As Geneen Roth explains in her book Women Food and God, "In an April 2007 UCLA study of the effectivness of dieting, reseachers found that one of the best predictors of weight gain was having lost weight on a diet at some point during the years before the study started. Among those who were followed for fewer than two years, 83 percent gained back more weight than they had lost. Another study found that people who went on diets were worse off than people who didn't.

Failing is built into the weight game. There is no way to play it and win. [To be healthy, we need to move beyond being] brainwashed by a sixty-billion-dollar-a-year diet industry."

At Thrive Wellness Coaching we support lasting lifestyle change by working with clients to establish permenant healthy habits; no diets allowed! Learn about our personal coaching services and leave the dieting yo-yo cycles behind on your path to sutainable healthy living. 

Thank you to everyone who joined our yoga practice this weekend where we reflected on the relative nature of good and bad.
 
The more we commit to our yoga practice, the more we come to understand the value of working to move beyond our mind’s automatic habit of quickly labeling things, people and experiences as "good" or "bad," (or other such judgmental adjectives). We all see the world through tinted glasses based on our values and past experiences. When we cultivate the ability to realize this limiting behavior through meditation, mindfulness or yoga, we get closer to seeing things the way they really are.
 
This 2,000-year old Taoist parable beautifully illustrates this concept, and invites us to reframe our thinking to consider the big picture when it comes to our lives.
 
"An old Chinese farmer lost his best stallion one day and his neighbor came around to express his regrets, but the farmer just said, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad.’ The next day the stallion returned bringing with him 3 wild mares. The neighbor rushed back to celebrate with the farmer, but the old farmer simply said, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad.’ The following day, the farmer’s son fell from one of the wild mares while trying to break her in and broke his arm and injured his leg. The neighbor came by to check on the son and give his condolences, but the old farmer just said, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad.’ The next day the army came to the farm to conscript the farmer’s son for the war, but found him invalid and left him with his father. The neighbor thought to himself, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad." (Parable language quoted from the Secular Buddhist Blog.)
 
As Kent Moreno explains, "The Taoist prefers to look at life events without judgment or interpretation. According to Taoism, the true significance of events can never be understood as they are occurring, for in every event there are elements of both good and bad. Furthermore, each event has no specific beginning or end and may influence future events for years or even centuries to come."
 
As Moreno touches upon, events in life will always involve good and bad. The great achievement is often accompanied by many sacrifices. The turn of bad luck usually comes with a silver lining. And from the wider-angle perspective, something "bad," but small in scope, may happen that prevents a major calamity down the road.
 
If these ideas resonate with you, a great way to practice application of the philosophy is to begin with asanas (the physical practice of yoga). Work for a while with the intention to accept yourself exactly as you are each time you come to the mat. Make your yoga practice a no judgment zone. Ignore what the teacher and other students look like in identical poses. If your energy level is low, modify and observe child’s pose when needed, instead of pushing yourself to replicate yesterday’s practice. Use your flow to practice radical acceptance of the self. And above all – drop any notions of what “should” be happening! Once you find your way on the mat, begin to think about how these concepts can be extended into other parts of your life.
 
As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, "give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome, which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking, and disliking."
 
The more involved with yoga and yoga philosophy you get, the more you will learn that these ideas are fundamental to the tradition. Buddha describes yoga as "the journey of the self, through the self, to the self." Yoga is not a competitive sport (as much as Instagram may sometimes suggest that). It is not a place where we should be thinking along the lines of good, bad or most especially, should. It is an avenue to living a self-accepting, and therefore authentic, life. 

If you spend any time observing young children and how they learn, you may notice that being new and "not good at something," doesn't deter them in the least from whatever skill they are pursuing. Unlike adults, they have not yet learned to be embarrassed or frustrated when they are not immediatly proficient at something with which they have no experience. But the reality of any beginning in life is that we will start out rather clumsy, and need to muster patience for the learning process.

Beginners make mistakes and often this phase, while annoying, leads to our biggest strides. If we can suspend that critical internal voice that craves perfection, we will have a much easier and pleasent time with the learning process.

When you are able to give yourself time and space when you are new at something, you won't be working against yourself. This in turn helps to keep the experience positive and exciting, factors critical to long-term success. Remember the mantra: "You've got to be a beginner before you can be anything else." 

