Cleansing Samskaras

I am currently doing an ayurvedic cleanse. It consists of two weeks of eating simply, participating in ayurvedic rituals to cleanse and heal, and steering clear of some of the most difficult foods for us to handle – coffee, alcohol, and dairy. Ayurveda is often called Yoga’s sister science because it is the ancient healing modality from India. There is so much to Ayurveda, and perhaps my next post will cover those issues, but today I want to focus on what it means to cleanse and let go.

This is the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere. Here in the United States, we often call this season fall. It gets that name because it is when all the leaves fall off the trees. Of course, that barely happens here in the Tucson desert, but it is my favorite time of year and one thing I miss from living in places that actually have four seasons. (Of course, come January, when I’m not wearing a parka, I stop my whining.)

But the point is that autumn is a time to let go of that which no longer serves us. It is a time to slow down as the heat of the summer begins to dissipate. We begin to crave warming and grounding foods. And this is the reason to cleanse in autumn. It is a time to reset after the summer and move forward into simpler times. It is also one of the two times of year where we are closest to equal parts light and dark in our days because it is right after the equinox. This major shift in the Earth allows us to make major shift within ourselves.

Certainly the cleanse is about releasing internal, physical toxins and calming the digestive tract to help it better digest our food. And as Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be they food.” Food has the power to harm and to heal and be a beacon for our overall health. But there is something more to this cleanse than simply cleansing physically.

Cleansing is an opportunity to release old patterns that no longer serve us. I have written before about samskaras. A samskara, while it sometimes has a negative connotation as a “bad” pattern we hold, is nothing more than a pattern. The word itself is neutral. If we act in a certain way often enough, it simply becomes a pattern, and we no longer have to think about what we are doing. It simply comes naturally.

To be clear, this is required in life. We have to be able to turn off our brains at times and run on autopilot. If we had to think about everything every time we tried to do something, we would get very little done. And we know physiologically, this is how the brain is set up. Babies are born with many more neurons than adults have. As time goes on, they go through a process called “pruning,” whereby they create synapses, or pathways in the brain, that lead to modes of being. This is why it is so much easier for babies to learn than adults. Their brains are more malleable because they have very few synapses but a lot of neurons to create them (though new research suggests adult brains are more malleable than previously thought). 

Therefore, patterns we develop in childhood lead to the patterns many of us carry into adulthood. These can include anything from good study habits to driving on the left side of the road to craving unhealthy foods to negative self-talk. While the neurosciences call these synapses, yoga philosophy calls them samskaras, and Buddhism calls them samsaras. So, some samskaras are uplifting and help us get through our days, while others of them bog us down and can eventually create dis-ease.

And as fall begins and we think about letting go and slowing down for winter, it is important to notice the patterns we hold that no longer serve us or might be causing us some disease. Louise Hay, who wrote, “You Can Heal Your Life,” talks about the power of affirmations to overcome all disease. And as I mentioned a few months ago, the medical literature is beginning to agree. What we think matters to our health, and what we think can shape our health perhaps more than some of us would like to admit.

So, what are some negative samskaras some of us hold? Simply read these statements and ask yourself if any of them resonate with you.

I’m not good enough.

I’m not loveable.

I deserve to suffer.

I will not succeed, so I will not even try.

I do not deserve happiness.

There is no joy in my life.

I am scared.

Can you think of others you bring into your life? There are so many ways we inhibit our greatest good from coming forward. But we can begin to overcome these negative patterns. There are several emerging psychological techniques specifically designed to reframe these negative patterns, including Somatic Experiencing, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Tapping/Emotional Freedom Technique.

But the first step is simply noticing what we do to create this self harm. I see it so often in the work I do. It comes up everywhere to people in healing professions. It is so much easier to see when other people do it than when we do it ourselves. But I know very few people who do not do this, and therefore noticing is the first step.

The next step is to reframe the pattern. As Robert Frost said, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” When we leave our old patterns behind, we can begin to create new patterns. We have to make the choice to do that. And we begin to create new patterns by reframing our self-talk. When we notice a negative statement coming, state a positive one. There are literally thousands of affirmations we could say, but I want to leave you with one in particular.

