Tools for Transformation

The luster of those New Year���s resolutions has already begun to fade, but that sparkly sense of ���New Year, New You������as cliche as it is���still hangs in the air. It���s into this lingering atmosphere of possibility that I���ll toss a couple of resources. Not mandates to ���give up this��� or ���add this��� but two different programs I am using to reach those places in me that could use some tweaking.

I embarked on the first���Baron Baptiste���s Forty Days to Personal Revolution���a week ago. It is based on his book by the same name, but it extends past the pages of the book when it is done in concert with a group of people like I am doing with 1,000 other folks at Yoga One locations around Houston. Yoga studios across the country are offering their own versions of this program which includes a 40-day commitment to moving, meditating & breathing your way to a more balanced self. There is encouragement to eat in more balancing ways too, and many offer weekly meetings for accountability and complimentary workshops to help kick-start an existing practice or launch a new one. I like this program because it���s accessible and unintimidating to new yogis but allows us longtime yogis to go deeper and identify gaps in our practice that we didn���t even know were there.

I am particularly drawn to Baptiste���s way of seeing yoga as a tool that works for people from every faith tradition. In my book, Sophia Rising: Awakening Your Sacred Wisdom Through Yoga, I advocated for the inherent compatibility of yoga with every spiritual tradition. Baptiste does the same, saying:

���I attempt to bridge the gap between the wisdom of the East that can and does apply to us here and the teachings of great masters such as Jesus and Moses. We forget that what these masters taught lies at the heart of what we seek in yoga, and they stand as perhaps some of the greatest yogis who have ever lived. Many of us have rejected these teachers in favor of what we perceive as the more mysterious and fascinating ones from faraway cultures, but the teachings of one can deepen our understanding of the others.���

I have not been the best at blogging lately���understatement since my last post was three months ago���but I am going to try to post a reflection on each week���s theme. First up, presence, followed by vitality. Look for something later this week if you want to follow along or journey through the book together.

When this forty-day program is over in mid-March, I will dive into a second program���this one designed by my dear friend Trista Hendren, author of The Girl God series, using her new workbook, New Love: A Reprogramming Toolbox for Undoing the Knots.

Undoing the knots. Isn���t that exactly what we all set out to do every new year with our resolutions, intentions and goals? We are trying to undo physical, mental and spiritual knots that keep us from being the best version of ourselves. The problem is, though, without a deep understanding of what knotted us up in the first place, we can end up with a few new tools but even bigger knots.

The idea of reprogramming from the core appeals to me. That is why���in addition to kicking off the year with the forty-day yoga program and vows to start taking my vitamins and learn to chant in Sanskrit���I am working through this book that will help me change some of the bedrock programming that leads to dissatisfaction.

The particular knots this book helps untangle are universal for women conditioned within the model of modern femininity. Trista describes the program���s over-arching goals, saying:

���This toolbox is a means to help you break free of those oppressions individually, facilitating the release of the collective female consciousness from the indoctrination of inferiority most of us were raised with. In doing so, we hop to rattle the cage that women have been locked up in for thousands of years.���

Even if you were raised���like I was���with parents who encouraged your dreams without placing any gender-limiting notions on them, this book will encourage you to explore the subconscious default that lies beneath the surface of our psyche. The one that causes us to default to male imagery and language, especially in the realm of sacred experience which has been presented predominately through a masculine lens in all the world���s major religions.

This is all fascinating to me because it feeds into the work I���m doing for my next book which will explore���more deeply than my first book���the impact of a patriarchal worldview on our spiritual lives and what we can do about it. I hope to have more news soon on the next book, but for now, please join me in using the tools of your choice to untie your knots. If you choose to travel alongside me through either of these two books, please post here to report on your progress and insights.

Happy New Year, all!