Yoga Dharma Life

21/03/2023

27/12/2022

13/12/2022

Wishing you all a safe and happy summer!

Paul Wooden
Irene Tirol

27/07/2022

Nasi campur,
a massage at our favorite spa,
nasi campur again,
a dip in the pool at another favorite place,
perpetually incence-perfumed roads, and countless always smiling faces,...just some of the things we've enjoyed these first 3 days in Ubud.
We've definitley arrived in Bali!.probably time for another Nasi campur.

Only 4 days to go and we can't wait.

18/06/2022

"Yoga is the practice of tolerating the consequences of being you."
-The Bhagavad Gita
wooden05

13/06/2022

"We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness."
-Thich Nhat Hanh


Paul Wooden

06/06/2022

YOGA IS PARTICIPATION

Despite our best efforts to hold a clear boundary between ourselves and the world, we are called again and again into the grace of living.
t is not that we don’t know the spacious ease of freedom, we feel it all the time. We feel it in the warm glance of our beloved, in the first soft openings of a new day, standing before a stunning work of art, or transfixed before a sunset.

🔅Afterwards we may say "Oh, that was beautiful," but if we are curious, we might notice something else at play. We were not standing there cold and detached. We are not simply a subject observing an object. It is not simply the shape, the colors, the light, the textures before us. We are moved, opened, touched.

🔆It is in the relationship that beauty is born. Boundaries dissolve and we become a partner in the unfolding resonance of beauty. We know beauty through feeling beauty. We are seduced momentarily into a timeless participation with the living moment.

Life is relentlessly generous in this way.

Every moment is an open invitation to participate, to touch and be touched by life. Participating in the living moment is how we relinquish the familiar confines of our self enclosed orbit into an astonishing relational participation with reality. The two become one seamless display of freedom.

🙏This is our moment to moment practice. . . . .

The invitation to participate is constant. Even the most painful places in us, when simply met, open us with their own resonant intelligence and beauty.

The unadorned simplicity of being utterly available for what is actually presently happening illuminates and releases us into the intimate grace of living. ❇

- Paul Wooden Paul Wooden
c. January 2016

📷 Photo: Rod Sheppard

👉For the full article, check out today's blog:
https://www.yogadharmalife.com/post/yoga-is-participation

31/05/2022

"Yoga is an effortless dance with breath and gravity."
- Vanda Scaravelli

Breathe. Dance. Live.
Wishing everyone a great week!
Paul Wooden

25/05/2022

"You do not have to be loyal to that which does not nourish you"
- Gloria Wendroff

24/05/2022

🕉GRACE

Grace is not a thing, it is not something you can get and take home with you.

Grace is the spontaneous and utterly natural experience of a relational participation with reality.

When we feel grace, we feel effortless, potent, balanced and intelligent. We feel intimate with everything and utterly present.

Grace brings a dignity, a sense of belonging. We feel at home, we feel like ourselves.

When we are in right relationship to the moment a living intelligence emerges, we instinctively know what to do. This knowing is not mediated through the mind but is direct and effortless, we "know ourselves by being ourselves."

Grace renders the mind utterly open and exquisitely receptive. In zen it is called mu shin, No mind or Beginners mind. We enter our practice with an innocence, utterly available.

When grace becomes the guiding intelligence of our practice we gradually learn to surrender to the irresistible and perpetually unfolding intelligence of life.

All practice is is deepening our relationship with reality, not what we think reality is but the living fire itself. So with grace as the guiding intelligence of practice we learn to do nothing, but give everything.

Paul Wooden Paul Wooden
c. October 2013

Credits to for this amazing photo.
https://www.yogadharmalife.com/post/grace