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Over 37 million people practice yoga in the US alone and nearly 300 million people practice yoga across the world. And while Yoga has become mainstream for the vast majority, yoga is something that you do on the mat at your local studio or gym or maybe even using an app at home. But yoga isn't just a physical practice. So in today's episode, we're going to dig into what it means to live a yoga lifestyle. Stay tuned.
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Hello, and welcome to Episode One of the karmic warrior podcast where I'm here to show you how to harness yoga wisdom teachings to live in extra ordinary life. I'm your host, Lisa Engles. Witter, please do, be sure to subscribe to this podcast here on YouTube, or wherever you can find podcasts, we have a really great episode today where we're going to be talking about the yoga lifestyle and what that means. But before we hop into that discussion, I do have a free PDF for you on the cosmic law of karma. So karma is this principle that all spiritual traditions, I should say all Eastern spiritual traditions primarily agree on. And in yoga, the law of karma governs all of relative reality. So as a yogi, or yogini, who's committed to living the yoga, lifestyle, karma is a principle that you need to understand. So this free PDF that I have for you is called karma demystified. And in this PDF, I lay out what karma is, how it's created, and how to work with the law of karma, so that you can break free from your unhealthy patterns, and live a freer, fuller life. And I put the link in the description below to make it easier for you to grab. So go ahead and do that.
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So let's dive into today's episode on the yoga lifestyle. You know, there's this distinction that needs to be made, I think, between yoga and the yoga lifestyle. So yoga, as most of us know, it is something that we do, as they say, on the mat. And we do yoga, in order to be healthy, it's for our body, right, we do Asana, we go to classes, in the yoga studios, or in the gym, or maybe we practice yoga, at home, on an app wherever it might be. And maybe for some of us, yoga also includes pranayama breathing exercises. But the vast majority of people who engage in a yoga practice, consider Yoga is something that is a physical practice something that they do for their body in order to stay healthy and balanced in their body. But there's the other side of yoga as well, that I'm making this distinction between yoga and yoga lifestyle, as the yoga lifestyle, being something that we do off of the mat. The yoga lifestyle is something that nourishes our mind, and our spirit, not only our body, and off the mat Yoga is includes practices like meditation or insight inquiry, and a lot less people are engaged in a yoga lifestyle versus yoga. As I'm making this distinction. I think that a lot of people out there who practice yoga would say, Yes, I live a yoga lifestyle, because they're practicing on the mat yoga, but I want to make this distinction really clear, because even yoga teachers and I have friends who are yoga teachers and teach lots and lots of yoga, but they don't really practice a yoga lifestyle. And there's nothing wrong with that. But in this podcast, we're here to really explore what does it mean to live a yoga lifestyle? And how can that enhance our lives and free us from the unhealthy patterns that we're stuck in in our lives? So we're at this point in, in history, right? There's an existential crisis happening right now, which just recently, at the time of the recording of this podcast, we have just recently been given by the UN Red Flag Warning of climate change. So we are faced with an existential crisis in a way that we never have been before. And also at the time of this recording, we're, we're still in the throes of a global pandemic, and who knows how much longer the pandemic will last, it's been here for about 18 months at this time, and maybe it's gonna go on longer, maybe it's going to, maybe we're almost through it, who knows. But certainly, that's been an existential crisis, as well. So we're faced right now with this reality that the world as we know it, and our lives, as we know, it, are really teetering on the edge of a complete breakdown, or maybe a massive breakthrough, who knows where we're at. But the thing is that people are looking for answers. People are looking for direction. And there's so much out there, right now, you can go anywhere, to find information. And it's very, very easy to get overwhelmed, it's very, very easy to get confused by all of the conflicting information out there. And it's hard to know where to go. At times, at least, this has been the experience that I've had myself have in my own journey. But certainly what I'm hearing from other people that I talked to, in my life, my friends, my clients, they're all saying this, to me, and I call this the karmic dilemma. And our life is this series of experiences that fluctuate between pleasurable experiences, and painful experiences. And it can feel like this never ending cycle of ups and downs.
