Find Happiness Within...

Well, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday.

Whenever I feel this crabby, I actually feel a little bit guilty about it~so non-yogic of me! I tried to tell myself all of the things that I say to my students about finding happiness within.

Wasn't working. In my own stubbornness, I convinced myself that I was being more "real" by being crabby and owning it.

Then a friend of mine shared famous yoga teacher/writer, Max Strom's Facebook status on her page. It read, "No matter how many chaturangas we do, no matter how much wheat grass juice we drink, no matter how many kirtans we attend, we will not have a happy life if we are carrying inside us resentment and hate. 'It's not what you eat, but what's eating you.' Our yoga will take us quite far down the road, healing past wounds, purging us of ghosts, but at some point down the road we have to do some work on ourselves which is also part of spiritual tradition; self-enquiry, and in that work, one of our greatest tools is the power of forgiveness."

Thanks Max. Okay, I will try. I will look inside and find out what is eating at me. I will, at the very least, try to forgive myself this mood even if I can't find the cause to forgive.

I continued my funk, putzing around the house, ending up in the kitchen. It is here that I found a fortune cookie fortune sitting underneath some items in a bowl.

"Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change."

Okay universe! I get it. I'm trying.

I went and sat down and started thinking about it. I came to one of my favorite yoga sutras that I love to teach in class.

Duhkhanusavi Dvesah: Aversion is that which follows identification with painful experiences.

Sri Swami Satchidananda goes on to explain that "We attach ourselves to pleasure because we expect happiness from it, forgetting that happiness is always in us as the true Self."

After stewing over that and getting a good night's sleep~I know that all of these statements I ran into are true. My mood, who knows, sometimes we just have good ones, sometimes bad ones. No need to attach to it in the end. No need to long for happiness or a better mood if that is the case that day, just know that if you let go from attaching yourself to your anger or resentments and do forgive whoever or whatever it is that is bothering you, you will find that happiness, that peace & that joy within. I know that I am trying...every single day.

Om Shanti~Marcia