Imagine a life free from pain and sorrow—infused with joy and tranquility!

As the season unfolds and I return from such a beautiful surrounding in Portugal retreat, I am grateful to come home to our YAF community. I love bringing groups together in shared experiences to go deeper into the philosophies and methodologies of the more subtle tools of breath and meditation. It’s such a gift to witness the transformation of students as the practices reveal so many miracles of experiencing the joy of living.

Over the years, my deepest love is teaching the sutras, which offer the yogic philosophy and practices that have been evolving since at least 3000 BCE, which accounts for their rich complexity and diversity.

Patanjali

In simplistic terms, the two main goals of yoga are to know oneself and to know the possibility of something greater or the Cit, a Sanskrit word for truth. From this understanding, the seeker aspires to know oneself not as just an identity of form or role but to align with a deeper source of consciousness awareness. In other words, one aspires to embrace the soul and to honor the presence of a source or God or Higher Power, whatever the truth reveals in the experience of living one’s yoga. The tools are many, and Patanjali’s yoga sutra outlines practical steps toward this optimal alignment.

These sutras offer us a practice of yoga that have the ability to help ease our suffering of a roaming mind and to calm our nervous systems. Science is catching up, and my life’s work, after leaving the mental health system in the early 90s as a therapist, was to offer the teachings of yoga as a path to heal the physical, mental and emotional layers of the mind and embrace the soul.

For the past two years, I have been blessed to go deeper with my yoga therapy tools and into my own practice. I completed a teacher training in the very practical and yet profound study of Vishoka meditation. The methodology for learning these practices offers beginners as well as long-time practitioners an opportunity to experience the subtle grace of presence.

Sutra 1-36: visoka va jyotismati (by focusing on the light in the heart that never suffers) is a sutra in the section where Patanjali gives us different options for calming the mind, bringing it to a state of steadiness closer to citta-vritta nirodha. This principle of philosophy offers the glimmer of possibility that there is a light deeply hidden in our hearts that never suffers, which is opposite of our learned mind that holds the memory of despair, sorrow, anger, or heaviness. This is the light of consciousness.

We are born into this light, and it is neutral, unaffected by the outer world. However, the effort is in actually bringing the focus of the mind inward instead of turning the light towards external objects and outer experiences. We might not be able to change the outer world at times, but we do have the choice of discernment to shift our own focus and bring our minds home. We can use these tools now as the uncertainty of living is moving so quickly, and our sense of stability is shifting.

Now, I am offering these teachings to our YAF community and create soul groups that come together and feel safe enough to let the resistance of fear move us into the open space of self-love and compassion and celebrate our aliveness. This course is designed to be 6 weeks in 2 hours sessions covering the practices of different skills in yogic breathing techniques, asanas, discussions, and learning the sutras, meeting each student where they are.

We will gradually move into the full body of the Viskoska meditation. Pantanjali asks us to turn this light inward toward the divine resting our attention in our heart. This takes a refined mind of practice as we are so much affected by sukham and durham, or the joys and the sorrows of what we are witnessing. Life is much greater than our attachments to the ups and downs of living through the lens of learned habits or patterns. The light we have is not ours, it belongs to the divine, and all of us are miracles of the profound grace which offers a gateway to thriving.

Our nature is to fear as we cling to maintain our self-preservation. When we collectively connect with that which is our true nature or cit, we rise above the experiences that constantly bombard our moods of anger, frustration, anxiety, overwhelm, exhaustion, and irritability. My teacher always reminds me that when someone is bitten inside with pain, they will bite out. That reactive mind is an unstable mind, and it is holding on to hurt. To heal ourselves is to heal the world. To move into that which is healing takes courage to let go of old patterns. We need each other to support and encourage this journey.

Vishoka Meditation with Sutra Study meets on Saturday from 12-2pm starting October 29. I hope you can join me on this journey and reclaim your inner joy! Learn more and register here.

With love and light,

Laura Jane

Laura Jane Mellencamp in Showing Up: Dare to Live From Your Heart, a Film

Certified yoga therapist Laura Jane Mellencamp talks about reaching for the wrong things in life in the upcoming film, Showing Up: Dare To Live From Your Heart.

Showing Up encourages you to live a life that matters to you, to show up.

The film offers insightful interviews with teachers, ministers, therapists, and others who illuminate the journey from your head to your heart. They explore why we struggle to slow down, even when we say we must. A meaningful life requires we move out of our comfort zone, they explain. Do you wonder what gets in the way of taking your next daring step? They have answers.

