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    Journey Into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga
    Journey Into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga
    Journey Into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga
    Ebook394 pages5 hours

    Journey Into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga

    By Baron Baptiste

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    About this ebook

    Discover the ultimate workout with this easy-to-follow, life-changing yoga program from the “spiritual master” (Self) and New York Times bestselling author of 40 Days to Personal Revolution.

    Whether you are looking to lose weight, increase your strength and stamina, or hoping to sharpen your mental and spiritual edge, Baron Baptiste can take you there. With this transformative and inspiring book, the yoga master illustrates how to reveal the perfect self already within you. With accessible and actionable guidance, Journey Into Power will help you:

    -Develop strong, lean muscles while shedding unwanted pounds.
    -Discover mental clarity and focus.
    -Release the negative beliefs and habits holding you back.
    -Inspire to live authentically every day of your life.

    Heal, detoxify, and electrify your body and mind as never before with this classic guidebook from “one of America’s all-star trainers” (Vogue).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtria Books
    Release dateAug 23, 2011
    ISBN9780743229777
    Journey Into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga
    Author

    Baron Baptiste

    Baron Baptiste is the son of two of America’s yoga pioneers. He began to seriously study yoga at twelve and trained extensively in all the major traditions before creating Baptiste Power Vinyasa Yoga in the 1990s. Baptiste has trained both celebrities and athletes, including Helen Hunt, Randall Cunningham, Raquel Welch, and Elisabeth Shue, and for four years he was Peak Performance Specialist for the Philadelphia Eagles. He divides his time between his yoga studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sundance, Utah.

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    • 5/5
       Excellent book by Baron Baptiste which focuses on his approach to yoga and health.
    • 5/5
      Reviewing old books on power yoga, this one certainly stands out. Well written, speaking from experience and encouraging readers to find their own unique practice while giving several options that have worked well for him and his students. The teachings have held up surprisingly well over time.

    Book preview

    Journey Into Power - Baron Baptiste

    PART 1

    Rewiring Your Mind

    Where Transformation Begins

    Years ago, I was the private yoga teacher for a very wealthy man. He was a billionaire who came from an extremely poor background who had built his fortune from the ground up using nothing but intuition, common sense, and determination. One day I asked him how he had learned to create so much from so little, considering where he came from.

    Technique was only twenty percent of it, he told me. The other eighty percent was my worldview.

    Imagine that: Only 20 percent of success is the mechanics of achievement; the other 80 percent comes from your psychology. That idea has stayed with me ever since I heard it, because I can really see how true it is for everything in life. The how to element isn’t the problem. It’s how receptive we are to growth that really determines how far we can go. It all comes down to whether we choose to play small or big, whether we become instruments of peace and power or vehicles for pain in this world.

    The reason it is so difficult for us to change is that we focus too much on the microcosmic steps, or the program, and not enough on changing the perspective that landed us where we are in the first place. Deep and true changes come from the inside out, not the other way around.

    We can try all different kinds of techniques to transform ourselves, but unless we address the underlying structure, we are just moving the pieces around. We haven’t made any lasting changes just by saying affirmations, or going on a diet, or superficially altering our habits. We’ve addressed the symptoms without going to the root.

    Affirmations change the thoughts but not the thinker. Diets change the eating patterns but not the eater. Willpower holds the negative actions in check for a little while but does not ultimately change the doer. If you only change what you do, all you get are temporary alterations to your actions. Shift your inner viewpoint, though, and your world transforms.

    The physical aspect of power yoga will transform your body—of that there is no doubt. And who doesn’t want a more powerful and peaceful body? The real question is do you just want a more powerful and peaceful body, or do you want a more powerful and peaceful life? I will push you, poke you, prod you, challenge you to tap some potential, but ultimately, how far you go is determined by you and your inner viewpoint.

    The Western path to self-improvement is based on attacking our problems, which we see as the enemy, and ourselves as the victims. We look at the cause, analyze the pattern, and seek out ways to fix it.

    In the Eastern model, there is no need to improve ourselves, because our real power flows from a force that is in us but not of us. The goal is to simply surrender ourselves and our problems to the highest powers in the universe. The Eastern model tells us not to struggle against our problems but rather to forgive and let go: resist less, struggle less, fight less, and flow more. From birth we are taught to swim upstream, but in yoga practice the goal is to jump into the river of life. Struggle just drains us and fortifies the very thing we want to release.

    Surrender is not such a difficult thing once we realize that within us is a brilliance that is already perfect, already wise, already healthy. Problems are just places where we have been separated from our authentic selves. The only solution needed is to become aware of the thoughts and imaginings that are keeping our true selves buried. When you change your focus from limitations to boundless possibilities, from doubt and fear to love and confidence, you open your world in entirely new ways. You stop worrying about fixing what’s wrong with you and start living from all that’s right within you.

    When you focus on the problems, you get more of the same. What you focus on you create. You can analyze the problems, react to them, wrestle with them, take them all personally as though something is wrong with you. But that just keeps the negative merry-go-round circling in your head and leads you to again seek out another plan, another program another 20 percent solution. As Einstein said, Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

    When you make that deep internal shift from your problem-solving mind to your truth-knowing mind, you don’t need to search for the answers anymore. The search for answers is over and the process of more fully accepting and owning what you already know has begun. All that is not authentically you falls away, and you have a new center of being that allows you to see very clearly what is needed to effect change in your life. You stop trying to fix yourself and start being yourself.

