Developing Devotion - Acquiring the Full Benefits of Yoga

Enjoy this new Yoga post on My Yoga Online by Kino MacGregor, Developing Devotion. Kino looks at the application of Yoga and acquiring the benefits of your practice when done through consistency and mindful devotion.

A yoga posture demonstrated by a master level practitioner is often the epitome of grace and ease. Yet when the novice student attempts to mirror these same movements the degree of difficulty is immediately evident. The real test of a yoga practitioner comes when the path ahead is laid out clearly and the student choose whether to commits to each step of the journey regardless of difficulty.

While the inner path is sometimes arduous, long and painful, it is also immensely rewarding, filled with timeless joy and one of the only sources of real, lasting peace. Each practitioner of yoga goes through periods of injury, pain and discomfort but not every practitioner has the dedication, heart and courage to find the light at the end of the tunnel. Those who maintain a relationship with their practice over a number of years begin to understand just how much it takes to make yoga a lifelong practice. There are moments of doubt, intense suffering and emotional turmoil as well as moments of bliss, ecstasy and realization. What commitment to yoga over a lifetime really demands is total devotion.

It is through the practice of dedicating yourself to your yoga practice everyday regardless of pain or pleasure that you learn the meaning of devotion. By traversing the murky jungle of the body and mind through yoga you develop the strength and fortitude of spirit needed to face life with dignity. By devoted yourself totally to the path of yoga you learn what it really means to surrender yourself to something. Before that moment of complete dedication there is always the chance to pull out, draw back or quit. But when you devoted yourself wholly your intention, energy and spirit moves mountains to create the real possibility of transformation. It is through the power of devotion that yoga changes your life.

When I started practicing yoga I was not a naturally strong person but I was deeply inspired by the masterful articulation of handstands and arm balances. For nearly five years I devoted myself entirely to the study of yoga with a special emphasis on the development of strength and steadiness in the body and mind. It is because I lived for strength in my yoga practice for a number of years that I now consider myself much stronger. It is because I followed the path of yoga through injury, pain, doubt, discomfort and disillusion all the way through into peace, joy, acceptance and love that I now share what I have learned through teaching. It is yoga that lead me to discover my own inner strength, a quiet voice that was always there though I did not know how to awaken it. When you begin your practice you will learn how ready you are to be truly devoted to yourself and to yoga. When you commit yourself fully to your chosen goal, be it in your yoga practice or in the world, there is nothing that can stop you.

A lifetime commitment to yoga teaches you the power of the deepest level of devotion. Whether you practice six days a week or only two times a week as long as yoga remains in your life over time you will delve deeper into the inner world and know what it means to fully surrender yourself to the path of yoga. When you are able to maintain your attention on your deepest dreams with the type of unwavering focus and heartfelt dedication that yoga teaches you, then you will also know the exhilarating feeling of actualizing your dreams in the world.

Learn more about Kino Macgregor

About Kino MacGregor
Kino MacGregor is a small business owner (www.miamilifecenter.com), yoga teacher and freelance journalist who has produced two yoga DVDs and is currently working on her first book, Inner Peace, Irresistible Beauty to be released late April 2009. For complete details please see www.ashtanga-awareness.com.

Other articles by Kino MacGregor:
The Unhappy Monk: How to Use Yoga

The Unhappy Monk: How to Use Yoga

My Yoga Online - Enjoy our latest article by Kino MacGregor, The Unhappy Monk, that looks at the process of inner observance. Through our Yoga practice, we can more readily discover how our outward view of the world is a deep-rooted reflection of the energy and thought patterns that exist within us. How we see and experience life around us is greatly affected by the life we permit to flow in our minds and soul.



How you think, feel and act influences the kind of interactions you have in the world. While there might not always be an easy causal relationship between thought, action and experience, if you dig deep enough the connection is almost always evident. There is an ancient Zen parable that tells of a young monk-in-training who searches the world for a true master and a peaceful place, but finds only angry, unhappy people everywhere he goes. After roaming through many towns the young aspirant meets a Zen teacher in disguise who asks the traveler what he has experienced during his journey. When the teacher hears the report of anger and misery from the young monk, he replies, "I think that you will only find more of the same anger and unhappiness where you go." The would-be student neither recognizes the teacher nor the teaching and leaves angry and unhappy himself.