Thank you to everyone that attended yoga today where we focused on cultivating non-judgement on and off the mat. Today's class reading are included below. 
 
Reading from Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
 
"It doesn’t take long in [yoga] to discover that part of our mind is constantly evaluating our experiences, comparing them with other experiences or holding them up against expectations and standards that we create, often out of fear. Fear that I’m not good enough, that bad things will happen, that good things won’t last, that other people might hurt me, that I won’t get my way, that only I know anything, that I’m the only one who doesn’t know anything. We tend to see things through tinted glasses: through the lens of whether something is good for me or bad for me or whether or not it conforms to my beliefs or philosophy. If it is good, I like it. If it is bad, I don’t like it. If it is neither, I have no feelings about it one way or the other, and may hardly notice it at all.
 
When you dwell in stillness, the judging mind can come through like a foghorn. I don’t like the sensation in my knee…. This is boring…. I like this feeling; I had a good [yoga practice] yesterday, but today I’m having a bad [yoga practice]. …It’s not working for me. I’m no good at this. I’m no good period. This type of thinking dominates the mind and weighs it down. It’s like carrying around a suitcase full of rocks on your head. It feels good to put it down. Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as "good" or "bad." This would be true stillness, a true liberation.
 
[Yoga is a practice] of cultivating a non-judging attitude towards what comes up in the mind, come what may. That doesn’t mean judging won’t be going on. Of course it will, because it is in the very nature of the mind to compare and judge and evaluate. When it occurs, we don’t try to stop it or ignore it, any more than we would try to stop any other thoughts that might come through our mind.
 
The tack we take in [yoga] is simply to witness whatever comes up in the mind or the body to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it, knowing that our judgments are unavoidable and necessarily limiting thoughts about experience. What we are interested in [with yoga] is direct contact with the experience itself – whether it is of an inbreath, an outbreath, a sensation or feeling, a sound, an impulse, a thought, a perception, or a judgment. [In this way] we can act with much greater clarity in our [practice, without immersion] in a stream of unconscious liking and disliking, which screens us from the world and from the basic purity of our own being."
 
Beginning from "Where We Are" from The Heart of Yoga
 
"When we go into a posture or carry out a movement that feels tense, it is difficult to notice anything else besides that tension. Perhaps when we sit in a cross-legged position our only thought is for the pain in our strained ankles. In doing this we are not really in the asana we are striving for – we are obviously not yet ready for this particular position. Rather, we should first practice something easier. This simple idea is the foundation for our whole yoga practice. Practicing the postures progressively, we gradually achieve more steadiness, alertness, and overall comfort.
 
If we want to make this principle of asana practice a reality, we have to accept ourselves just as we are.
 
If we have a stiff back we have to acknowledge this fact. It may be that we are very supple but our breath is very short, or perhaps our breathing is all right but our body gives us certain problems. It is also possible to feel comfortable in an asana while the mind is somewhere completely different. That is not asana either. It is only possible to find the qualities that are essential to asana if we recognize our own starting point and learn to accept it."
 
This quote from Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh, speaks more abstractly to our theme, allowing us to think about non-judgment as an enlightened frame of mind.
 
"Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn to practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times."
 
CLOSING DHARMA QUOTE
 
Cultivating Non-judgment Quote by Rumi
 
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about."

​Thank you to everyone that joined us for yoga this morning. Below are the quotes we explored around the theme of being present.  

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

Eckhart Tolle  
 




​“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
Buddha
 

“Remember then: there is only one time that is important – Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”

Leo Tolstoy  
 
“The meeting of two eternities, the past and future.... is precisely the present moment.”
 
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.”

Both quotes by Henry David Thoreau 

The late grand master of modern yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar was born in Belur, India, on December 14, 1918. When he was 14, his brother-in-law, T. Krishnamacharya, introduced him to a yoga practice, which improved his tuberculosis. Iyengar pioneered the use of props to make poses accessible to a wide array of students. He has written a number of books, including Light on Yoga, which many practitioners esteem as the bible of yoga. 

Iyengar himself described his variation of yoga as follows, "I just try to get the physical body in line with the mental body, the mental body with the intellectual body, and the intellectual body with the spiritual body, so they are balanced. Each asana has an optimum line or position. From the head to the foot, from the front to the back, from the right to the left—without deviation, without distortion."

To learn more about B.K.S. Iyengar and Iyengar Yoga, visit the official website at
http://bksiyengar.com.