Is Your Yoga or Exercise Practice a Regime?

Athletes, runners, weight lifters, and yogis, I must ask you a few questions.  What is your motivation?  When you are practicing, running, and training to your limits, are you motivated by self love of self hatred?  You may say, “I am looking after my body” or “I am getting in shape and that is self love”  and this my very well be true.  And the opposite may be true as well.  If you are motivated by a voice inside that says anything like “you are not good as you are, you need to lose weight, get in shape” etc. then you are pushing from a place of what I call “body domination”.  Body domination is a form of identification with an unloving part of self located in the mind.  Usually in a yoga setting we train ourselves to move out of mind and into body.  Yet this unloving voice is sneaky and can be speaking so quietly that you may not even know it is the source of your pushing to be something other than the beautiful presence you already are.  Even in a yoga setting, and we see this more and more in the media, there is a mainstream goal of looking good.  I will now give you a good reason to move away from this form of self hatred, a reason that I hope out weighs the voice of body domination –  listening to the voice of self love, of “body support”, and identification in the present moment as body, is the way to true well being, health, youthful radiance, balance, stamina, and magnetic beauty.  Is this a program you can get behind?  Self love is like a beacon, and a light that warms up a room, and it is infectious to those in its glow.  When we have this light turned on, we are accepting and even in love with our flaws, our unique expression of our infinite self.  We lose the motivation to be something else and drop into the flow of present time experience.  This is how we can evolve into recognizing our true form, and this is why we practice yoga, to be the embodiment of the light of divine love.