"Life is always flowing to you and through you, but for you to have conscious deliberate awareness of it is the ultimate in truly living. Accomplishing end result is manifestation: consciously managing and maintaining your vibrational balance is Deliberate Living. And it is what we call living the Art of Allowing.

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You are far more Vibration and Energy than you are the physical Being that you recognize with you." -The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent: Living the Art of Allowing

Often in class I invite students to allow by saying, "Rather than studying and attaching to the repetitive thoughts that are racing through your head as you evaluate the sequence, your performance of it or the practices of others around you, study your own physical body. Listen to and feel your heart beat, notice the quality of the breath, drop consciousness into the surface of the skin where your circulation, your pulse converges with the energy of the charged particles in the air around you. Let go of expectations, performance anxiety and fear: simply allow the sequence to flow through you, and do the best that your body allows for. Allow yourself to arrive on your mat, to surrender rather than to perform, to flow rather than to strive: dance with life." Engaging in asana in a sate of flow creates mindfulness and awareness of the state of allowing. When we cultivate the state of flow on the mat, we are able to study this state of allowing. Eventually mindfulness around flowing and allowing permeates our entire life experience.

Through time on the mat we start to notice and physically feel our thoughts: we become aware that they are often repetitive and limiting bringing us into a state of reacting and resisting the flow, i.e. "this is so hard, my mat is so slippery, why is the person next to me breathing so loud, that guy has something weird on his toe, I'm hungry and want to be done with class . . . .." We've all been there! This is one of the primary reasons why the Yoga is so hard: we need to create opportunities for discomfort and resistance in order to study our reactions and limiting beliefs and dissipate them by moving into the state of flowing and allowing. Studying our bodies as pure energy--as physical manifestations of our alive-ness--we move slowly but surely out of our foggy state of resistance and disconnection towards our state of flowing and allowing. Next time your in class and you hear the tape recorder of your thoughts start to play, detach, breath, study your physical body, surrender to the sequence and FLOW.