The track is reminiscent of an earlier Pretty Lights style, a classic soulful hip-hop style. The music video was created by Derek Vincent Smith (Pretty Lights) and his girlfriend Krystle Blackburn (PLM’s creative Director). While the two of them traveled together all over the world during 2011, they filmed as much as their schedule allowed. Locations included in the video include Detroit, Warsaw, Oslo, NYC, Vancouver, London, Paris, Prague, Australia, New Zealand, Denver and many more.

The aim with the video was to accomplish multiple things:

1. Create a visual accompaniment for the music that added depth and complexity to the emotions being channeled by the music and lyrics… Rather than tell a story, communicate a range of feelings and open ended ideas.
2. Create a piece of art that speaks to the name “Pretty Lights.” The name was originally intended to capture the essence of inspiration and speak to the nature of the artistic eye, so this video combines captivating imagery with beautiful lights in an organic and creative manner.
3. To accomplish the first two things in a way that captures the attention of the viewer and does not let go. The element of precise synchronicity combined with quickly and creatively edited shots brings the video and music together in a way that unites the two like never before. It truly is one piece of art.

The track was produced by Pretty Lights and was released as a single on Jan. 26th 2012.

“Times will get bad, and the whole wide world, will come down on you…. You must go on.”

“I wish that I could tell you how I feel. It’s so real, it’s so real.”

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peaceloveyoga currently teaches ongoing Mysore classes at Yogayama in Stockholm, Sweden.

Hello! My name is Laruga. I have a passion for yoga. Above all, I guess you can say, I’m a truth seeker. Always have been. Precocious as a child, I have nourished my curiosity into adulthood. A constant gnawing from the inside, I’ve always known there was more to life than meets the eye.

I’ve been a practitioner of yoga for over 16 years, including 13 years of daily Ashtanga yoga practice, in the tradition of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. I’m an Authorized Level 2 Teacher in the lineage and truly enjoy nurturing a space for students to grow and explore this dynamic practice. I can’t say it enough how blessed I feel to have the practice be part of my daily existence. To arrive on my mat regularly, essentially starting over from the beginning, one breath at a time, allowing each cell of my body become fully alive, and hopefully my innate wisdom awakened, has given more than words can say.

In addition, I’m a Reiki Master, a field that is of profound fascination to me in regards to the power of healing.

Thank you for being on this journey with me! Through this blog I hope to share with you some of my thoughts and insights along the way. Please, be in touch.

Analili

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“Some people never go crazy.

What truly horrible lives they must live.”

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“Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.”

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA. The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel.

Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

Seekers exploring a consciously spiritual approach to sex are not just motivated by sexual dissatisfaction. Many already have fulfilling sex lives, but sense that sex and relationship have the potential to provide them with deeper experiences of connection with each other and with the cosmos. Others embark on a search for sacred sexuality after years of meditation in some Eastern tradition. These traditions offer time-honored methods of achieving spiritual growth and insight, but they offer scant wisdom on the subject of sexuality, since they have historically been practiced mostly by celibate monks and nuns.

The sacred sexuality teachings that have gained popularity over the past 20 years incorporate ideas and techniques from the human potential movement workshops that have been evolving since the ’60s, from pre-modern Taoist and Middle Eastern sexual teachings, from India’s extensive texts on the sexual arts (including the famous Kama Sutra), and from mainstream sex therapy. But, above all, the modern sacred sexuality movement draws its inspiration and techniques from the same ancient spiritual tradition of the Indian subcontinent that spawned most of the practices we now know as hatha yoga—the tradition known as Tantra.

Read the full article:

• The Truth About Tantra

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down…”

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Yoga teaches us that happiness is always available to us, no matter what our circumstances. Here’s a hint for how to tap into it: Look within.

There are certain core teachings that can forever shift the way you see the world. “Joy is within you” is one of them. Even if you hear it in purely psychophysical terms, if you really hear it, it’s going to help you recognize one of the most empowering truths there is: It is actually possible to feel happy regardless of how the world is treating you, or how horrible your childhood was, or the fact that all of your friends are more successful than you are. You can even, this teaching implies, be happy when you’re failing at something or when you’re sick.

