Day 33
Use your tongue to Sing Love, Speak Truth.
Use words to heal the planet.
"Just certain things happened in my life which left me thinking 'What's it all about, Alfie?' and I remembered Jesus said somewhere 'Knock and the door shall be opened' and I said (knock, knock) 'Hellooo!' It's very difficult. From the Hindu point of view each soul is potentially divine, the goal is to manifest the divinity. The word yoga means union and the union is supposedly between the mind, the body, and the spirit, and yoga isn't lying on nails or standing on your head. I mean, there's various forms of yoga and they're all branches on one big tree. The Lord, or God, has got a million names, whatever you want to call him, it doesn't matter as long as you call him, Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want. Going back to self-realization, one guru said he found no separation between man and God, saving man's spiritual unadventurousness, and that's the catch, everybody's so unadventurous. We're all conditioned, our consciousness has been so polluted by the material energy it's hard to try and pull it all ways in order to really discover our true nature. Every one of us has within us a drop of that ocean and we have the same qualities as God, just like a drop of the ocean has the same qualities as the whole ocean. Everybody's looking for something and we are it. We don't have to look anywhere--it's right there within ourselves."
~ George Harrison, Press Conference, Los Angeles, 1974
In The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books, 2000), we learn that while on location in the Bahamas for their 1965 film Help!, the band was approached by a "swami in orange robes" who gave each of the Fab Four a signed copy of The Illustrated Book of Yoga. The author turned out to be Swami Vishnu-Devananda, founder of Sivananda Yoga, and this encounter began Harrison's lifelong fascination with Eastern philosophy. Soon the musician became a vegetarian and studied sitar in India with Ravi Shankar, who gifted Harrison with Paramahansa Yogananda¹s Autobiography of a Yogi. He eventually composed numerous songs, including "My Sweet Lord," which express Eastern mysticism more keenly than perhaps any other work by a popular Western artist. "In many ways he was more Indian than many Indians," said Shankar. But it was his special genius to fuse East and West, philosophy and music, for which we are all the richer.
~ Yoga Journal
Missed Ryan’s workshop this morning? Click below to replay, valid until Wednesday at midnight PST.
THE DIGITAL STUDIO CLASS SCHEDULE
Today, Tuesday February 2nd
7-8am PST Karma Vinyasa with Drake Logan
8:30-9:45am PST Weekly Workshop with Ryan Leier
4-5pm PST Vinyasa with Malina Dawn
Today, Wednesday February 3rd
8-9am PST Vinyasa with Kiyah Leier-Marshall
4-5pm PST Vinyasa with Vanessa Bourget
6-7:15pm PST Vinyasa with Risto Duggan