No single blog post is going to help you overcome all your negative samskaras.  But a friend of mine gave me one of my favorites, “I love myself. I forgive myself.” And I add to that, “I am safe.” I figure this covers the vast majority of negative self-talk so many of us use. So I hope you are able to look in a mirror every day and say to yourself, "I love myself. I forgive myself. I am safe." 

How do you notice your self-talk? Is it causing you dis- ease? What helps you reframe the talk?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Cleansing Samskaras, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Starting Fresh and Forgiving the Trauma

I think we have all heard the word trauma. It probably means something different to each of us. This week, we marked the 12^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I have been reading an interesting discussion about how people in the United States were traumatized differently if they were actually in New York, D.C., or Pennsylvania vs. the rest of us who “just” watched it on television. This year, we had a similar event, though smaller in numbers, with the Boston Marathon bombing.

But even without these major events on our own soil, if you’re an American reading this, most of us hear the news about what is happening in Syria and the rest of the Middle East. I have not seen the photos (I refuse to watch them because I do not think at this point I can handle them), but I know they are out there. I did watch the video of the woman dying in Egypt during their revolution in 2009. As if we do not have our own individual trauma, we now have a world of shared trauma. In an instant, we can be across the world watching someone die . . . over and over again.

On an individual level, we all have experienced our own personal trauma. Today, I was talking to a yoga therapist, and she asked me if I had trauma as a child. My response was, “don’t we all?” I mean, I looked back at some of the very intense physical issues I had to deal with as a very young child, and I see now how incredibly intertwined they are with my current physical situation. There are many people who believe, and I think rightly so, that birth itself is a trauma. And then, of course, there are the children and adults, who deal with ongoing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. 

I rarely discuss the work I do on this blog. Part of that is because so much of it is confidential, but also because it is really not the specific point of this blog, and because I frankly think it would be unprofessional to get into anything beyond the most general. Trauma is a really big word in the juvenile court world. These days, the goal is to be a trauma-informed or trauma-responsive system. It is a noble goal, and one I do not think anyone takes lightly. The legal world is, therefore, focusing on this one word a lot. The military, and even the NFL, are talking about responding to traumatic brain injuries and PTSD.

The word trauma seems to be everywhere.

And I sometimes feel like we get lost in the word because we use it so much. Do we get desensitized to it because we talk about it so much? Do we forget sometimes real peoples’ lives are at stake below this word TRAUMA that seems to pepper every discussion we have?

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have these discussions, to help people accept that their trauma is real, and it is okay to experience the repercussions. It is important to have these discussions to find the best ways to work with trauma, and perhaps most importantly, to realize we can heal from trauma. I have written about this before in the context of healing professionals and vicarious trauma. But during this time to focus on forgiveness, I think it is important to look at trauma as something to forgive.

It is very easy to dwell on why things happen to us. It is very easy to dwell on how terrible it is that they happened.  It is very easy to be upset about decisions adults made in our lives when we were children when we think we would have made different ones. But the truth is that life happens. We all make the best decisions we can along the way. And as long as we hold onto the victim stance, our bodies will respond with dis-ease.

There is an entire aspect of yoga focused on trauma and how best to bring very traumatized people into yoga safely, so they can begin the healing journey. But regardless of who we are, yoga is going to force us to see our own trauma, whether we watched the Twin Towers fall, were beaten by a parent, or fell down one too many times as a child. We are going to face whatever good and bad experiences we have had in our lives, whether we want to face them or not. Yoga brings us to the brink of our humanness.

At times it can be very difficult to accept that we are still feeling the effects of what happened to us 5, 10, or even 50 years ago, but the truth is that we are. Some of us get really upset at ourselves for not healing, not getting better fast enough. But as someone said to me once, “what would you say to the child or the person in the moment they experience the trauma and the fear?” That is how we need to treat ourselves regardless of when the reaction to the trauma arises. We must learn to forgive the event, the people who we have told ourselves caused the event, and the fact that we are re-experiencing the event however many years after it occurred.

