(Picture of Liz and her teacher, Ketut Liyer.)

Now this does seem surreal. I read this book this past June and I'm just now sharing about it on the True Yoga Blog. Where did I go? I've certainly been on a journey into the Self, and it continues on, of course. There were some pretty heavy and dark places I had to go through earlier this year during the Spring and early Summer. It's because I traveled into those depths of mySelf that I've been able to emerge into the luminosity of the Present moment I am now feeling and experiencing even more brightly. Hallelujah...

So, if you haven't read this book yet...where have you been? This book transformed my experience of how I view my life and myself and this journey called Life we are each on. I mean I love the title of it...Eat, Pray, Love...how is that for simplicity or nishprapancha, in Sanskrit, which means, "freedom from complexities..."

Elizabeth Gilbert was just on Oprah this past Friday...now you know it's a phenomenon when it's on O. Anyhow, I loved what she had to share, which was another simplicity about the practice of meditation she learned from a medicine man during her four months in Bali. She traveled to Bali after spending four months at an Ashram in India. During her time at the Ashram, she meditated for several hours each day and learned specific practices for achieveing union with the Spirit within and without. Though effective, they were more complex than what the mecidine man in Bali would have to teach her.

When she arrived in Bali, the medicine man she studied with everyday taught her a very simple meditation technique.

"He said, 'Why do they make it so complicated in India with the meditation?' He said, 'I'll give you a meditation. … Sit and smile,' he said. Even smile in your liver," Liz says. "Smile all the way through. Sit there and smile all the way through and see if that doesn't work a little bit to start to change your life and cause a little revolution in your mind."

So, I've begun to practice this technique of feeling every part of my Being smiling. And, it feels good. There is an energetic resonance, an experience that flows all the way throughout when you feel what a smile would feel like in your liver, your kidneys, heart, cells, skin...everywhere. Even your feet...smiling and being Happy Feet. ;) So, the Truth is it really is simple. It is man, not God, who's made it complex. That's why the first teaching in The Yoga Sutras is to allow the mind to be settled or still...to be in a place of no mind.

1. And now the teaching on Yoga begins.
2. Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence.
3. When the mind is settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded consciousness (peace, love, joy, bliss)
4. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.
- The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Translated by Alistair Shearer

(The rest of the over 100 Sutras, or threads of knowledge, are the step-by-step practices of how to realize our essential nature or awakened Consciousness. But maybe, we only need one... Smile all the way through.)

Namaste!

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