How is it that Orville and Wilbur Wright were able to create a machine that could fly through the air? How is it that a college dropout named Bill Gates could become one of the richest men in all of history? How is it that a relatively unknown senator with a foreign-sounding name could become the first African-American to hold the office of President of the United States? Quite simply, the answer is possibility. And it is this very same possibility that yoga seeks to unleash in your life.

But wait, I can hear the chorus singing, yoga is a spiritual discipline. What on earth does a spiritual tradition have to do with these kinds of material achievements, with accomplishments of technology and wealth and power? Well, the answer is nothing—and everything.

On the one hand, yoga is a spiritual discipline, and as such, one could argue, it has nothing at all to do with getting ahead in the world, with managing and manipulating our material circumstances, or with achieving and acquiring status and accomplishments. One could argue.

Yet on the other hand, if we’re honest, really honest, we’ll see that spirituality can in no way be divorced from life itself. Not really. That’s because whether a life is lived in a monastery or in a Park Avenue apartment, it is life. Despite what many may believe, life doesn’t stop in a monastery, in fact, it really doesn’t even change that much: traffic jams on the way to work are replaced by traffic jams on the way to the bathroom; arguments about who failed to change the paper in the copier are replaced with arguments about who ate the last of the granola, struggles for promotions are replaced with struggles to sit next to the guru. The truth is, like it or not, our humanness follows us wherever we go.

What this means of course is that if spirituality is to have any relevance at all, it must embrace life, all of life. For the setting in which we find ourselves, from a meditation hall to a concert hall, is largely incidental. We are all on an ever unfolding journey of evolution, recognized or not. Everything indeed is spiritual, that is everything is grist for the mill of your very own evolution. Even the ancient scriptures are in agreement with this.

Thus, to insist that yoga has nothing to do with your life as a banker or plumber or doctor or mother is to miss the point—and colossally so. This unfortunate viewpoint is steeped in misunderstanding about how spiritual technologies seek to create transformation and worse, it deprives millions upon millions of the powerful gifts the teachings of yoga have to offer. It’s true that for some, the practice may involve retiring from the world, but for others it may carry them along in lives that are very much engaged with society—just look at the life of the Dalai Lama for an example of this. And for those of us living regular lives in regular towns with regular jobs, this is good news indeed.

So then, this brings us to the real question, the question of how? How can this practice unleash such gifts into our lives? How can your yoga practice become more than a diversion, a weight-loss program, a fitness regimen, a stress-relief exercise? How can yoga make the heretofore impossible, possible? To answer this, we must first understand what our three examples have in common. In other words, what was it that made these phenomenal accomplishments possible?

And here it is: before Orville and Wilbur could fly, before Microsoft could be born, before Barak could be elected, one thing was necessary; a thing more important than any other factor. It’s this: the inventor, the software designer, the politician, each of them in turn, had to be open to something that most others could not fathom. Each needed to sense the possibility of the seemingly impossible. Each was required to tap into something—we could call it an inner knowing, intuition, or even a gut feeling—that helped them to see through the limiting beliefs of others, and perhaps some of their own. It was this opening to an inconceivable possibility that paved the way for the extraordinary.

I know, because I too have followed the subtle call of this inner guide and have seen the way it can magically bring unseen potential to life. I have followed it against the advice of friends, against the promptings of business associates, and even against the better judgment of my very own mind. And in one particular case, the results were exceptionally extraordinary too; the results are what we today call Yoga Pura.

The birth and subsequent blossoming of Yoga Pura was to many a rational mind impossible. A no-name yoga teacher moves to a random city in which he knows virtually no one, has no student base, no business contacts, no knowledge of the local business climate. He chunks down his modest retirement savings, builds a studio, throws up a sign, and starts teaching. Add to this the fact that it all happened in the economic doldrums immediately following 9/11 and in a place that had not yet developed a thirst for yoga, and you have a likely cocktail for yet another business failure. Fortunately, that was not to be.

This is in no way to say it was an easy journey. On the contrary, it was at times an excruciatingly difficult and exhausting process. Long hours of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice were required, but too, these were the very same long hours, dedication and sacrifice that wouldn’t have been possible if intuition hadn’t been prompting me along. It’s not that I knew that Yoga Pura would be a success; it’s that I knew Yoga Pura was what I had to do. This inner voice provided a clarity of purpose that kept me focused and on track, even in the most difficult of times.

Looking back, I know that without listening to that ever so faint but persistent whisper of intuition, things would have turned out much differently. At the time, I wasn’t at all focused on starting a yoga studio and I certainly had no plans for moving to Phoenix. In the year 2000, I had found myself at the epicenter of the Internet boom. Living and working in San Francisco, the Chief Operating Officer of an Internet start up, and charged with making successful a new concept in commerce and partnerships that was made possible by the Web. I was at the height of a career in marketing, communications, and management that had spanned the public, private, for-profit, and non-profit sectors. Surrounded by bright, talented, and enthusiastic people, challenged by forging a new business model, for me it was a rewarding and exciting time.

This of course was but my “day job” as I had also been teaching yoga for a number of years in the evenings and weekends. My typical teaching schedule at the time was six to eight classes per week, plus all the personal study via classes, retreats, and home practice I could cram into my already full schedule.

It was the best of situations, it seemed. I was blessed to be straddling two worlds, and was experiencing success in both. I had a challenging “real” job that compensated me well and challenged me professionally, and at the same time lived in a part of the country where eastern spirituality and world teachers were prevalent and accessible. All was right with the world.