But as with all the great truths, your understanding of what “Joy is inside you” means is crucial. If you don’t understand it deeply, you’re likely to mistake superficial good feeling for joy. You might also attach your joy to the circumstances that triggered it, like that evening of chanting with Krishna Das, or the weekends when you get to hang out with a particular teacher, or romantic moments with your partner, or even time spent jogging or playing basketball. Then you become addicted to those particular actions, people, or situations. Or you might make the mistake I made for years and become a sort of bliss fascist, expecting yourself to be in a “good” state all the time and subtly beating yourself up when you aren’t.

So, what are we really talking about when we discuss inner joy, and how are we supposed to approach it? In Sanskrit, there are basically four words for happiness—sukha, santosha, mudita, and ananda—each of which points to a different level of happiness. Together, they constitute a path that leads us to the kind of happiness that really cannot be shaken.

Sukha (Fleeting Pleasure)

The word for ordinary happiness—the kind of happiness that comes from pleasant experiences—is sukha. It means “ease,” “enjoyment,” or “comfort” and is often translated into English simply as “pleasure.” Sukha is the happiness we feel when we’re firmly inside our comfort zone. I live on the California coast, and there are days when I wake up in the morning and look out the window and feel, well, spontaneously happy. That particular form of happiness is less likely to be present when I’m, say, circling the San Jose airport trying to find a way into the long-term parking zone so I can make my flight. The point, as every inner tradition will tell you, is that sukha, joy experienced as pleasure, is basically unreliable. Any state that depends on things going our way can disappear in an eye blink.

There’s a famous story by the writer Katherine Mansfield that perfectly describes this quality of ordinary happiness. A young wife is giving a party. As she surveys the scene she has created, she congratulates herself, because everything seems perfect—her house, the wine, the mix of guests, her nice husband pouring drinks for everyone. She realizes she is completely happy. Then she notices her husband whispering in the ear of a female guest and realizes he is setting up an assignation with the woman. Suddenly, the wife’s happiness is transformed into the agony of loss.

The story is, of course, a profound yogic parable, an illustration of why the yogic texts make such a point of warning us about the fleeting quality of ordinary happiness. Ordinary happiness—sukha—is inseparably linked with its opposite: duhkha, or “suffering.” This pain-pleasure dichotomy is one of the basic dvandvas, the pairs of opposites that plague our lives as long as we live out of duality consciousness, the feeling of being separate from others and the world. Like hot and cold, birth and death, and praise and blame, sukha and duhkha inevitably follow each other, simply because when our well-being depends on external conditions, it will always come and go. This is one of the problems the Buddha noticed, the one that led him to formulate the first noble truth.

Santosha (Contentment)

The simple yogic antidote to this problem—the endless chase after the mirage of permanent pleasure—is to go to the next level and begin to cultivate santosha, which the yogic texts translate as “contentment.” The Yoga Sutra considers practicing santosha essential, because it is the fastest way to still the agitation that comes from frustration, discomfort, and unsatisfied desire.

Implicit in santosha is the idea of being OK with what you have, accepting what you are, without feeling that you need anything extra to make you happy. Hard-core yoga texts like Vyasa’s commentary on the Yoga Sutra actually associate santosha with the spirit of renunciation—the absence of desire for anything other than what we need. In this viewpoint, we can achieve real contentment only when we are willing to give up striving for what is out of reach, to stop expecting more of life than it can give us, and to let go of the mental patterns that destroy our satisfaction—like comparing our skills, character, possessions, and inner attainments with those of the people around us.

I recently heard from a friend who was laid off work six months ago and has yet to find another job. Practicing santosha is a big part of his strategy for salvaging his inner state. One way he does this is by reminding himself to accept things as they are. “I make the calls,” he told me. “I send the e-mails. I make the contacts. Then I turn my attention inside, and I remind myself that the universe will always give me what I need. Once I’ve done that, then my mind can be calm about it. Sometimes I sit and breathe in ‘Trust’ and breathe out ‘Trust.’”

Mudita (Spiritual Happiness)

Practicing santosha calms the mind, and when we calm the mind, there’s a good chance that the next level of happiness—mudita—will begin to sneak through. In English, the closest translation of mudita is “spiritual happiness.” Mudita in its purest form is the joy—the kind that comes from out of nowhere, like a message from our deeper self, and that actually has the power to change our state in an instant. It gives rise to a whole host of feelings, such as gratitude, exaltation, equanimity, and the capacity to see beauty even in things we don’t ordinarily find beautiful, like sidewalk litter or fast-food hamburgers.

