How to live ...anything you want

Have you noticed that most people are not living? 

Are you?

After all your schooling, do you now have the money you want, relationships you want, are you as fit and flexible as you'd like? Is your business, career and relationships exhilarating?

Shouldn't they be?

Why do most people not get what they REALLY want?

Most people are not creating their lives deliberately; most are creating it by default. Most of people are settling for good enough, not realizing that "good" is the enemy of great.

But it's not your fault. You learned to face reality before you learned how you are creating it.

And you never attended How To Have A Great Life school

Restart your education now, with these five simple questions...

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Taste Your Way To Your Best Diet

In the 1980s, we blamed fat. Later, carbs became the culprit. Today, sugar is the villain and there is a veritable war on gluten.

Are there good foods and bad foods?

On the Riverflow Renewal in Greece, our chef Nikiforos served us meat, pasta, cakes, jellies and jams, espresso and more. Many of the things we avoid at home, we savored here.  

What kind of diet is that? The best kind...

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How to stop facing reality and start creating it

Ah, how I love a good joke. 

Here's an example: just 40 short years ago yoga was a joke ("Do you mean 'yogurt?'" my friends would ask). Today yoga is a multi-million dollar industry that includes Lululemon fashion fails and props that practically do the poses for you.

At some point, yoga went from weird to normal. 

Who's got the last laugh now?

Now the Wall Street Journal reports the latest oldest-idea, something I have been teaching in Hot Yoga Teacher Training for years:

You need to stop facing reality if you ever want to live the life you really want, and start understanding how you're creating reality.

Here's what we mean...

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The power of awe

Want to improve your life? Go do something awesome.

So says this WSJ article: Feeling Awesome: Studies Find An Emotion Has Myriad Benefits.

Awe is not the only emotion that heals....but it is one of the most awesome.

The feeling of awe and experiences that inspire it, benefit us in ways from stronger health to improved relationships, making us more generous and more humble. Awe increases empathy so we recognize another person and respond with concern. Awe makes us more willing to connect authenticallywith others.

Awe is an emotional response to something vast. It challenges and expands our way of seeing the world. It might be triggered by nature, art, a significant event. We’re just not likely to find it on a treadmill at the gym..

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Yoga Wars

"I moved a mat—just a tad—to make room and I got, "Did you touch my mat?” from its angry owner. I rolled up my mat, walked through the sea of rubber and left...in tears."

People are getting hotter in hot yoga...and not in a good way

"I attended a packed hot yoga class with a mob of sweaty strangers staring me down. I left more tense than I came in." 

"Hot yoga classes are dominated by bee-yotches.  I will pay $500 to do a one-on-one with an instructor before I set foot in another a crowded yoga environment."

Doesn't sound like the yoga I started practicing 43 years ago.  Yet I hear these stories regularly from students who come to our small community studio, from what I call BIG BOX YOGA STUDIOS: rooms that hold 70+ people and feel more like a circus, only no one is amused.

No doubt about it, hot yoga can be a crowded, sweaty, stinking experience. But does it have to be?

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