But then the wheels came off. The Internet bubble burst, funding dried up, and my company, like hundreds of others, went belly up. As initially unsettling as it was, I quickly recognized my new-found unemployment as an opportunity. But an opportunity for what? Perhaps for starting my own Internet company, or maybe even accomplishing my lifelong dream of sailing around the world. After all, I had been living on and preparing my 35-foot sailboat for six years. All I had to do was buy groceries, cast off the lines, and point the bow out to sea. On the one hand, my mind had me creating a new and exciting business, at the helm of a cutting-edge internet powerhouse. On the other, I was lazing in the sun off the coast of Mexico and sailing off to exotic Pacific islands. Yet as enticing as each of these options was, something about them didn’t quite feel right; my heart was pulling me in another direction, toward an unseen possibility, one that my mind had not yet conceived. And it was here that my yoga practice helped me to tap into something more primal and more true than thought.

At first, this pull manifested as a subtle inner tension, something that could easily have been written off as stress and ignored. Something that I almost did. As with most of us, my mind speaks loudly, my intuition in a whisper. But thankfully, my yoga practice gave me access to this subtle inner guide, despite the misguided shouting of my mind. It was because I heeded inner voice that the trajectory of my life was realigned in a way my mind could have never imagined.

When the notion of a yoga studio first began to occur to me, it was quickly dismissed by the mind as a frivolous idea. I had bills, I had responsibilities, I had no job, I had meager savings. I couldn’t possibly pull that off, could I? But instead of reacting to thoughts of doubt and fear, my yoga practice helped me to settle my mind and tap in to something deeper than the ever-changing panorama of skeptical thoughts and ideas. I redoubled my dedication to my yoga practices diving into asana, pranayama, and meditation in order to quiet my mind and create a space for my deepest knowing to be recognized.

It was during this time that I began to notice a pattern that had been limiting me throughout my life, and one, I’ve since noticed, that is also very much at work in the lives of most of us: I had a dogged habit of believing my own thoughts.

Now, I’m fully aware how this might sound. Of course, you believe your own thoughts! Doesn’t everyone? And unfortunately most of us do. I say unfortunately because when we really take the time to notice, we’ll find an overwhelming percentage of our thinking is composed of random, self-limiting, and unhelpful thoughts. Often times, what we think—and by extension what we believe—has more to do with habit and momentum than it does with reality or possibility. It’s this pattern that keeps us living relatively small and uninspired lives.

The mind is a preprogrammed mechanism; that is, the thoughts it spins are largely dependent upon what it has experienced in the past. What this means is what we think possible is a function of what we’ve experienced before. If your mind has been programmed to think small, small is what you’ll get in virtually every sphere of your life. And all of us, that’s all of us, have been programmed to think relatively small.

For here is the point that so many of us miss: thoughts create reality, both in an esoteric sense and in a very real and practical way. Without turning this into a complex thesis on the relationship of thoughts to reality and manifestation, suffice it to say that if I think something is impossible, and I believe it, I won’t even apply myself to the task. We could put it this way: while you may not be completely in command of your success, your failure is 100% within your control. If you don’t apply yourself, you destiny is sealed, failure is guaranteed.

In case you hadn’t noticed, this leaves us in something of a conundrum: if my thoughts are dependent upon my past and my past is limited (as all of our pasts are), then my thoughts are also limited and my life is created upon that limited blueprint. Around and around we go, recreating the familiar and missing out on the miraculous. And it’s here that our question of how your yoga practice is able to radically transform your life, and make the impossible possible, is answered.

One of the many gifts yoga offers us is that it opens us to something beyond our habitual and limiting patterns of thought; it helps us to tap into a deep reservoir of possibility that reaches far beyond our naturally restricted, and therefore self-sabotaging, minds. The practice has the power to temporarily interrupt the mind’s plotting and planning and struggling and striving to get what we think we want, in order to allow a whole new order of potential to be revealed. This is precisely why much of our yoga practice is about disentangling ourselves from the tyranny of thought: quieting the mind and peeling away limiting concepts and beliefs to open ourselves to the possibility of a life greater and more fulfilling than is imaginable.

And best of all, the price of admission is something all of us can afford. What is asked is simply your wholehearted dedication to your fullest potential through your practice. And though it’s a small price to pay in relation to the reward, nevertheless it’s a price that few are willing to pay. And not surprisingly, what is stopping us are the very same limiting thoughts and beliefs that stand between us and our greatest potential.

My wish for us all in this coming year is that we can transcend our unconsciously self-imposed limits and summon a wholehearted commitment to our greatest, though yet unrecognized, potential. To bring ourselves to our practice as if a $10 million reward waited each of us at year’s end. For if you are able to muster that kind of devotion, a reward awaits you that will bring you more riches and blessings than your mind could ever conceive and in every area of your life. In the words of an anonymous 14th century mystic and author of the seminal Cloud of Unknowing:

Your whole personality will be transformed, your countenance will radiate with inner beauty, and for as long as you feel it, nothing will sadden you. One-thousand miles you would run to speak to another who you knew had really felt it, yet when you got there, find yourself speechless.

Is it possible? And in this very year? Not if your mind has anything to say about it.

Blessings to all,

E

Copyright 2008, Eric Walrabenstein, all rights reserved.