A thought provoking happiness article from The Economist.  A lovely, and spirit-lifting, read!

Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older

Dec 16th 2010 | from the print edition

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years’ worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can’t please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).

As appears in YYoga’s Blog: Off the Mat

It’s that time of year again, the time that we emerge bleary eyed from a winter of gray rain and step blinking into the growing Vancouver sunlight. The warming weather reminds of last year when, was it possible? We actually went outside!

It’s time to slough off the winter funk and come out of hibernation. But before we race off to Lynn Valley or sprint up the Grouse Grind, we can take advantage of the change in seasons to do a some much-needed housecleaning. Spring is the perfect time to clean up, clear up, and streamline – both inside and out.

Getting Your Internal House Clean: Yoga Style

Shake off your hibernation body! Winter is the right time to stay inside and eat cozy foods, but sometimes we can go a little too far with our comforts. If anyone is still feeling the remnants of the holiday indulgence or general winter torpor, your yoga practice will help kick start your body into a fresh start.

Here’s a simple twisting practice to bring some movement back to your digestive system and give your internal organs some love. Moving the inner body helps to squeeze and soak our vitals, generating fresh blood and nutrient flow and getting rid of any stagnancy. Movement can help break up fascial adhesions in our body, keeping us mobile and fluid. When we move, we create synovial fluid in our joints, helping them to function well. Imagine your car with oil, then your car without oil, and you get the idea! Twisting is also great for our spine, and helps keeps our intervertebral discs happy by squeezing and soaking them.

We’ll start off with a simple breathing technique that will get your juices flowing and your abdominals fired up.

1. Easy Seat (Sukhasana) with Kapalabhati breathing
2. Easy Seat (Sukhasana) with a twist
3. Cat/ Cow
4. Downward Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana)
5. Chair and Twisting Chair (Parivtta Utkatasana)
6. Crescent
7. Twisting Lunge (Parivrtta Parsvakonasana)
8. Bridge
9. Savasana

For detailed instructions on doing these asana for the juiciest effects, click the above links.

Consider a Cleanse

If you’ve had a winter of wine and sugar, a simple cleanse can help you restore order and balance to your system and give your body a chance to rid itself of accumulated toxins.

There’s no need to be too dramatic; even just taking a week off of alcohol and refined sugar will help your body reset and give your liver a much-needed breather. For those interested in going a little deeper, consider abstaining from all things white: white pasta, white rice, white sugar, white bread. Replace these foods with fresh veggies and fruits for a nutritional whallop.

If you’re a caffeine-phile, consider cutting your intake or even (gasp!) taking it out altogether. While the first few days may be a little rough, your body’s energy levels will even out and become more self-sustaining. (I finally managed to cut out the coffee when my energy swings were so extreme that I needed to conk out every afternoon. Not a lot of fun in that! ) If you have radical energy peaks and valleys, caffeine could be your culprit. Giving your system a caffeine-breather will allow your batteries to recharge the old-fashioned way.

For a personalized regime that is perfect for you, consider checking in with one of YYoga’s Wellness practitioners. If you’re considering a more radical cleanse, check in with an expert before you embark to make sure it’s the best thing for you.

Clean Out the Closet

Nothing keeps us tethered to the past like a closetful of old clothes. Put your clothes into three piles: Absolutely keep, absolutely give away, and absolutely maybe. To sift through your “maybe” pile, ask yourself:

1. Have I worn this in the last year?
2. Does this make me feel fabulously me?

If the answer to both is no, then toss it! Make room for the new by clearing out the old. Give your old stuff to friends or donate it to charity to spread the love.

Clean Out the Fridge

If you’ve got some mystery food in your fridge, now is the time to clean it out! Get rid of all things expired and all things that don’t reflect how you want to nourish yourself going forward.

Clean Out Your Medicine Closet

Have duplicates of your favorite antibacterial spread or four toe clippers? Toss out your expired meds and give your duplicate tweezers to friends who are without.

