MyLifeYoga

“Why does it have to be human or divine? Maybe human is divine.”
– Robert Langdon in Da Vinci Code.

This insight provided by Robert Langdon, the character of Tom Hanks, in Da Vinci Code is critical for understanding yoga. For millennia we humans have struggled with the idea of divinity. Our misunderstanding of this idea has been the source of endless conflict. Being divine and human has been considered mutually exclusive. You had to be something special to be divine and to prove your divinity you had to be able to perform miracles. Divinity became a source of contention and conflict.

But yoga changes all that. The deepest insight of yoga is that we are all divine. There is nothing special about divinity. The most vile mass murder also has divinity buried inside him. The choice is NOT between being human OR divine. The choice is between being divine and non-divine. When we are divine we are expressing our humanity in a particular way. When we are being non-divine our humanity is expressed in a different way. The mass murderer is expressing his humanity in the most vile and obnoxious way.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish going the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

We are like the young fish. We are immersed in Divinity, and yet we are unaware of it. How can this happen? The answer in one word is: Ego. The ego is our source of ignorance. It is the cause of our separation from the whole.
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There is much to be grateful for. There is so much joy to be shared with our brothers and sisters across the world! This “Gratitude Dance” shows the way. Please share!

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An 8-week study of the effects of meditation on the brain has discovered some astounding things. Not only does meditation make noticeable improvements in our feeling of well-being, it actually changes the brain physically, producing more grey matter in certain regions of the brain and reversing the effect of aging on the brain.

In a study that appeared in the issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team of researchers report about meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s grey matter.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study’s senior author. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.
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