I have often wondered why the Jewish New Year is before the Day of Atonement. Would it not make more sense to let go of the past, ask for forgiveness, and then celebrate with the New Year? But as I look at it from this lens, I realize it does make sense.  In fact, it makes a lot of sense. The fact that the new year happens first reminds us that the world has already moved on. Now we just have to follow suit. We absolutely can move on and heal. We just have to do the actual work to allowing the healing to happen. And that is forgiveness.

We have to let ourselves forgive ourselves, each other, and the Universe for whatever we believe has caused us dis-ease during the year. And we can do this because we have already opened our hearts and attitudes to the idea that we have moved past it, that we are on a new path. And through forgiveness on so many levels we can begin to heal the trauma each and every one of us experiences, whether it be trauma or Trauma.

How are you forgiving the past? Yourself?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Starting Fresh and Forgiving Trauma, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Forgiving Ourselves

 “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” – Dalai Lama

I have posted several times before about this time of year. I was raised Jewish, and while now most of my practice comes from Yoga, the roots of Judaism are still there. And this time of year, the High Holy Days, is when I think about it the most. The period of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is a time to reflect on how we have acted the past year, ask for forgiveness, and forgive those that have hurt us. I can think of no spiritual tradition that does not place forgiveness at the forefront of living a good life.

The legal world is not generally a place that forgives easily. In fact, we can be accountable for long periods of time for actions that occurred years ago. Interestingly, though, I work in one area of the law that starts by saying, we know what happened in the past, but it is time to move forward. The goal is to move on from the past and make the future a brighter place for children and families. That is a pretty amazing concept. I cannot say it always happens, but that is generally the goal at the outset. It is inspiring to see the times when it actually works out well, and families can move forward into a greater future.

But it takes a lot of work. Forgiveness and moving on are not traits that come easily to many of us. Yoga, however, can give us some tools for finding forgiveness and, sometimes more importantly, asking for forgiveness.

But there is no way we can offer our forgiveness to others until we find it within ourselves. The Dalai Lama, in the quote above, says it perfectly – we need to find our own peace, our own forgiveness, before there can be external peace and forgiveness. But how does that even look? Self-forgiveness is a difficult process, but it is fundamentally necessary to surviving in the world.

When we practice yoga, we are forced to look at ourselves head-on. We cannot hide who we are from ourselves. Instead, we slow down, and we turn inward. Yoga is not about getting fit. It is not about exercise. It is not about having a cute butt. Yoga is about coming face-to-face with who we are. A friend of mine posted a question on facebook. She asked, “Why am I brought to the depths of sorrow and tears near the end of each Yoga class?” I have posted before about how yoga is not always about making us feel awesome every single time we go to class. It is about understanding ourselves and discovering who we are. It is about seeing our true selves, not the mask, or masks, we share with the world.

And so, in many ways, yoga is about forgiving ourselves for pretending to be something we are not. We all have our masks. And everyone else shows us his or her masks as well. We live in a world where we hide who we truly are for fear of making someone angry or hurting someone’s feelings or even of just feeling different. But then our soul begins to react and get upset about our hiding it from the world. It begins to create dis-ease in our life. So, one of the answer’s to my friend’s question is that yoga brings us to this reality. It shows us what we have been hiding from the world, and the relief can come across as laughter, tears, and powerful emotions.

But after those emotions start to clear, we see our true selves. We can be with who we really are. And from there, we can begin to find the peace and forgiveness the Dalai Lama mentions. And once we are finally able to forgive ourselves, and see ourselves for who we really are – perfect beings on this turbulent ride called life – we can begin to forgive others and connect with them on a deeper and fuller level. No one is going to claim this is easy, but that is what makes this year so amazing. Just like Christmas is a day where you can smile at anyone, this time of year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur has something in the air, even if you have never heard about these holidays before, so you have some support to start now.

How has yoga brought you to see yourself differently?

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Forgiving Ourselves, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

The Subtleties of the Bigger Picture

Yoga teaches us to trust our intuition. Some days it is a really good idea to go to a vinyasa class and move. Some days it is a really good idea to relax into a calming, restorative class. But every day is going to be different, no matter who you are. One of the only parts of each of us that is the same is that we change on a daily basis.

