Bhagavad Gita or the Lord’s song is an epic poem specifically discussing the very nature of yoga and what yoga means. If you have been a student of yoga for a while, you will know that yoga means to yoke or put things together harmoniously. But what, you may ask, are we supposed to yoke together?

The Gita tells us that in order to live a harmonious and happy life, we must yoke together our earth life with our spiritual life. But again, what does this really mean? It means that we should work towards creating our life on earth in such a way that it matches our spirit or what is deep within.  Here, we should strive towards manifesting those things that are most important to us. Those things that are most important to us are written onto our very spirit itself.

Another way of thinking about this would be to consider whether or not you are leading the life you wish to lead? When we are doing exactly what we want to be doing in our lives, we feel a deep inner harmony. However, when we feel like something is missing or there is an emptiness, most likely there is a discord between what we are doing in our earthly life and what our spirit is meant to be doing in our earthly life. The goal is to make these things match or to make them consistent with each other.

For today’s journal entry, the first thing I want you to think about is what does what I have said above mean to you? Do you feel your earth life and spiritual life match each other or is there a discord of some type? Reflect upon whether or not you feel like what you are doing in your life is what you feel like you were born here to do? This is the first step.

Shanti

Day 33 - Beginner's Mind

Today's Tarka Practice
In celebration of the new moon on Sunday this week's theme is about beginnings.

In both the Zen Buddhist tradition and within Hindu philosophy there is a practice known as "Beginner's Mind". This practice focuses on the idea that when we begin something for the first time, we are open, vulnerable, and flexible. Because we don't know what to expect when we try something new, we have not yet created a wall, we have not yet made associations, we have not yet come to expect something specific to happen and so our minds remain open and free. In these traditions, we are asked to remain in this state of consciousness throughout the practice, and we are asked to remain in this state of consciousness in our lives - open, free, unencumbered. When we are in this state of mind, we can see the possibilities for our lives, we experience hope and joy and we can look at the world through fresh eyes.

Today, I want you to spend the entire day looking at everything as if you have never seen it before and as if you have never experienced it before. Try to look at the day through fresh eyes, look at the people you know through fresh eyes and see their beauty. At the end of the day or perhaps the next morning, write down what you experienced. How did this shift in your consciousness to beginner's mind change your everyday experience?

Shanti

Day 36 - Ganesh Part 2

Today's Tarka Practice
This week we are talking about the symbolism of Ganesh. You may want to go back and read part 1 first.

Ganesh has the large ears of the elephant (rather than human ears) and this represents the idea that we should listen more. We need to listen more to our inner wisdom (intuition); we need to listen more to others when they are speaking  and we need to listen more to the beliefs and ideas that are being presented to us. When we are listening to these ideas, we need to determine whether or not they are bringing us closer to self-realization or farther away. For example, harboring anger towards someone and carrying that anger with us all of the time will bring us farther away from self-realization, but forgiving someone might bring us closer to self-realization.

For today's reflection think about the experiences you have had over the past week and write them down. See if you can identify what experiences brought you closer to self-realization and what experiences brought you farther away. For example, your journal entry might look like this:

Got frustrated with my son and shouted at him - this brought me farther away

Gave my husband the opportunity to go to a workshop in his field on the weekend - brought me closer self-realization

Studied some passages in the Gita - brought me closer to self-realization

Found my mind wandering to my own obstacles when my friend was discussing hers - brought me farther away

Shanti

Day 39 - Scorpio In Your Life

Today's Tarka Practice
The reason I chose to talk about astrology in our lives this week is because Saturn is moving out of Libra and into Scorpio, where it will stay for about 2 1/2 years. This is a big change, a powerful change and we will all feel it in our lives in different ways.

In order to discover how this change might impact your life, you should look at where Scorpio falls in your natal chart. Is it in your first house, second house, etc.?  For example, Scorpio falls in my first house. The first house is concerned with the personality, our worldly outlook, our self-interests, and our natural disposition. What does this mean? This means that I will benefit greatly by staying aware of how Scorpio is affecting my personality. Since my personality and this house greatly influences the way in which I respond to "all" of the houses in my chart, this movement of Saturn into my first house will affect "every" aspect of my life. In order to make this transition harmonious for myself, I will need to make sure to step back from the firey passion of Scorpio and make sure to be an objective observer. I will need to flow with the cylces of loss and gain.

For today's tarka, you should take a look at where Scorpio falls in your chart and take a look at the characteristics of that house and what this change will affect for you. For example, if Scorpio falls in your second house, how might it affect your sense of wealth and what might you do to create harmony for yourself during this transition?

Shanti