The Path

Walk day by day in the path of spiritual progress. If you persist, remarkable things will happen. When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were better than anything we could have planned. - Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 100

 

Reliance on God enables me to match calamity with serenity.
H E L P = His Ever-Loving Presence.

 I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.
The spiritual path - is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don't know it.
I began by doing physical yoga, initially just for the workout, as exercise. I would get peaceful and calm at the end of it, and I was curious about that.
Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in me. Because that's my job. It's no one else's.

I wanted out of my pain and that silliness, but I wanted an easy out. That's before realizing that there is no easy out. Before accepting that you just have to do the work.

A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you're aware in anything you do - and it doesn't have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you.
Everybody needs a way out of that pain. Many people choose drugs and alcohol. Some people obsessively exercise or develop strange dietary habits, which is what I did. At least it got me toward a path of healthier living.

For me, first, it's finding quiet in my life - and I do that through yoga and meditation. It's also been a matter of changing the way I eat, because I think what we eat can inform who we are; food is a chemical and a drug to a certain extent.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction. I was at the height of my career at the beginning. Then I had to jump down the ladder and climb back up again, which I didn't understand. That was very hard.

I don't take myself terribly seriously. It's why I can be incredibly honest about my life.
I got back into the position of taking care of my wife, which is what I'd learned that I couldn't really do: you can love and make things okay to a certain extent, but you can't fix. I didn't quite learn that until I came to CARE. It became so clear then.
I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes I don't know it's happening. I think we should be passionately curious about what we do.
We're taught to take care of people we love, but sometimes you can't.
The other thing is surrounding yourself with people that care for you. These are simple things, but they're powerful, and they've completely transformed who I am and how I perceive myself.
What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared.
Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.

Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth."
Dharmapada