And yoga not only allows this, but it encourages these differences. It encourages us to look at our subtleties and understand them more fully. We can move into our bodies each and every day and understand its needs that day. We can use different modalities to calm our minds and calm our nerves every minute. We live in an age where there are thousands of modalities, and we just need to find the one that works for us.

The “real” world, however, still has not quite caught on. Law schools still seem to think the right answer for every student is a law firm life, the bigger the better (and yes, I know not all schools do this, but the underlying culture still does). Professionals specialize more and more such that simple answers outside their specialty evade their understanding. We live in a world where we try to make every situation the same because then it fits a pattern that is familiar to us.

When I was studying in New Zealand, there had recently been a change in New Zealand requiring lawyers who represented children to actually see their child clients in person. Prior to that, many lawyers just assumed all children were the same, so they did not actually have to meet their particular client in this case. And that was in family law, where seeing the child with each of the parents and more fully understanding that child’s relationship with each child was even more important.

I do not mention this to say these lawyers did not care. They simply did not think through the fact that every single person is unique and has individual qualities. When I went to see a surgeon, he really only looked at my MRI. The physical therapist and another doctor said, “I want to see you before I look at the images.” When we get into too much specialization, we lose subtleties of each and every person.

And this does not only affect the professional world. It affects our everyday lives. If we stop expecting people and situations to be different, we start making assumptions about how certain situations are going to happen. And with that, we have the potential to stop trusting ourselves in the moment of those situations. But yoga helps us tap back into that intuition in the moment. It helps us see that each and every day our body and mind are different.

For example, we learn to tap into the subtleties that make up our every day lives. We learn to find new meaning in what we might have otherwise thought would be a mundane situation. This is really the next step in gratitude. Not only can we be grateful for what we have, but we can start to see how nothing is really as it seems, and our lives are richer and more interesting than we might otherwise imagine.  But first, we have to learn to look. We have to learn to step outside of our focused vision and see the bigger picture. But in order to see that bigger picture, we have to learn to notice the small differences in each and every person, encounter, and situation.

I guess the big question is, “so what?” My 8^th grade English teacher used to ask us that on our writing assignments. Why am I mentioning this? How does this affect our daily lives? Some people believe that one of the underlying reasons for unhappiness in our world is when people believe they are not fully seen for who they are. If we believe that everyone of a certain characteristic (whether race, occupation, age, etc.) is the same, we fail to see the person before us. It is not easy to do. It is much easier to put everyone in a box and go from there. It takes less mental effort . . . on the surface.

But in the long term, what takes less mental effort is not keeping people in those boxes, whatever they are, but allowing yourself to fully experience life. Just like we do not usually need the fight or flight response in our daily lives, though it is great when we do, we do not need to box people into categories anymore. We live in a different world than we did 10,000 years ago when there were reasons not to trust anyone but our clan.  Now our world will be better served by tuning into the subtle differences of each and every person and situation. For me, I have found the ability to start doing that through yoga.

Do you find yourself caught up in assumptions? How do you get out of that mindset? How do you see each person as an individual?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Subtleties of the Bigger Picture, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Looking at Ourselves

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein

Yoga in America is an interesting phenomenon. I started doing yoga as a way to find some semblance of peace in my life. I was 19 years old at the time. But now yoga in America happens in gyms and on commercials for decidedly unhealthy products, including McDonald’s. It has become Westernized and commercialized. There is, of course, a lot to say about what this means for us and for yoga, but I want to focus on one particular aspect today. And it starts with law school.

I loved law school. Loved it. I loved it so much I went back to get my Master’s of Law. But I was lucky in law school. I was lucky because a) I went to a great school that did not focus on competition amongst students, and b) I was too naïve to even notice the competition that did exist. For anyone who is not a lawyer, or who has not seen, The Paper Chase (sadly, Legally Blonde is a not-too-realistic example of law school), law school is about competition. Grades are almost always on a curve, and students are told it matters a lot where you graduate in your class. It is extremely important to some students that they get on the journals and help publish articles written by law professors attempting to get tenure.

But the point is that everyone is compared to everyone else. There is no question this happens outside of law school as well. I once heard that at Julliard School of Music, you cannot leave your instrument lying around because someone could come and break it. I have no idea if that is true, but the point is that competition is everywhere.

