while it's hard to believe we're mostly through August, the calendar doesn't lie - September and the autumnal equinox are well on their way to us. and if you're anything like me, this summer has breezed by without having much of an opportunity to really get in and play. this is one of the harder aspects of being a responsible adult - we have to be so serious about life and making sure that all of our needs and desires are taken care of that we forget to take the time to enjoy the experience. I see this reflected constantly in class. students show up on their mats and are immediately developing their pranayam, or going right into giant extensions, thinking there's a should of their yoga practice. we turn into these serious yogis, we arrive rigid and hardened with this expectation of what we think our practice should be, and we miss the lightness and joy and excitement and play.

I've been working to rebuild this sense of buoyancy in my own practice by thinking on the cosmic balance that created it all. there's a sanskrit word, leela, and it loosely translates to "play". more specifically, it refers to the description of reality as the outcome of creative play as manifested by the divine absolute. and when we start to recognize our lives as these chance interactions in which the outcome is directly affected by our relationship to the experience, it seems that the easier answer is to lighten the mood, lighten the tone. the more joy we put into the world the more joy we beget from our experience. and with this ability to lighten our loads, to remember the fun and joy that is an intrinsic part of our journey through life, the more we find that even in the most serious of circumstances, when we grant an easiness to the situation, the solution becomes easier to attain.

off the mat, allow yourself the time to see the turns of your life as an opportunity to discover what the experience has to teach you. when we fully revert to that childlike state of wonder and amazement at what the everyday has to offer, we find the lightness that lets us continue to express fascination at what we find. keeping ourselves open to the possibility that anything is possible presents us the ability to find possibility in any experience.