Do a Deep Clean of the House

Get our your scrubbies and dive in! Now is the time to clean all those places that you’ve always said that you will “get to” eventually. Move the furniture, get out the ladder, and take a day to clean out the nooks and crannies. White or ascetic vinegar with water is a natural (and cheap!) anti-bacterial cleaning agent that can help freshen up your home without a lot of toxic cleaners.

Now Get Outside!

Once you’ve done a good ol’ clean out, get thyself outdoors! On the next glorious day, take yourself for a walk in English Bay or Stanley Park and bask in the sunshine. We deserve it! And be reminded why Vancouver is called one of the most livable cities on earth. Happy Cleaning!

9 Yoga Moves for a Great Spring Cleaning

1. Easy Seat (Sukhasana) with Kapalabhati breathing

Start off in a comfortable, cross-legged seat. Prop yourself up on a blanket or a block (a book can do!) to give your spine the maximum lift.

Take a few minutes to close your eyes and breathe. Connect to the internal space of your body. Exhale fully a few times and feel the inhalation naturally and effortlessly expand more fully through your abdominals and ribs.

Kapalabhati breathing consists of short, sharp exhales through the nose, pumped by your lower abdominals drawing in and up. The force of the exhalation will allow the inhalation to naturally drop back in of its own accord. Start off with a slower rhythm, then eventually increase your speed.

To start, sit up tall and exhale fully. Then inhale partway, and begin with short, methodical, vigorous exhales through the nose. Keep your throat, face, and tongue soft, and concentrate on keeping the body quiet as the abdominals do their work to help expel your breath. Repeat this exhale 12-15 times, then release the Kapalabhati breath and sit. Allow your breathing to return to normal, and feel the effects in your body. Not only does Kapalabhati rev up your core and give your inner organs a massage, it increases your oxygen intake and revitalizes your cardiovascular system. Repeat once more.

2. Easy Seat (Sukhasana) with a twist

Sitting in sukhasana, bring your fingertips to your shoulders. Root through both sitting bones, sit up tall and twist to the right, using the strength of your obliques to turn you rather than your arms. Keep your chin over the center of your chest and imagine a line pulling from your left shoulder to your right hip. Hold 3-5 breaths, feeling the deep internal workings of your core. Inhale to release, and do the second side. We twist to the right first to stimulate the natural action of your digestive track. By systematically twisting to the right first, we imitate the natural peristaltic movement of your large intestine.

3. Cat/ Cow

Come onto your hands and knees. Your hands are parallel and outer shoulder distance apart, your knees are under your hips. As you inhale, draw your chest forward through your arms and reach your sitting bones back. On your exhale, round your spine to the ceiling and root your sitting bones to the floor. Close your eyes enjoy the sensation of moving from the inside of your breath. This simple movement helps to open the front and the back line of your body. Repeat 5-7 times, then exhale and send your hips back and up to Downward Facing Dog. Walk your feet a couple inches back to find the correct stance.

4. Downward Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana)

Press your fingertips and the base of your fingers forward and down as you bend your knees and STRETCH your spine longer. Then press the tops of your thighs up and back as you reach your heels back and down towards the floor. Downward Facing Dog can’t be beat as the asana to create a beautiful spinal stretch. Focus on feeling the length of both sides of your waist evenly stretching. This mild inversion will also give your brain a refreshing oxygen bath.

5. Chair and Twisting Chair (Parivtta Utkatasana)

Step forward to the front of your mat, and bring your feet and knees together so that your feet are parallel. Bend your knees, lower your hips, and reach your arms straightforward for a slightly modified chair pose. Bend deeply at your hips and send your inner thighs back and down as your sitting bones root to the floor. Enjoy the heat and intensity (tapas) that you can create simply by being here! The heat helps increase the blood flow to the periphery of your body and can even get a detoxifying sweat going.