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And when it's good, when everything is going good, we feel invincible. We feel like we're on top of the world, we feel like we can do anything. But inevitably, this cycle comes back around and we experience some type of pain, or suffering in our lives. And when that happens, you know, we get depressed, we become hope, hopeless, we feel unsure about things, we often feel overwhelmed and confused that in fact, that's a lot of what I'm seeing right now with, with my clients and, and friends is there's a lot of overwhelm, and confusion. And it it paralyzes us from really being able to do anything. And so this is why the ancient Yogi's and rashis and masters said that we need spiritual practice, it's essential to a yoga lifestyle, that yoga isn't just a something that we do Asana on the mat, which is actually a very westernized version of yoga. In fact, we've we've taken a small piece of what is actually the yoga lifestyle, and we've in in western in the Western world have made it the only thing that Yoga is and it's not, again, what the ancient rishis, and Yogi's and masters told us was that we must have spiritual practice. It's critical, but also what what these masters told us is that despite the fact that we're we have this karmic dilemma, karma is in our destiny. So that's good news for us. And I think that there's a lot of misconceptions about what karma means. There's
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a lot of surface level understanding. I think most people understand that karma means if you do that your actions create results, for you didn't know that. That's basically what the law of karma is. The law of karma says that for every action, there is a consequence. Karma itself, though, is actually just a Sanskrit word. That means action. So karma isn't so Um, judgment or punishment system by the, the gods in the sky, who are who are, you know, punishing us for what we've done. Karma is something that is a fact. It is a principle that governs all of relative reality. So again, the law of karma says that for every action, there's a consequence. And we'll get into this in in later episodes. But what I want you to get here is that with the Masters told us is that karma isn't our destiny. In fact, we aren't prisoners, to our karma. We're not prisoners, to our actions and to this big karmic dilemma that we find ourselves in right now. They gave us specific practices that will permanently free us from this cycle of suffering. And to me that's really exciting because I know that at a certain point in my life, and me being a I am a psycho spiritual counselor, and I have too many certifications in so many different motivational and personal development and human potential types of things, whether it's energy psychology, and EFT, or somatic healing, or shamanic journeying, and all of these things. And what I found was that even though I was professionally and professionally certified, in all of these modalities, and I've helped clients for all of these years, I myself was still experiencing pain and suffering in my life, even though I had done quote, unquote, right, done the work. And I got to a certain point, this was several years ago, and really wondering, like, there had to be something it felt like I was missing something. And this took me deeper into my own spiritual studies. And at the time, I was really deeply studying the Bhagavad Gita. And it became clear to me as I was studying this spiritual text and the commentary specifically by paramahansa Yogananda, in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, that there's a way out of all of this and, and the Bhagavad Gita for those of you who, again, I won't go into it deeply here, but if you're unfamiliar, the Bhagavad Gita is a very sacred text, sort of equivalent to the Bible, but it's the Bhagavad Gita in in Hinduism or in yoga tradition. So in the Bhagavad Gita, one of the core teachings, one of the main teachings is about karma, and releasing ourselves from our karmic bondage. And as I started to study, that this sacred text deeper and deeper, I started to realize that when, and I'll speak for myself when I put my life and I start to understand my life and the series of events and experiences that I was having in my life into this broader context of karma. It really was the change that changed everything for me. And I started to understand that if I'm going to live the yoga lifestyle, what I'm actually doing is becoming, and this is my, my term for it. I'm becoming a karmic warrior. So that's why I named this podcast, the karmic warrior podcast. So what the rashis did with the Masters the ancient Yogi's did was they gave us this exact path of the karmic warrior, they showed us how to break free from our karmic patterns so that we can live in extra ordinary life. They showed us how to win on the battlefield of life through wisdom and discernment and truth and most importantly, through love. And depending on where we're at, in our own spiritual evolution, everybody's on their own path. Nobody's in a wrong place right now. It really is. My belief and and also what has been told over and over again in the spiritual texts that you are where you are right now because that's where you're supposed to be on the path. It's perfect. where you are right now. is perfect. If you were supposed to be Somewhere else you would be experiencing somewhere else, but you're not, you're right here. So, that being said, wherever each of us is at, in our own spiritual evolution, eventually, the teachings tell us, eventually there will come a point in time, when our suffering becomes unbearable, there'll become, there will come a point in time at which we start to seek something outside of the external to make us happy. And we'll start to seek take that journey within. And
