Yoga for peak performance

When I first landed in U.S. a few years ago, one word that I heard everywhere was stress management. Why would anybody want to manage their stress? I can understand if you want to manage your money, your business, your family, your property. But why would anybody want to manage their stress? It is because you have established a whole culture of believing that stress is a part of your life.

Stress is not a part of your life. It is not the nature of work that you are doing which is causing the stress,it is just that you have no control over your systems.You don’t know how to function smoothly within yourself. That is why you are stressful. Have you seen, in many situations, one person would be very stressed out and another person would go through it effortlessly? So stress is not coming because of the situation.Stress is coming because of your inability to manage your inner situation. If your mind, your body and your energies could take instructions from you, and behave the way you want them to behave, would you make yourself stressful, no matter what is happening around you?

You are making yourself stressful because you have not kept control over your fundamental faculties within you. If you could experiment, if you keep your palms facing down and breathe deeply you will see breath will happen one way. If you turn them around, face them up and breathe you will notice your breath will happen in a different way. If your palms are facing down the maximum expansion and contraction will be in your diaphragm. If you turn them over it will be higher up, in the chest. So just turning your palm over, the very way you breathe is changing. This is not just about your breath, the very way your energies function in the body is changing.

Don’t live by accident

Your body, your mind, your emotion,and your energies - these are the vehicles through which you are traveling through your life. Without any understanding about it, without any control about it, without any subjective experience about it you are trying to live your life; it is an accidental existence.

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