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Jul, 2021
Sarasvati contemplation cards

You already have everything you need within

You don’t have to search anywhere else.

The freedom you seek is within. The happiness you seek is right there too.

The truth about your being and reality, which maybe you did or maybe you didn’t know was part of the puzzle, is right there as well. The truth of your path, your dharma, is within you.

How do you find out what there is to know if it is within?

You have to be quiet.

You have to quieten the busy mind and drop back from it.

Ironically, if you really want to know your path, if you really want to experience freedom within, you have to be willing to surrender the need to control and know.

When you give up all the mental habits and desires you may well find a sort of profound joy and okay-ness.

And then perhaps a glimmer of insight as to your path will bubble up and become apparent. Where you are right now is perfect for now. Sometimes it is perfect for later on too, but we all know that change is inevitable. Maybe in stillness we get a little nudge about moving in a certain direction. And if you listen quietly maybe the message gets clearer or maybe it fades away.

I have always found that projects and ideas have presented themselves, and rightly or wrongly I have tended to follow the little nudges. Some have been more outwardly ‘successful’ than others but I always grow and learn from them.

The nudges I have followed are many, here are a few:

*Do yoga teacher training (way, way back in 2001!)

*Teach meditation as well as yoga

*Teach mother and baby yoga

*Teach yoga for breast cancer 

*Write a book

*Buy our house in Mordialloc (moving to the beach from the eastern suburbs where we had spent most of our married life)

*Create yoga off the mat contemplation cards

*Blog and chat about the contemplation cards

*Create an online course that takes people to a state of inner freedom

Some of these projects had a natural duration and others continue. The thing I have found is to stay open and to stay tuned in to the inner voice, so to speak.

Life presents us with opportunities as well as what might be seen as challenges. These are the ups and downs of any life. How we accept and ride those waves is up to us. Spend some time tuning into your inner wisdom and you might find that everything really is okay. You really can feel a sense of inner joy and okay-ness. Maybe even great bliss and love. That is always my wish for you.

Much more meaning than is teased out here can be taken from these cards, this is just a starting point.

You can purchase your own set of these ‘Yoga off the mat, contemplations to enrich your practice’ cards from the store HERE and postage is free in Australia. They make a perfect gift too.

The gorgeous original picture on the front of each card is by Gayle Stone Art.

*If you are interested in the possibility of experiencing more inner freedom in your life, then my online course Fluff-free freedom might be just perfect for you. Find out more HERE

‘Meditation plus contemplation leads to insight’

A series of blogs arising from picking a Contemplation card from my deck

Meditation alone may not be enough!

It is true that meditation is a wonderful practice. You can step back from the dramas of the mind and find a quiet space. Even if the mind doesn’t quieten down, the time spent just sitting quietly allowing the thoughts to roll over is helpful. If you are looking for stress reduction and some peace, will get that. Along with the physiological changes from countering the effects of the stress response, that is a huge benefit of meditation.

And in that quiet place regular meditators may also find insight, creativity, flow and perhaps a feeling of bliss. How wonderful!

In meditation you can step back from being caught up in the mind to being able to observe the mind. But then who are you if you can watch the mind? And who are you if you can recognise that it is the mind that creates the ‘me’? ‘Me’ is a bundle of thoughts and so essentially a fiction, but it is also something that we are so familiar with that it becomes a central point from where we almost always operate. Maybe meditation helps us to see this mis-identification, this ‘maya’ or veil of illusion’. This may prompt further contemplation and questioning about how to integrate the experience of small individual self and the larger Self that we might call Universal Consciousness (or many other names such as God) into our everyday life.

This is the work of Yoga isn’t it – finding that we can experience that Union of the individual with the whole?

Then the experiences known as kaivalya, nirvana, moksha or enlightenment make perfect sense. Perhaps this can lead to further contemplation about being okay with the mystery of life and not taking the mind’s view of reality so seriously.

Fun, right?

You can purchase your own set of these contemplation cards from the store here and postage is free in Australia. The picture on the front of each card is by Gayle Stone Art. I’d love your feedback and look out for my blog about the next card soon.