    It sounds like I’m promising miracles, but this is all entirely possible, and entirely within your reach. Rewiring your mind from within is where it all begins. The actual psychic surgery happens through surrender to a willingness to see things in a new way. It’s time to step out of the mental box we keep ourselves in; to turn our worldview upside down and see from a whole new vantage point. When we relinquish the negative beliefs and thought systems based on fear, fight, and limitation, then we open the door to spontaneous and healing insights fueled by love.

    The Power of Yoga to Rewire Our Minds

    A lot of people think yoga is good for the mind because it reduces stress. But stress management doesn’t interest me. Coping is not what this is all about. That’s just putting a lid on a boiling brew of poison. I’m interested in total life transformation, in transcending stress altogether. I can’t change the factors that cause the stress—there isn’t much I can do about traffic, or your relationships, or your job, or your kids, or whatever else stresses you out. But I can show you how to remold your mind and your reaction to and perception of these things. That is where the stress lies. It’s about rising above your reactions and starting to live your life authentically rather than in reaction to everything. When you learn to make this internal shift, you start living from a deeper, more peaceful place. You wake up to your true nature, and suddenly the whole world opens up to you.

    There is a story of the spiritual teacher Osho who lived in India and guided many on their spiritual path. One day, a highranking Indian politician came to Osho complaining that he was unable to sleep. It seemed no matter what this politician tried, he would toss and turn and rarely catch more than a few hours sleep each night. He was exhausted and desperate, so he went to see Osho begging for guidance on how to relax so he could sleep.

    I’m sorry, Osho told him. I can’t help you. But there is another spiritual teacher down the road who can. Go to him and tell him I sent you, and that you need to learn ways to fall asleep.

    The politician was overjoyed and headed off down the road to the other spiritual teacher’s home. Several weeks later, he returned to thank Osho.

    Osho, thank you so very much! The teacher taught me how to meditate so I could fall asleep. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

    Wonderful, Osho replied. I am glad you learned how to fall asleep. Now, when you want to learn how to wake up, come back and see me.

    This yoga is the ultimate laboratory for awakening. Your yoga mat is a place to invite in stress and meet it head-on, to rewire your mind on a daily basis. All the ingredients you need are there: the challenges, the resistance, the doubts, the frustrations, the fears, the possibilities. You challenge yourself on a physical level, and the mental resistances rush right up to the surface. At those moments, you have a choice: You can either break down or break through.

    Sometimes playing your edge just means taking a leap of faith. You can give in to the limiting beliefs or fears in your mind that hold you back, or you can reframe your consciousness and say yes!—’Yes, I can surrender these thoughts, I can let go, I can give up the fight and just be light. The yes" moments are the break-throughs, the exhilarating release into transformation.

    Opportunity at the Edge

    So where do these opportunities for transformation lie? At the place I call the edge.

    The edge is where we come right up against ourselves and what we can do and be. It is the boundary between where we are and where we grow, the place of comfortable discomfort, where all growing and healing happens. The edge is the point in every pose when you are still within your capacities but are challenging yourself to go just a little bit farther. Stepping up to this edge and daring to leap is how you break through and thus break with old ways of being.

    We all have an inner comfort zone. Many people keep their thermostat at the same level: they go to the same places, see the same people, eat the same foods, think the same thoughts, have the same reactions. I’ve heard it said that we have something like sixty thousand thoughts a day, and 90 percent are the same thoughts we had the day before. Think about it: Only 10 percent of your thoughts today are new! We get stuck in a mental hypnosis and become so conditioned that we don’t even realize we have put constraints on ourselves.

    In India, the way they train baby elephants not to run off is by tying one of their legs to a sturdy tree. The baby elephant will struggle at first, straining against the rope and trying to escape. Eventually, the baby elephant gives up trying, and at that point the owner unties the rope. For the rest of its life, that elephant will never wander farther than the distance of the original captive rope. They don’t ever realize they are free, that they can walk a little farther, or even away from the tree that imprisoned them. It is generally possible for people to get into most of the power yoga poses, but it is only when we are tired and ready to come out of it that the pose really begins for us. You come up against fatigue, resistance, fear—all kinds of head trips. Your instinct may be to flee, to say, This hurts. . . I can’t do it. . . I’m out of here . . . But that is precisely when you have the chance for a breakthrough. That is the edge. That is the moment of truth, when you can transcend your boundaries and grow.

    You know you are on your way when you feel resistance, in whatever form it takes, welling up in you. It is so powerful when you really start to get that and begin to view those moments as opportunities for growth rather than signals to quit. These moments are precisely what develops strength and serenity.

    Dissolving the Blocks Within

    Every one of us has limiting beliefs in our minds that hold us back, most of which we aren’t even aware of. These beliefs are so germane to who we are that we rarely even formulate them as conscious thoughts. They fester in our deepest unconscious, invisible to the naked eye but powerful enough to run our lives. They are the thoughts that sabotage us right at the moments of greatest opportunity. They whisper, You can’t. . . Who do you think you are? . . . You don’t have what it takes . . . How or why we developed these psychic patterns isn’t really important. It’s recognizing and releasing them that

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