The young monk who sees anger and unhappiness everywhere himself actually carries the anger and unhappiness within himself. Whatever and wherever you are on the inner plane translates to the physical world through experiences and interactions. If you decide that the world is a dangerous place you will see evidence of your choice everywhere you look. But if you decide that the world is a peaceful place then you will literally see evidence all around that the world is peaceful. It would make sense then to gain control over the mind and its many layers of emotion and thought. With careful direction of the mind there is nothing that a person cannot achieve. Yet with out such direction one often experiences a tumultuous turn down a havoc-ridden highway.

If you carry the seed of anger or unhappiness inside yourself you literally attract experiences that match your internal vibration. Thoughts and emotional states have the magnitude of gravity in that they literally bring situations into being. If you are not aligned with peace and happiness on an internal level then there is really no way you will experience it truly in your life. It augurs well for everyone to pay careful attention to the emotional baggage and unquestioned assumptions lying dormant within. The yoga practice gives us a chance to see ourselves clearly under the mirror of self awareness. It is often through an injury, a challenging relationship with a teacher or other hard circumstances that students of yoga learn the most about their tough emotions and inner judgments. One of the most transformational aspects of a daily committed yoga practice occurs when you come face to face the ugly inner reality that you've been carrying around inside. It is only then that you can literally move through it, not by fighting, fixing or talking the problem away. But by accepting, breathing and just being with whatever you're going through.

Seeing deeply held emotional patterns in the clear light of consciousness dissipates the ghostly power these largely subconscious reactions have over your life. Imagine that you're the young monk in search of inner peace and all you experience in the world is a series of conflicts. At some moment your daily practice will direct the finger that you've been pointing at the world towards yourself. If the law of attraction states that like unto itself is drawn, then the best thing you can do for changing your life experience is seeing exactly what you're really like on the inside. You can't bring lasting peace to the world if you're angry inside. You can't share true love while your heart is filled with hatred. And you can't live in truth if your mind is riddled with delusion.

About Kino MacGregor
Kino MacGregor is a small business owner (www.miamilifecenter.com), yoga teacher and freelance journalist who has produced two yoga DVDs and is currently working on her first book, Inner Peace, Irresistible Beauty to be released late April 2009. For complete details please see www.ashtanga-awareness.com.

American Yogis Teach Entrepreneurial Spirit to India's Poorest Women

My Yoga Online has posted a feature article by Kino MacGregor. This article provides an inspirational view of Yoga Gives Back, an organization that has been supporting female entrepreneurs in developing countries like India. Enjoy this wonderful article offering insight into how one's Yoga practice can spread benefits across the globe.

Imagine if all you needed to lift your family out of generations of poverty was two hundred dollars. You would undoubtedly have the resources and connections to secure such a modest sum between your family, friends, credit cards, bank or government assistance. But imagine if you lived in a place where not only was money not readily available but the fact of your female gender prevented you from having access to the means of acquiring a source of revenue? Welcome to India’s rural villages and meet Jayashree. She is a young, beautiful seamstress and mother of two who made just 75 dollars a month working at a garment factory to add to her husband’s meager income earned by driving a rented an auto rickshaw (taxi). She dreamed of buying her husband’s rickshaw so their family could earn more money but had nowhere to turn to for the meager sum of 7,000 rupees or about 175 dollars.

Not only does Jayashree not have the education most Americans take for granted, but she also does not have the opportunities that are a vital component of earning a reasonable income. In India it seems like all Americans are rich because the money spent on groceries or on a month’s yoga classes has the potential to change the life of someone like Jayashree. The Americans most familiar with India are often the spiritual seekers who journey across land and sea to meet yoga teachers, learn meditation techniques and study ancient sacred texts. Yet for the cost of one month’s membership to the average yoga center in America a woman’s entire family could be altered forever.