Central ideas are inspired by the book Unfolding: Slow Down, Drop In, Dare More, written by Downers Grove local, Nancy Hill. From Unfolding, “Courageous choices that proclaim our essence are both risky and rewarding. They reveal who we are.” Heartfelt living is not a place we’ll reach someday. It happens in the moment. It happens when we show up. The film is directed by local Keith Kelly.

In the film, you will also meet people like you who face their fear and keep going.

• Travel to a Maasai Village in Tanzania where an American woman’s dream results in the education of thousands of children.

• Follow the journey of a classical violinist who longs to be a rockstar. It seems impossible. Could it happen?

• Be inspired by an artist who receives a devastating diagnosis. Will this end her painting career?

These uplifting stories and others show you how obstacles can be doorways to deeper self-expression. Already living from your heart? This film will encourage you to keep going. Do you question what it takes to live from your heart? This is a brilliant depiction of that journey.

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EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE SHOWING

Showing Up: Dare to Live from Your Heart

Saturday, October 15, 2022
at the Tivoli Theater in Downers Grove.

Tickets are $10 advanced purchase, $15 at the event

9:00 AM Doors open

Cover Girls, featured in the film, will perform

A professional photographer available to take your Premiere Photo

10:00 AM Film starts

11:3O AM Q and A

Hope you’ll join us!

Will you trust where your heart longs to go?

Learn more about the film on their Facebook page.

Healing Yoga: the journey of self love, from harming to healing

“The greatest journey she ever took was to heal herself. You can go around the world a thousand times. Until you go inside your soul and make peace and LOVE, you have not actually gone anywhere. How kind can you be to yourself in the next moment? That is the journey.”

—Jaiya John

These words are my new mantra. Again reminded this past week that vulnerability is the only gateway to the heart. I crashed off my patio while looking at the full moon and landed on my right side. My wrist and knee are now recuperating, and I am humbled just to be still. This active whirling dancer is sitting on the inner journey of listening and releasing the habits and patterns of my “doing” identity. I’m grateful nothing is broken; just the ego is bruised.

This month we begin our fall season of classes and workshops. Our teacher training is coming to its completion in October, and I’m debating on how to move forward. So much of our teachings at YAF are sharing the tools needed to move into our healing and connecting to our true inner selves of the heart. I want to begin teaching the philosophies and the methodologies of deeper, refined meditations for releasing the old patterns of traumas—the anger, the hurts, and the old beliefs that no longer serve in learning to love.

Yoga therapy is not just a physical practice but offers teaching with a heart-to-heart individual relationship between teacher and student. Holding a safe place to shift the mind’s struggle of gripping onto the patterns of thought, speech, and action that only add to the suffering. The mind is in the body, the breath, the thoughts, the behaviors of identity, and our moods. Each tool of yoga can influence these layers, and ultimately through practice and nourishing of new patterns, open the gateway to our deeper intelligence.

Learning self-love versus self-loathing is a journey of the soul. This is my life commitment to keep growing, and so I surrender my need to be perfect and accept my humanity. I am forever grateful for my injuries to remind me to come back to my practice in a new gentle way. As I prepare for my retreat in Portugal, my injury becomes a gift to move deeper in mindful meditation and to accept my limits by nourishing my grateful heart.

Everyday healing is not for the weak of the spirit. My hero at this moment is Michael Taylor, my dear friend, and colleague who is truly living the moment-to-moment acceptance of cultivating patience as he sits each day in uncertainty. His entire system is healing from a transplant last April.

And for anyone undergoing any type of treatment, whether a cancer diagnosis, an autoimmune disease, or just a much-needed mental rest from the exhaustion of living, know that we at YAF are holding the space of love and support for one another. May we all be nourished and feel connected as a community. This is what it means to be human.

Let’s meet each other where we are. Learn the gift of shifting anger into passion, fear into love, and appreciation for the brilliance of all the teachers that walked this path before us. Let’s move each thought, speech, and action from harming to healing. When you can observe your thoughts of anger or worry or fear and witness the thoughts as a pattern of learned habit, in that moment of awareness, pause, reflect and choose a better, right thought—the one that arises from a new pattern of practicing detachment from the self-preservation of identity. The ability to choose a better action from a kinder, compassionate perspective allows for a new experience to unfold, living a life with the possibility of less suffering, a pathway inwards with the desire to experience self-love.

The light in me honors the light in you,

Laura Jane