Mudita can be cultivated, and much of spiritual practice is aimed at generating this kind of joyfulness. In one yoga studio I know, the attendance at the weekly chanting sessions is higher than at any other program. Why? Because chanting generates mudita. So do certain yoga poses and meditation practices, like mantra repetition and focusing on enlightened beings. The devotional traditions, like bhakti yoga and Sufism, specialize in the art of cultivating mudita, which can become a powerful bridge into even subtler states of awareness.

Ananda (The Bliss That Passeth Understanding)

When mudita deepens until it becomes our entire field of experience, we find ourselves in touch with the most profound level of joy: ananda. Ananda is usually translated as “bliss,” but in my opinion, the English word bliss is much too lightweight to convey what ananda really is. Ananda is ecstasy, rapture, a joy that wells up on its own from the very depths of the universe and connects us instantly to the vastness of pure being. Ananda, in other words, is divine power in the form of happiness. When you touch it, you know it—and you also know that you’ve touched the deepest level of reality.

According to the great nondualist philosophers of the Upanishads and the Shaiva and Shakta Tantras, ananda is actually God. My teacher used to say that when you feel ecstasy surging through your veins, you are experiencing God. You can find this same association of joy with divine experience in Sufi poetry, in the Kabbalah, and running like a rich vein through the writings of Christian mystics. C.S. Lewis called his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, because all of his experiences of God’s presence were experiences of absolute happiness. That’s why cultivating joy is such a direct path to inner experience: It is not only a means, it is the goal itself.

To me, this insight is the real clue, the secret of how to follow the path of joy. Begin by taking what these great teachers say seriously. Try out their understanding that joy is actually present, inherent in you and in the world around you. Then look for the practices and attitudes that can help you open yourself up to it. Joy can arrive on your doorstep spontaneously. But it can also be approached step-by-step, through a combination of practice and self-inquiry.

Making a Practice of Joy

It doesn’t always work to approach joy frontally, demandingly. The Siddha guru Gurumayi Chidvilasananda once compared joy to a butterfly that will come and sit on your hand but that you can never grasp or hold. Instead of trying to “get” joy, we do better when we find practices and attitudes that attract it. Most of the clues we get from our teachers about how to work with the mind are actually practices for attracting joy. Loving kindness practice, remembering to be grateful to ourselves and others for every little boon and even for difficulties, consciously letting go of grudges—all of these help displace the sludge that builds up around the heart and keeps joy away. Even more important is the practice of noticing the stories you tell yourself, monitoring your thoughts when they create painful inner states, and using the creative power of your own mind to create inner states that are conducive to joy.

So, taking it step-by-step, the process of cultivating joy could look something like this. It begins with the simple understanding that joy is real, and then continues with the decision to tune your mind and heart so they are open enough to feel it. Depending on your state, you might need to practice some form of santosha, which for me means noticing the thoughts and feelings, the anxieties or desires, that are currently agitating my body and mind, and then doing what I can to let go of whatever resistance to my current reality is causing the agitation.

Cutting to the Chase

The next step is some form of mudita practice—chanting, prayer, going directly into the heart center and letting the energy there expand, meditating with a loving image or visualization, offering prayers for the well-being of others, remembering a beloved teacher, or any of countless other practices.

In the Tantric texts, one core practice—I call it a cut-to-the-chase practice—lies at the heart of all of the above. It’s very simple, it can be done anytime—while you’re in the car, washing the dishes, or even reading this magazine—and it will shift your consciousness in a very short time.

Close your eyes and remember a time when you felt really happy. Then take yourself into that moment. See if you can get a feeling-sense of yourself in the situation. Perhaps you’ll do this visually—by remembering where you were, what you wore, who was present. Perhaps you’ll do it by invoking the feeling, asking yourself, “What did that happiness feel like?” and then waiting until the feeling-sense begins to make itself present in your body. Stick with it until you actually feel the happiness—even if only a little.

Then remove the memory of the scene or situation and just feel the feeling. Find the place in your body where the feeling is centered, then let it expand until it fills you. If you’re very visual, it might help if you give the feeling a color—a warm one, like gold or pink. Or you might work with the breath, breathing into the feeling and letting it expand on the exhalation.

Sit with this feeling of happiness. See if you can hold it. See if, for this moment, you can let the happiness become your primary feeling. This is a glimpse, however small, of your true reality.

(by Sally Kempton yogajournal.com)