From chair, again bring your fingertips to your shoulders. Lengthen fully through your spine, anchor your hips together, then twist strongly to the right. Look down and keep the tip of your nose in line with your knees so that your body is working evenly. Since you aren’t using your hands, your core will be doing most of the work here, which is both strengthening and a great way to massage your internal organs. Keep drawing your right shoulder back to increase the twist and get your back muscles involved. Hold 3-5 deep breaths. Inhale to release, then do the other side.

6. Crescent

Step your left leg back and parallel, then bring your hands to your hips and lift up for crescent pose with your front thigh parallel to the floor. Start by gathering your inner thighs to your midline to increase your core connection and stability. (You can also leave your back knee down if you feel shaky.) Press the tops of your inner thighs back as you root your sitting bones down to the floor in order to most efficiently stretch your hip flexors. On an inhale, lift through your back ribs, then stretch your arms up and overhead. Press down through both feet as you begin to lengthen through the sides of your waist and take your upper inner arms back in line with your ears. Breathe and stretch from your pelvis out though your fingertips. This full body expression will help open up the hip flexors that have become tight through chair sitting over the winter, as well as create the space you need for twisting. Link this pose to the next pose…

7. Twisting Lunge (Parivrtta Parsvakonasana)

Exhale and come halfway forward (like you’re on a 45 degree angle with your upper body). Bring your fingertips again to your shoulders and widen your elbows away from each other. This variation will call for core deep stability, so again, you can leave your back knee down if needed. Hug in through your inner thighs, lengthen through the sides of your waist, and twist to the right. Keep your chin in line with the center of your chest and your nose to the inside of your right knee. With each inhale, lengthen the sides of the waist, and on your exhale, twist using the deep strength of your core. Inhale to release, step back to Downward Facing Dog, then do Crescent and Twisting Lunge on the second side.

8. Bridge (Setu Bandha)

Lower to your knees and come onto your back. Bend your knees, place your feet under your knees, hip distance apart and parallel. Make robot arms by placing your elbows on the floor by your waist and pointing your fingers straight up to the ceiling. Press the tops of your arms down and feel your collarbones widen. Root through your feet (particularly the inner edges) to keep your thighs parallel, and lift your hips and chest off the floor evenly. Keep your arms here, or interlace your hands underneath you for more leverage to lift your chest. Lift your sternum to your chin, and press the back of your head down slightly to keep the natural curve in your neck. This heart-opener will open up your core after all its work, as well as provide a stretch for the muscles that are chronically tightened by the shrunken posture of wintertime. Take 3-5 breaths, then lower your chest and hips to the floor. Repeat 2-3 times. If needed, draw your knees into your chest after your final Bridge.

9. Savasana

Absorb all the work you’ve done by resting in Savasana. Extend your legs long and stretch your arms by your side. Enjoy the openness and warmth that you’ve created and savor the knowledge that you’ve just given your body a delicious internal shower!

Watch this and be INSPIRED!!!!
My friend and YYoga co-worker Steph Tait runs 11,000 miles in one year with her running partner Matt Hill to generate environmental awareness. An astonishing journey!!!!

Message from Steph:
In celebration of Earth Day 2011, commit to one new action for Earth. Small steps add up.

1. Eat local & organic
2. Turn off your car
3. Eliminate plastic bags – bring your own bag
4. Use green cleaners
5. Turn off the lights
6. Turn off the taps
7. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
8. Compost
9. Bring your own bottle

10. Teach your children well

Believe in the power of your dreams.

Love
Steph

Last weekend I went skiing in Whistler.

Now, I am not what you’d call a great skiier.  Last time I was on the mountain was three years ago, before that, it had been a decade.  So let’s just say that I was shocked to find out that good skis aren’t straight and that it’s now considered cool to wear helmets.

My idea of making it down the mountain in one piece is to traverse it as slowly as possible.  I ski horizontally across to one side, do a little jiggle hop, then cruise on back across the mountain. Now, if you know something about skiing, you’ll know that covering the mountain like you were crawling down switchbacks is not precisely the point.

