I am a competitive person I will admit.  I LOVE to compete and I hate to lose.  But I am most competitive with myself.  And for the sake of growth and to learn not just because I hate losing.  The part about losing isn’t the loss in not winning the game it’s the loss in not moving ahead.  It’s about feeling like I didn’t grow.  So competition to me equals growth.  And in order to grow we need each other.

I will never be more competitive with you than I am with myself because you’re a star.  I want to compete with you because I think we’re all amazing and we all have our own weird way of seeing and experiencing the world that needs to be shared.

Level playing field were we all get to compete and work together is so much better than dividing us up into winners and losers.  The competition is the game.

You’re a star — and so am I. I’m a genius — and so are you. Your success encourages my brilliance, and my charisma enhances your power. Your victory doesn’t require my defeat, and vice versa.

 

Those are the rules in the New World — quite unlike the rules in the Old World, where zero-sum games are the norm, and only one of us can win each time we play.

 

In the New World, you don’t have to play down or apologize for your prowess, because you love it when other people shine. You exult in your own excellence without regarding it as a sign of inherent superiority. As you ripen more and more of your latent aptitude, you inspire the rest of us to claim our own idiosyncratic magnificence . . . .

Rob Brezsny  /// Free Will Astrology

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The winter solstice is out there and not that far away.  Only 5 weeks from now our sunlight will already start to get longer each day. As we come up to the last month of the year we start to think about what it is we want for the future.  What direction do we want to be headed as we cross over that line from this year to next?

Yoga philosophy has it’s own stories to tell through the wonderful world of Hindu Gods and Goddesses.  In these stories we learn to see and develop a better understanding of ourselves and the world through metaphor.  The story of GANESH, who is referred to as “the remover of obstacles”, “the lord of new beginnings” and “the lord of the threshold” is perfect for this time of year. He is symbolic of crossing the threshold of where we are now into a new experience.  Ganesh represents having the courage, will, and strength to move from what is familiar to us into ambiguous spaces in order to learn and grow and create the lives we want.

So, we head into the dark, toward a new year and prepare ourselves for something new.  We make an alter (literally or metaphorically), or in the yoga world it’s called a “puja,” and place in front of us what we want to become.  We layer ourselves with experience as we make our way through a new year.  We start again, and again and again.  The sum total of those experiences is what makes the shape of our lives.  It’s way we tell our stories for a new year and every year.  What is the story you want to tell for 2016?  

HELLO LOVELY YOGIS