What is actually this word ... GRATITUDE
Gratitude … a word just like any other word … a label ….a convention …. A word we use often in nowadays conversations …. But … do we really feel it?…..a hard but very relevant question for today’s troubled world? The good thing is that this word starts to really, really come alive at certain moments as we journey through life. Most of the time this happens when we’ve experienced pretty challenging circumstances …..health wise, in our professional life, family life or just as we live out our lives….. In my case, I have multiple reasons from my early life to be grateful. If you’ve read my family story you will understand why I say this.
WHY THIS COMBINATION OF ..... YOGA AND GRATITUDE
At the end of last year, after a scary moment which ended well in my family I felt drawn to a particular program on line … a 20 minutes a day, 40 consecutive days yoga program. I decided then - as an offering to the divine, as a way of expressing my gratitude - to sign up to this program and, more importantly, to commit to the program. I can tell you now that for me the word gratitude is not a label, not a sequence of letters for how I feel for signing up. … I can feel it at the cellular level. And this was 130 days ago …. I am still doing the program, now repeating the 40 days sequence again and again and again. It is now, part of my daily routine. if you think that I and each day in a complete bliss and can't wait to hit the yoga mat, ... think twice ... it is very hard, very, very hard and I did skip 3 days .... and ... it does not matter because ... I came back to the program after a break and kept going. The most important thing is ... not to judge ourselves, to take breaks if we need them and ... to come back to .. the mat and the journal.
MANTRAS
A few years ago I was lucky enough to take part in a few live kirtan evenings organised by a very talented singer and yoga teacher Diana Sampson from Luna Rhythms Yoga. It was an instantaneous connection for me with the sacred sounds and, believe it or not, I now find myself chanting when I am driving - or walking by the beach - or while I am deeply engrossed with my painting.
WHY HAVE I POSED TWO QUESTIONS ABOUT YOGA PRACTICE
What I have noticed while doing my daily yoga program is that different moves trigger a different emotion in me … sometimes I feel joy, sometimes I feel empowered, sometimes wobbly …. sometimes I loved the routines, sometimes I really didn’t. Along the way it became clear to me that my experience of yoga programs was deepening and broadening….and I knew then that I had to find a way, for the future, to record my individual feelings so that I could look back and retrieve in my mind those special moments. I had to write it down somewhere.
WHY A JOURNAL
Writing by hand is something that fewer and fewer people do these days. I’m lucky, many years ago I started the habit and ever since I have loved creating my future memories. Somehow people have forgotten that there is something really soothing and even magical about picking up that special pen and start adding…. letter after letter, word after word. The whole body relaxes, the breathing becomes smoother, and believe it or not you enter into a meditative state … you really do become more mindful.
PUBLISHING
So, I decided to put all of the above together and to encourage those who love yoga to record their journeys and in so doing to become mindful about what they have experienced along the way…..
This is why and how "108 YOGA GRATITUDE JOURNAL" came to life. I hope you will find it useful and enjoy it as much as I did creating it and using it.
108 YOGA GRATITUDE JOURNAL is available from Amazon worldwide.
Recent Comments