To ease my way back from what was essentially at 13-year hiatus, I took a lesson.

Yoyo, my very kind Japanese instructor, first made me ski without poles and keep my body facing down the mountain.  Down the mountain?  Yes, down the mountain.  In a move that seems bizarrely counter-intuitive, I am supposed to turn my body down towards the sloping belly of beast, regardless of what my hips and knees are doing beneath me – or the natural tendency to lean back.    Despite my misgivings, keeping my torso facing down the hill actually seems to help me stay in control and Yoyo seems pleased with me.

“Much better.  Much more stable.”  He nods approvingly when we stop.

I’m pleased, and a little flushed.  “It’s a lot to think about,” I say.  “Keep the head still, torso down, arms forward, shoulder forward, core in…”

He frowns, “No, no.  Don’t think too much.”

I frown back.  Easy for the ski instructor to say.

We continue to work on my upper body (“Keep body facing down!”), but towards the end of the day, Yoyo deems me ready to work on my edging.  He instructs me that instead of lifting my skis to turn, I should roll my weight across them to use the edges.  Edge on one side, then roll to center, turn, and edge on the other side.  I give it a whirl and notice with a bit if panic that when my weight becomes even on the skis, I seem to suddenly move much faster.

“Good, good!”  says Yoyo.  “See your lines, better edging.”

I glance behind me and -sure enough- my skis have cut twin grooves in the fluffy snow.

Life is grand.  I swoosh down the mountain by following in Yoyo’s tracks.

And then we hit the ice.

I wipe out.  In a beautiful blitz of snow.

Yoyo swishes up to me.

“I need,” I say, trying to haul my butt up, “to slow down, huh.  Make slower turns.”

Yoyo shakes his head.  “No, turn faster.”

“Faster?”

“Point your skiis down, and turn more.  Turn, turn, turn.”

I have managed to get up.  I look at him.  Rather doubtfully.

“Okay.”

Despite the screaming resistance in my brain.  I turn my skiis down the hills.  And Turn.  And Turn.  And Turn.

And strangely, despite the fact that I am going faster – I’m cruising right along, really – I feel more connected to my feet.  I feel more in control.  The skiing is actually going better.

And it’s the same with yoga.

And with life, since, let’s cut to it, people, yoga is really just a big ol’ reflection of life.

Sometimes the next step on the path is not to know more.  You can’t study up harder.  There’s no more homework to be done.  Learning more details and having better skills won’t always take you across that final chasm.  Instead – we have to trust.  Isvara Pranidhana, as the sutras say.  Surrender to god.  What takes us into handstand is that moment where we go, well, screw it, and let the chips fall where they may.   We practice, we prepare the ground….and then we have to let go to something bigger.  And when we turn our skiis down the hill, when we give up our scrappy attempts at control and dive into the jetstream – that’s when, strangely, everything starts moving with grace.

In the fall of 2010, I initiated a project where the community of YYoga joined together to create a cd called “listen to understand, vol.1”. This remarkable endeavor features the original music of our teachers, guest experience team, base camp team, and wellness practitioners. And every last cent is donated to Vancouver’s Children’s Hospital. To date, the cd sales have generated over $4,000 for Children’s.

Take a listen to the excerpts and stop by a YYoga center to buy your own copy. Online version available via Itunes and CDBaby.

Taking Me Higher
Om Shanti
Anusara® Invocation
Twameva
Asatoma Sadgamaya
Sri Krishna Govinda
Let Go
Hopeful
Tibetan Singing Bowls
Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
Taking Me Higher-Remix
Eternal Om

When I went traveling to India this last month with my mom, I packed everything in a small backpack, determined to be a minimalist.  It was an experiment to see if I could really get away with traveling light.  “Aren’t you impressed,” I asked my boyfriend.  “I got everything into here!” I brandished my backpack proudly.  He looked at my bag skeptically, “I’ll be impressed,” he said, “if you still think that was a good idea when you get back.”

