We can even look to our yoga mat to watch the attachment pattern play itself out. We often find ourselves attached to a never-ending process of “improvement” in our asanas. They do improve quickly at first—in the beginning, we are on a honeymoon of discovery; we grow by leaps and bounds in ability and understanding. After a couple of decades, however, our poses change much less. Oftentimes, we can no longer practice certain poses because of age or injury, yet we feel agitated because we assume that the poses of our youth should be the poses of our middle and old age.

What gives life its juice is the ability to mourn anything fully and simultaneously know it doesn’t ultimately matter. In other words, we can live to the fullest when we recognize that our suffering is based not on the fact of impermanence but rather on our reaction to that impermanence.

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”

Click to Shop the Studio Tunic by OMgirl

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth,
to start our life!

Pablo Neruda

Williamsburg Brooklyn

Many meditation techniques use one point as an object of concentration. Whether it’s the breath, a mantra, sensations, the thought of love, or awareness itself, the object of concentration can be a doorway to the moment. But sometimes this single focus is too subtle for the mind to track easily. If that’s been your experience, you may find that slow-motion movement, which begins with attention to strong sensations in the body, to be a more tangible and satisfying focal point.

This process of gradually shifting your attention from the large movement of the asanas to the small movements of the breath is the essence of raja (or classical) yoga. As you attend to the postures, you encounter and release deep-seated tensions. You also refine your awareness by concentrating on the subtlety of your breath and turning inward.

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

East River
New York, NY

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Metro Pictures, David Zwirner, Greene Naftali, Cheim & Read, Maccarone and Team Gallery are only a handful of the approximately 180 galleries from all over the world taking part in the inaugural edition of NYC’s Frieze Art Fair—the London-based art fair’s first U.S. edition. The event will take place inside a structure custom designed for the fair by architecture/design firm SO – IL; expect art-world celebrities, regular-world celebrities and plenty of attendant art-action citywide during the first week in May. For more information, visit friezenewyork.com.

The work, a pastel on board, is one of four versions created by Edvard Munch; the other three are in museums in Norway. The buyer bid over the telephone.

It took 12 nail-biting minutes and five eager bidders for Edvard Munch’s famed 1895 pastel of “The Scream” to sell for $119.9 million, becoming the world’s most expensive work of art ever to sell at auction.

Bidders could be heard speaking Chinese and English (and, some said, Norwegian), but the mystery winner bid over the phone, through Charles Moffett, Sotheby’s executive vice president and vice chairman of its worldwide Impressionist, modern and contemporary art department. Gasps could be heard as the bidding climbed higher and higher, until there was a pause at $99 million, prompting Tobias Meyer, the evening’s auctioneer, to smile and say, “I have all the time in the world.” When $100 million was bid, the audience began to applaud.

http://giftureapp.com/

GET THE GIFTURE APP

Maybe that’s one reason why loneliness, or even the fear of loneliness, can be such a stumbling block on the road to inner growth. Certain journeys cannot be taken unless you’re willing to face loneliness, and yet many of us are afraid to do so. Learn to embrace your time alone as a chance to connect with what’s truly essential.

Loneliness, like fear, is a threshold emotion—you have to pass through it if you want to enter the inner world. In fact, loneliness is the shadow side of solitude, that magical and transformative state that poets, mystics, and yogis celebrate as the great laboratory for self-awareness and spiritual growth. If loneliness reeks of alienation and sadness, solitude offers the ground for you to connect to what is truly essential in yourself. Solitude teaches you how to be with yourself, and without it, you never learn to truly be at home with what you are.

“Alone… and the soul emerges”

-Walt Whitman

But since in practice it’s all but impossible to experience happiness for others unless we first develop the capacity to taste it in our own lives, many Buddhist teachers interpret mudita more broadly as referring to the inner fountain of infinite joy that is available to each of us at all times, regardless of our circumstances. The more deeply we drink from this fountain, the more secure we become in our own abundant happiness, and the easier it then becomes for us to relish the joy of other people as well.

We’ve probably all had moments that have shown us that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the external circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the state of our minds and hearts. We can be drinking margaritas on a Caribbean beach totally miserable or we can be late for work, stuck in freezing sleet in a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge, overflowing with bliss.

BROWSE THROUGH DEBRA LA LOMIA’S COLLECTION OF ORIGINAL ARTWORKS