Being Your Best
Being Yoga is very pleased to announce its new official manager: Kevin Fitzmaurice!
For those of you who don’t know his history with us–it all started on the studio’s opening day when Kevin walked in as the very first student. Since then, you have all certainly been beneficiaries of his selfless devotion to the studio. Kevin has provided a wide variety of services–from book keeping to instructing. He has set a stellar example of dedication with his hard work, attention to detail and willingness to lend a hand whenever needed. It is clear that his dedication stems from a sincere desire to contribute to this community’s happiness and prosperity.
In general, Kevin will be responsible for the studio’s “nuts and bolts,” including membership, accounting, work/trade staff and maintenance.
Congratulations Kevin! You truly embody this month’s theme—“being your
very best”!
We all have an idea of what “being your very best” means. On the surface, it seems fairly self-explanatory, like “Go out and perform to the best of your ability.” This explanation, however, is only a partial one. “Being your very best” means a lot more to us at “Being Yoga” than a mere performance. “Being your very best” starts long before the performance—it starts with the inception of a thought. When practicing yoga, for example, we can physically perform all the postures—bending and twisting and stretching as the teachers instruct us to. However, if our minds are wandering, and we are not focused on doing our best, we are actually not being our best. Our “best” starts with our thinking and then branches out from there. If we set our intentions at the beginning of each class to be mindful with elevated thoughts, we can achieve our best.
Recently, a yoga practitioner confessed that she was practicing in back of a male student who was fidgeting and seemingly not paying attention to the dialogue. She felt distracted, and soon she found herself becoming critical of the man in front of her. Although she continued moving in and out of the postures with the class, she started feeling more and more annoyed and angry with him and her circumstances. Perhaps anyone witnessing her might think she was performing to the best of her abilities, but inside, she knew otherwise. She was, in actuality, merely going through the motions. It wasn’t until she was able to consciously focus on her own practice, and let go of her criticism of his, that she was able to have a deeply satisfying experience performing on her best level.
That is one of the powerful lessons of yoga—that “energy follows thought.” And just as thoughts create energy, energy creates our experiences. So, positive thoughts create positive energy and positive energy leads to positive experiences (and vice-versa, of course). It is important for each one of us to realize this truth and try to carefully select our thoughts in order to create positive experiences in our lives. If we focus on uplifting, elevated thoughts, we will experience an uplifted, elevated direction in our lives.
So, in order to be our very best, we must give thought to our best. Before we can even begin to do that, however, we must first become aware of our thoughts. Most of us wander around as though we are helpless victims of our uncontrollable thoughts, but if we practice becoming conscious of our thoughts (yoga and meditation are great tools for helping us do so), we can then choose to let go of negative thoughts and focus on positive ones. We have the ability to achieve the very best for ourselves in life by being the very best in our lives.