Well, two weeks later and I’m happy to report that traveling light was an excellent idea.  (Although my bag did come back a bit more stuffed than when I left.)  I was a bit dirty, I’ll admit, but it was incredibly satisfying to let go the usual defensive materials I like to shore up.  No extra books for reading, no “clothes for every occasion,” no mascara, no “just in case” items, and few distractions.

In celebration of traveling light, I’m sharing this article I found by Michelle Cook.  It’s that time of year: clean out the closets, dump off the waste, and let in the fresh air!

Spring Clean Your Body, by Michelle Schoffro Cook

Spring is upon us–at least in theory. Every year I get spring fever. I can’t wait to get outside, open all my windows to let some fresh air in, and get down to cleaning my house of all the clutter that tends to build up over the winter. I think spring is the best season of the year. It’s a season of birth and new growth. Flowers, trees, grass and shrubs all start budding with life. This spring, help breathe new life into your body by incorporating some simple detox suggestions to your day. Reducing the toxic burden on your body can spell: improved digestion, increased energy, clearer sinuses, normalized blood pressure, fewer allergy symptoms and hormonal imbalances, strengthened immunity to viruses, sharper mental abilities, better sleep quality, fewer mood swings, healthier skin, and much more. Here are 9 ways to spring cleanse your body without the harsh regimes or deprivation of most detox plans:

1. Throw out the trash…from your diet, that is. I probably don’t have to tell you what constitutes “trash”–fried foods, sugary foods, and the 3 Ps: processed, prepared, and packaged food since they tend to be full of trans fats, sugar, and food additives.

2. If you can’t read eat, don’t eat it. Read labels on the healthy food selections you choose. As a general rule: most of the harmful chemicals you should be avoiding have long and complex names. If you can’t read the words on the package, don’t buy it, and don’t eat it. Better yet, choose fresh foods that come directly in Nature’s packaging.

3. Drink at least 8 to 10 cups of pure water daily to help flush out toxins. For a really great detoxifying drink, add the fresh juice of one lemon to a large glass of water first thing in the morning. Lemons help alkalize your body chemistry, contain more than 20 anti-cancer compounds, and help cleanse your liver, kidneys, and colon.

So it’s New Years. So you made a resolution. What is it this year?

I’ll share my typical checklist:

-lose five pounds

-go to yoga EVERY DAY

-finish writing book

-resolve all unresolved psychological issues

-do something really important that will make everyone love me

Hmmmmm. Lofty, anyone?

Resolutions are excellent.  They invite us to visualize, set intentions, make goals.    Like many of us, I love the idea of a clean slate.  From this brilliantly cleared slate, my life is an open book with nowhere to move but forward into greater and loftier etheric realms of evolution.  Like wiping away the niggling and painful habits of the past in one fell midnight-bedazzled swoop so that I emerge phoenix-like into the new year, ready and prepared to seize the day and realize my dreams.

So then what happens when mid-February rolls around and I have not gone to yoga for a week and have gained two pounds and my book is a mass of unrecognizable scribbles on a post-it note?  My ego happily chimes in: you are not good/dedicated/hard-working/talented/insert adjective here enough to get things done. You might as well give up now and eat another cookie.

Surely this is not the way.

The yo-yo of self-esteem that depends on goals being met or lost creates a win-lose situation.  Well guess what?  Eventually, we all lose.  While goals are great for getting us motivated and giving us vision, what do we do when the thing we wind up with doens’t match what we thought we wanted in the first place?  For example, maybe the book didn’t get written.  But instead I went to India, studied yoga for two months straight, and had an adventure?  Keeping resolutions might keep me so busy lamenting over what I didn’t accomplish that I forgeto to actually feel good about what DID happen!

Here’s an exercise.

Based on what you were able to do last year, write out (in retrospect) your resolutions for 2009.  Take stock of all that you DID accomplish.  The strange, unexpected twists and opportunities that life dumped in your lap.

Now, how does that feel?