To have an open mind is to: mind your openness. It’s not like you can swing it open, place the door stopper there, and Shazam, now your mind is open for all of eternity. Open is not simply the opposite of closed. It’s more like the screening process at the airport, you have to ‘mind’ to it, just like you mind to your teeth and your toenails. When you don’t brush your teeth, they are grimy and your breath stinks. When the door of your mind is unattended, all kinds of sketchy characters will saunter in and make your mind grimy and your thoughts stink. Stinky thoughts translate into stale words and stale words translate into relationships that are polluted with moldy crusts of mediocrity.

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Sensory compulsion can be all consuming as we live in a world ruled by our senses. And that iron fist is slamming us from every direction imaginable. Wether that sweater I just mentioned is now popping up on my FB or feeling the rush of all those dings of dopamine flooding the airways or still on a sugar high of Christmas cookies, we are inundated not only with sensory experiences, but with those trying to manipulate and manage our experiences for the benefit of themselves like ninjas in the night.

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We know that idleness is not the root cause, but a symptom of something much deeper, yet it does carry its’ own weight and has the ability to breed and multiply like a pesky insect. Our bodies and minds are tools that must be trained and when we ignore, avoid, or disregard them, they lose their luster, become weak, unreliable, and fragile

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Caring can be life giving or life taking. Sometimes we need to be more care-less about the things that don’t natter, so we have the capacity to care more about the things that do. If we cared less about FB or YOUTube, would we have the space to care more about our humans and our pets and our passions?

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Doubt is the illusion of inadequacy in our own worth and our ability to be able to cultivate ability in anything that we choose. Not knowing is the curious and humble demeanor required to experience your own aliveness in the unfiltered brand new moment by moment play of life. Not knowing is necessary, doubt is devastating.

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Patanjali warns us that this desire to dive in head first on the daily will absolutely wither and wane and what once required not much will at all, will, require our willingness to decide what’s important to us and how we will follow through after all the sparkles settle and subside. So after our 1,750th vinyasa, it becomes our duty to dive into the depths of what we believe we know so that now we can learn not just about vinyasas but the very beliefs we are believing that may very well be broiling the aliveness from our brains.

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Yoga Sutra 1.30 presents us with nine different obstacles of the mind on our journey towards samadhi. These obstacles are disease, dullness, doubt, carelessness, fatigue, sensory attachment, wrong perspective, non-achievement, and non-steadiness.

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This sutra reminds me of what it’s like to see and feel the results of working out and eating healthy. Once you get a taste of that feeling, of being strong, and capable, and confident, the motivation to continue, multiplies. It’s like this with un-covering God or Ishvara within you as well. Once you have just a moment of realizing that you are a ray of the sun, or a drop in the ocean, or the embodiment of divine intelligence itself, the desire to seek satisfaction from the external world begins to subside and the fire to dive even deeper within intensifies.

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Sutra 1.28 continues to tell us about the meaning and importance of the Aum (Om) sound. This sutra states that the continuous repetition of the sound along with contemplation of its meaning is like the yellow brick road to Oz, and of course Oz is Samadhi.

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From nothing to something, from source to its’ formless manifestation, is sound. And the first sound was AUM, which is actually three sounds that encompass birth, life, and death or creation, preservation, and destruction, or Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva. How extraordinary that we have been gifted the portal of this now moment (Atha), to hop on the Om Express to destination cosmos or God or Spirit or whatever resonates for you. The Om Express catapults us onto a trackless track that is right on time for, no time, into the stationless station that is home, or Om.

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