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at this point, and which is where the point that for me, you know, this was again, several years ago, and I've been on this spiritual path I, for my entire life, I've I've, without going into it, I've been studying spiritual principles and practices, since I was very, very young since I was before I was a teenager. So I've this has been the trajectory of my life, but even so on my own spiritual path, in my own spiritual evolution, I had to go through certain lessons, until I finally found the teachings that were going to take me to that next step. And maybe that's where you are, too. But there comes this point in time, right at which the pain and the suffering becomes too much. And we say, Enough is enough. And we commit to a spiritual, a real spiritual path. Now, I know a lot of people that say, yeah, I'm on this spiritual path. And I hate to be like, no, you're not because I think everybody is, in their own at their own point on their spiritual path. But what do we how do we define that? And what does that really mean? There's a difference between being a spiritual tourist, and nibbling and dabbling in different things and going, Oh, there's this big smorgasbord. I like to use this, you know, a buffet of spiritual practices. And I'm going to try a little bit of the manifesting over here, and I'm going to try a little bit of the meditation or I'm going to pick and choose whichever spiritual practices that I think I like, right now that feels juicy to me, like this word, juicy, you know, people like to use that a lot. And that's wonderful, that is necessary on the spiritual path, because we have to try things out before we land before something lands with us. But when you really commit to a spiritual path and the spiritual journey, what you're committing to, is one practice. And any of my students or clients have heard me say this over and over and over again, and I just say it here, that that it's very, very important to know what the spiritual practice path that you're choosing is and why you're choosing it. So the analogy that I make is the analogy of two runners. And we have two runners, right. One is a sprinter, and one is a marathoner. They're both runners, but they have very, very different goals, a sprinter, say maybe 100 meter sprinter just needs to finish 100 meters in whatever it is 10 seconds, if you're an Olympian, right, and a marathon runner, wants to break two hours for a marathon again, if you're an Olympian,
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but they're going to have very, very different practices, aren't they? You would never as a marathoner, you would never do this same practice as a sprinter, and vice versa, you would never do that. So it's the same with your spiritual practice, you have to know why am I doing this practice because if you're someone who honestly, I was like this for many years was going to the buffet and to picking and choosing which one felt tasted the best in the moment. And then the results of the spiritual practice are sort of haphazard and you don't really you make some progress and you don't really get there. So you have to know what what is the spiritual practice you're doing and why are you doing it? Alright, so, this is that is a very, very critical point. And yoga wisdom offers us a very specific path with specific Thick practices. And not only that it offers us answers that we're sometimes out there trying to find by reading the latest pop psychology book or listening. You know, here we are in a podcast, but I'll just say it listening to the latest biohacking podcast or life hacking podcasts or whatever it might be. They're all great. But it's time now as a yoga or sorry, as a karmic warrior, to start to focus on what is the practice, and practices that are going to get you where you want to go, your goal, right. And in yoga wisdom, tradition, there are really two, our practices do two things for us. Our practices, awaken us to the truth of who we really are. Right, and then they also liberate us from the mental constructs and stories of who we think we are. So our practices should if you're if you are someone who wants to live, the yoga lifestyle, and you're choosing to step into, onto that path of the karmic warrior, then you're looking for practices that are going to do these two things, awakening and liberation, awakening to the truth of who I am, and liberating myself from the stories of who I think I am, so that I can awaken to the truth of who I am, I need both I need awakening practices, and I need liberation practices. There's a lot of people who love the awakening practices because they feel good, it feels really good when you when you tap into your essence nature when you tap into your divinity. But the the downside of that is that we could get into the problem of spiritual bypassing, and not do the the mental emotional work that's necessary to liberate ourselves from our, from our stories and our mental constructs. One of my teachers said, and I thought that this was so important and so true. And I heard there, there are a lot of awakened assholes out there. And I'm like, Oh, my God, that makes so much sense there are, you know, how can someone be so Awake, awake, right, and be an asshole? Well, because they haven't done the liberation, the work of liberating themselves from the stories and mental constructs, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that you need these two pieces on the path.
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As you're moving towards complete freedom, and fulfillment. And again, this is just episode one of our podcast. So these are all of the types of things that will be unfolding in the coming episodes. So this is really the path of the karmic warrior. And in the coming episodes, what we'll be doing is we'll be investigating specific teachings, right. And we'll be learning how to verify these teachings for ourselves, in our own lives, how to apply them in our own lives. One of the things that I love about the yoga lifestyle and yoga wisdom tradition is it's not based in faith, or belief. It's based in verifying the truth for ourselves through our own experience. And and that takes practice, that takes consistent practice. So my goal here is to guide you into deeper truth and harmony, and love through these teachings and to become a karmic warrior. So my invitation to you is to really step fully into this path with me share the bathroom, we need to be on the path together, what good is it to go through our lives and do it alone, we're not meant to where we're in a we're in. We're human, I should say, because we're meant to relate with each other. And it's through our relationships that we grow and we step on this path together. So again, that's my invitation to you is to step on to this path with me. Let's do this thing together. So thank you so much for joining me. Today, let me know your thoughts in the comments if you're watching on YouTube and if you are watching on YouTube, be sure to like this video and go to karmic warrior.com and get that free PDF called karma demystified. It's free on my website, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and namaste day
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