Kayoko Mitsumatsu, an avid yoga practitioner who lives in California and studies with Joel Bender, thought she could make that difference in people’s lives with the creation of Yoga Gives Back. Rather than just giving money to provide shoes, food or resources Mitsumatsu initiated this charity endeavor after interviewing Dr. Muhammad Yunus for a TV documentary about the power of micro-financing for poor women. Dr. Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel Peace Price in 2006 for developing a micro-credit program through the Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh that enabled millions of mostly women to buy everything from cows to cellphones in order to earn money for their families.

Yoga Gives Back works with the Grameen Foundation in India to provide particularly destitute families in Mysore and Bangalore with the same micro-financing that has succeeded in lifting families out of poverty in Bangladesh. Mitsumatsu and Bender aim to reach the more than 15 million people (a majority of which are women) in the U.S. who practice yoga and support rural families in India. One of the reasons Yoga Gives Back focuses its efforts in the Mysore-Bangalore region of South India is because many American yoga students journey to Mysore to study with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, the 94 year old master of the tradition. It was after a three month visit to Mysore to study yoga that Bender himself made the personal commitment to find a way to give back to the local community and upon his return partnered with Mitsumatsu to create Yoga Gives Back.

At least half the yoga practitioners in Mysore are Americans and nearly half of the world’s poorest people call India their home. While the Western world lives in relative abundance and benefits from India’s yoga legacy nearly one in four of India’s 1.1 billion people live below the poverty threshold of less than 40 cents a day. The Western world values equality of opportunity and rewards the entrepreneurial spirit in the meritocracy of capitalist enterprise and it repays another kind of debt when yoga practitioners from the U.S. teach the most needy in India how to run their own businesses with the power of micro-credit.

The cycle of poverty in India is a vicious cycle that traps generations upon generations into an indentured servitude to a series of creditors, lenders and lessors who control the resources and money available. When a poor family falls behind and their children are forced out of school and into work they dig themselves deeper into the repetitive and prohibitive system of entrenched poverty, virtually ensuring that the next generation will be as poor if not more than the previous one. Empowering women to find a way out of this trap opens a door to the real possibility of their happiness and self-sufficiency.

Jayashree seemed destined to perpetuate the cycle of poverty in her life until she applied for loan of 7,000 rupees or the equivalent of about 175 dollars from the Grameen Foundation and Yoga Gives Back. With the money she bought her husband’s auto rickshaw. Whereas he previously paid rent for use of the vehicle his profit was marginal at best, but as an owner the income tripled. In one year the loan was fully repaid and Jayashree applied for a second loan to buy a sewing machine so she could sew bags and other small items to sell. Her goal is to own a garment shop and send her sons to college and with the help of the Grameen Foundation and Yoga Gives Back that she finally had someone to turn to for the help, direction and guidance she needed in order to make her dreams an attainable reality. Mitsumatsu says, “Most women only went to primary school, had to work as daily labor to help family as young child, and got married young. Like their mothers, they never had an opportunity to improve their economical situation until they had access to micro credit.”

The old axiom that says that you cannot feed the world but if you teach a person how to fish or make bread they can feed themselves for a lifetime is at work in Yoga Gives Back. More than a charity, the work is a kind of education in business for rural women with an entrepreneurial spirit. They are rewarded for their hard work, given a chance to succeed without the pressure of the unfairly high interest rates of local lenders and find a way to break the relentless cycle of poverty they were born into. Most Yoga Gives Back loans average about 25 dollars a month and with this micro-credit loan rural, poor women start their own small business, buy their husband’s businesses or invest in their already existing businesses and double or triple their income almost immediately. Mitsumatsu states, “Many women used to worry about having enough food for the family, or sending children to schools. But with this micro credit, their life become much more sustainable.”

Yoga helps Westerners find peace and thus make their lives more sustainable. With the power of micro-financing Yoga Gives Back helps Indian women gain access to opportunities that would otherwise simply not exist.


To read more inspirational stories about female entrepreneurs that Yoga Gives Back has helped or to contribute, please visit their website at www.yogagivesback.org

About Kino MacGregor
Kino MacGregor is a small business owner (www.miamilifecenter.com), yoga teacher and freelance journalist who has produced two yoga DVDs and is currently working on her first book, Inner Peace, Irresistible Beauty to be released late April 2009. For complete details please see www.ashtanga-awareness.com.