MyLifeYoga

We all have heard of the many benefits and positive effects yoga can bring into our lives. We hear about it on TV, read about it in magazines, see it on the Internet and probably have friends that cannot stop commenting about it. We also have heard that in order to experience some of these benefits, we need to practice on a regular basis.

It’s not surprising to me that a good number of women today want to continue or start a yoga practice during their pregnancy, while others are surprised to hear how prenatal yoga can be very beneficial. The average person on the street, when they think of yoga, imagine individuals twisting like pretzels, sweating and performing advanced and difficult poses. No wonder why many expecting mothers are surprised to hear they can practice yoga during this special time of their lives.

We need to remember that it has taken the Western world many centuries to acknowledge that movement is good for the body, especially for mothers-to-be. In the past, many doctors treated the mother-to-be with extreme care like she was ill or had a medical condition. This view was based on the fear that movement and exercise could be dangerous to the mother and unborn baby. Continue reading →

David Kelley was diagnosed with cancer many years ago. He then learnt that it was the bad kind and he had only a 40% chance of survival. He then made a promise to himself that if he survived this cancer he would make it his mission in life to help people regain their creative confidence. David Kelley believes that most of us who consider themselves as the “non-creative” types do so because of fear of judgment on our creative abilities. He has created a process by which this fear is overcome and a person who used to think himself as non-creative is able to fully access his creative potential. His poster child is Doug Dietz, an engineer, who has redesigned the MRI machine so that the entire experience of being scanned is completely transformed. Doug has been so successful that the need to sedate children undergoing MRI has dropped from 80% to just 10%. Please follow the links below if you want to learn more about how to regain your creative confidence:

Related Links:

Institute of design at Standford. This is the d-school that David Kelley talks about.
The Quest For Perfection
Albert Bandura: The 4th most cited psychologist on whose methods David Kelley has built his process.

Imagine that you’re lazily floating along a river in your boat. It’s a peaceful day, and you’re leaning back, watching the clouds dance in a blue sky and are lulled into a meditative state by the easy flow of the boat on the water and songs of the birds in the trees on the shore. Then, abruptly, another boat bangs into yours, jarring you out of your reverie. Your immediate assumption is that the person guiding the other boat has intentionally hit yours, and you descend into anger and turn to defend yourself, and possibly retaliate.

Turning, you see that it’s an empty boat that has come unmoored and, quite by accident, run into yours. While you probably wouldn’t be angry at an empty boat, you might well become enraged if someone were at its helm. The point of the story is that the person who cut you off at the grocery store line, the kids who teased you as a child, the driver who aggressively tailgated you yesterday – are all in fact empty, rudderless boats. They were compulsively driven to act as they did by their ego, therefore they did not know what they were doing and had little control over it.

Just as an empty boat that rams into us isn’t targeting us, so too people who act unkindly are driven along by the unconscious force of ego-driven existence. Until we realize this, we will remain prisoners of reacting to actions by others instead of allowing the currents of life and love to flow freely through us. We all have a choice: do we want to spend the rest of our lives reacting to percieved insults coming from empty boats, or do we want to let the peace and love of the present moment be our guiding light?

Credit: This has been composed from multiple sources and the basic idea is from a Tao Story.

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