Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Facebook or Twitter.
As many of you know, for the last few weeks (and the next few) I’ve been studying yoga intensively at Yoga to the People in San Francisco.
I’ve been learning a lot of things, many of which I can’t begin to convey in a way that would be understandable to you yet. Wisdom, knowledge, and understanding takes awhile to coalesce into anything close to being presentable across the Internet.
The origins of yoga extend backwards 5,000 years into the history of the entire world. We think of yoga as being from India, but in actuality the practice has been built by all of humanity, a technology for building better human beings.
Yoga isn’t the point of this article though, belief is.
Recently we sat down for a lecture on the Koshas, which is yogic belief system which speaks of the different layers of the body. The physical body, the energy body, the mental body, the wisdom body, the bliss body, and finally underneath all of that the true self.
Most people are obsessed with the physical body, and the physical things around them. This leads to the current state of materialism in the world — and why materialism in and of itself is deeply unsatisfying to most people. It’s because there’s so much more.
I’m pretty fascinated with the energy body right now, Pranamaya. How we gain, use, and lose energy is incredibly important. I think that much of the work we’re doing to free people is at its base convincing them to free their energy. So they can breathe again.
When someone burns all of their junk, they feel incredibly free. When you get out of a relationship, suddenly energy comes from everywhere. It’s all interconnected into a part of ourselves that many of us are deeply disconnected from.
But this is also not the point of this article. Let me get to it.
The first thing the lecturer told us was simple:
“Don’t believe anything that I tell you.â€
And then followed with:
“All of this you must experience for yourself.â€
I think this approach is so incredibly important for you, and I, to understand.
I can tell you to burn your notebooks all you want, in order to free creative energy, but how are you going to know what it feels like until you experience it yourself? The article I wrote on freeing yourself from your past lives was incredibly powerful for a lot of people, but in order to actually experience what I’m talking about, you’re going to have to experience yourself.
How does it feel to delete the photos of your ex-boyfriend?
How does it feel to sell the house you’ve lived in for the last 26 years?
How does it feel to drop your TV off your roof?
How does it feel to move to the other side of the country?
How does it feel to not have a home at all?
How does it feel to swap out bacon egg and cheeses for breakfast fruit?
How does it feel to make $27 (or $2,300?) of location-independent income?
All of these seem like really good ideas, theoretically. But they also could be really bad ideas in practice. But you just don’t know until you try them.
Every lesson I’ve taught you in the last year on this blog has been very much optional. Also, every lesson I’ve taught you could be the wrong match for a lot of people. I like living a unrooted lifestyle. I gain energy from wandering the streets of San Francisco, smiling at the tranquility in the chaos. You might not be so into that, but you don’t know until you try.
Self-evolution happens in different ways for different people.
If you’d caught me two years ago, glanced off the top of my cubicle and told me that in one year I’d be working less than 2 hours a day, practicing and learning about yoga for 35 hours a week, I would have told you that you were nuts. …and yet, here I am.
If I told you that your wildest dream was possible, would you really believe me? Do you believe yourself when you tell you?
The human mindbody is incredible. It can convince you that you have great power. It can convince you that you have great worry. It can hold onto anything. The mind can give you a life of suffering or a life of joy. You really are the decisive element in every situation. The work that we’re doing here, is very much an exercise in exploring how far we can push our minds into believing that we’re actually capable of living in a way that is important.
Many of the best books I’ve read in the last year weren’t good because of the writing, they weren’t good because of the content, these books were good because they retrained my mind to think in a very specific beneficial way.
Books like Think and Grow Rich, The 4 Hour Workweek, Tribes all show you that success isn’t a result, it’s a mindset. Happiness isn’t a quantification, it’s a mindset.
We have control over our minds.
We have control over our bodies.
We have control over how we gain energy, lose energy, store energy and use energy.
We can also control the minds of other people, consciously or unconsciously.
There are so many ways to do this, but most people don’t investigate them (yoga is one.) Instead they sit in front of the TV, mindlessly sucking up whatever is in front of them. Their energy sinks into the couch cushions.
Mindsets are patterns. The pattern created from nightly watching TV is much different from the pattern of nightly practicing yoga with 75 people in candle light.
Let me bring this back to the point of this article:
Don’t believe me, and don’t believe anyone else. You need to experience all of this from yourself, you can’t just keep subscribing to my blog waiting for the change to come about. These words are only permission for you to embark on your own exploration of a reality that you have access to. In fact, I’d love if you’d unsubscribed to my blog if it would help put you on the path to experiencing real life.
You’re not going to know what it’s like to live without a TV until you do.
You’re not going to know what it’s like to eat fruit for breakfast every morning until you do.
You’re not going to know how much energy you gain from practicing yoga twice a day (in a beneficial way) until you do.
You’re not going to know what it’s like to throw away all of your stuff and move across the country until you do.
You’re not going to know what it’s like to read people’s energy from across the room until you do.
You’re not going to know if what I talk about is an unrealistic fantasy world, or if anything is possible, until you do.
Maybe it’s time to start working towards a reality that you can believe in — one that you’re experiencing for yourself…
…you won’t know if it’s possible until you do.
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If you’re trying to figure out how to do a good interview, Nina Yau did an incredibly good one with me here.
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I really hope you’ll check out Tara Sophia Mohr’s blog today — she’s involved an epic project called The Girl Effect, which I believe will change the world. Tara and I spoke to a class at Stanford last week, which was a blast.
Basically, investing in women in the 3rd world is been proven to make lasting change. When you give money to men in Africa (or anywhere) they tend to spend it on booze and motorcycles (I know, because I have, and I don’t even live in Africa.) Women tend to build businesses and support their families.
Go help Tara and women everywhere out, by retweeting her stuff. Women are so powerful. Thank you for your help! — Everett