And now it is in yoga spaces. For years, there has been discussion in the yoga blogosphere about the people (usually women) who are on the cover of yoga magazines, particularly Yoga Journal. They are always thin, extremely bendy, and white. If you look here, the Yoga Journal cover gallery, that was not actually true until around the year 2000, when yoga began to take the United States by storm. Prior to that, more men were on the cover, they were older, and they were not always in asanas.

And now people tell me they are afraid to go to yoga classes because they don’t want other people to see them. When people do make it to class, they compare themselves to others. I do not know anyone who has not done it. It is a natural part of life. But how does it serve us? We are all unique and come to our mats with our own struggles and our own abilities.

But the point of yoga is to turn inward. And the best professionals do their work well because of their own inner talents and drive, not because they are competing with others. It does no one any good for surgeons to compete. We, as the recipients of their services, do best when they are all incredibly good at what they do.

Some people argue that competition makes us all better. We strive to be like others and along the way become better at what we are trying to accomplish. I used to buy into that belief. I really thought that if I compared myself to people I admired, I would only get better. But that is not how the world works.

The underlying message of competition and comparison is, “I’m not good enough. I have to be better.” That underlying notion causes dis-ease, not a sense of empowerment and betterment. We all have our own unique gifts to offer the world. Some people may be able to do a handstand, and some may be able to write a novel, and some may be able to build a bridge. All of these are noble endeavors that make the world a better place. As Einstein points out in the quote above, we all must find our own path and passion. And that is how our genius will shine.

I am often dismayed at the modern yoga situation. But perhaps the most dismaying part about it is that instead of taking us out of the world in which everyone competes, it brings us deeper into it.

As I continue to read book after book about the power of the mind to heal the body, I keep coming back to the same sentiment, whether it is from Louise Hay or medical doctors – we have to accept ourselves as we are before the healing process can begin. At its core, this is the point of a yoga practice. This is the work we strive to accomplish.

This very personal practice that is yoga can be the antidote to so much of our dis-ease causing beliefs about ourselves. How do you stay in that mindset instead of getting caught up in what others are doing in classes?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Looking at Ourselves, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Daily Gratitude

Gratitude is something some people only think about in November (particularly Americans because that is the month in which the holiday Thanksgiving falls). Certainly, a time focused on giving thanks is a great time to think about Gratitude, but it can fuel our lives each and every day. When gratitude permeates our lives, the difficulties of our lives become less visible, more of a teaching moment, and may even disappear. Actually, the one downside I see to living in a country where Thanksgiving is such a big deal is that it takes away from finding gratitude every day. We can just compartmentalize it to a particular month. Not all societies have such a holiday; in fact most do not.

Our minds are powerful. While yogis have known this for millennia, and the new age community has been saying it for decades, the modern, conventional world is finally catching on, and some people are making a big stink about it. But why? What is so important about gratitude? What is it about bringing gratitude into our lives that makes our lives so much better?

Stress hangs out in our bodies and can physiologically change them. I am not just talking about a sore back or a headache. I am talking about serious disease processes and serious physical pain. While I have known this and talked about this for years, even I was skeptical about just how powerful it is. We are so trained to believe that pain and disease have other physiological causes. And sometimes they do, but stress underlies many of those “real” causes as well.

As I mentioned in the last post, a great book about this is called Mind Over Medicine. It said nothing I did not know, but it used the scientific proof so many of us crave. The proof was in peer reviewed medical journals. It is no more proof, really, than intuition, but we have been trained as a society to only believe these proven facts. And when I say stress here, I mean more than just working too much. I mean the stress that eats away at our bodies and minds, the stress that enters us and never leaves. I mean the stress that turns us into pessimists and makes our brains and bodies think we are constantly under attack. 

But back to gratitude. Gratitude is one of the antidotes to that stress. It helps create the optimism to overcome it. Stress puts us in the fight, flight, or freeze response, and chronic stress keeps us there. The antidote is, therefore, relaxation. But relaxation is more than vegging out in front of the television or even getting a massage every month. Relaxation has to permeate our lives to counteract the chronic stress many of us experience. A gratitude practice can be what helps us enter that relaxation phase.

Gratitude helps us start to see beauty in the world. It helps us recognize the good in our lives. And when we start to recognize the good in our lives, our brains can slowly begin to come out of that fight, flight, or freeze mode. We can reprogram the brain to recognize the fear that put it in fight, flight, or freeze is not life threatening. It is not a lion about to eat us. We can slowly begin to let go of our defenses and begin to find healing again.

This month on the Is Yoga Legal facebook page, I am going to post a daily gratitude. Join me there and share your gratitude as well. It is a beautiful time of year. We are in the end of summer, schools are going back in session, and here in Arizona the monsoon skies continue to show us unmatched beauty. I rarely have themes I follow each month, but this month it seems fitting to find a deep and true gratitude practice, one that is not just a passing phase but that infuses each and every moment of the day.

How do you bring gratitude into your life? Have you ever kept a gratitude journal? How has it changed your life?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Daily Gratitude, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

The Power to Heal

I just started reading a book called Mind Over Medicine by Dr. Lissa Rankin. It is yet another book about the mind/body power to heal against all scientific odds. Somehow I have always known this was possible. Even in my pre-yoga days, I knew there was a power within our bodies and minds greater than anything we talk about on a daily basis. When I was younger, I simply did not have the words to speak about it.

And I knew it was not true just for new age folks and those meditating on mountaintops. As a quote I saw on Facebook put it, “The placebo effect is scientific proof that we have the ability to heal ourselves. Our thoughts are powerful enough to bring this into existence – when will we begin to absorb this?” (emphasis mine). There is no person attributed the quote, but it is a true statement.

So why do so few of us believe this to be possible? Why do so many of us rely on the images, the blood tests, and the machines that measure various levels of things we don’t understand in our bodies? Why can we not turn inside to understand our true potential?

And yes, after all the years of knowing the power of the body, I am beholden to those images as well. For one, they’re really cool to see, but they also tell us a lot. They just do not tell us the entire story. They are just a small piece of information. What they do not tell us is how possible it is for the body to change.

The doctor who writes the book is pretty clear she wanted scientific proof the mind is a powerful healer. I have not yet finished the book, but I am well on my way. And it is clear from the book so far that what the research has found is the mind not only changes how we feel about certain situations, disease, etc. It can actually change our physiology. That is a really hard concept for so many of us to handle. I have wondered why for a really long time, and I think I am finally beginning to understand.

I think it is twofold. First, as Marianne Williamson reminds us, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us." Why this is, I am not sure, but I see it around me all the time. People shy away from their power. We are told as children to be quiet and not speak until spoken to. We grow up feeling we are not adequate. And yet, the exact opposite is true. We are powerful beings on this Earth, and our greatest asset is to share our power with each other.

But this first issue leads to the second. In our society, we put a lot of faith in other people to fix things. If we do not believe in our power, we believe other people have power we do not, so we ask them to make our lives better. As a lawyer, my job is to fix legal situations for my clients as best I can. Doctors fix health issues. Mechanics fix our cars. We keep ourselves so busy we never have time to stop and ask ourselves what is really causing issues in our life. We just go to other people and hope they can make the issues disappear. 

But the truth is that we can do this ourselves. Certainly, if my arm falls off, I want a surgeon to sew it back on. But that is only the very first step in the healing process. The healing goes on after that first surgery. The healing must come from within. And the pieces that help us heal the most are the ones missing from our daily lives.

We need a supportive community, time to relax, and faith the healing will occur. But so much of our lives are spent in isolation from others, rushing from one thing to the next, and believing we are our illnesses rather than believing we are in a state of dis-ease that can become a state of ease.

Certainly there are people out there to help us find this within ourselves. Caring medical professionals, therapists, friends, pets, anyone really. But at the end of the day, it is our innate healing power that is being brought forth by those other people. It is our own power and light that brings the healing forth.

Once again, we are in a world of simple but not easy. It requires us to go against so much of what we are taught. But the scientific proof exists that it is possible. We all know “miracles” happen. Now we just have to believe it ourselves.

How have you noticed the power to heal in your own life? Do you believe you have that power?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Power to Heal, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.