Valentines Day and Love

Regardless where you live in Canada: Vancouver, Victoria, Hamilton, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, Halifax, these marked days on the calendar to represent when we should most express certain feelings to one another seem, to yogis, is superficial. For example, giving things on Christmas to demonstrating givingness or candy on Valentine’s Day to demonstrate love.

But love is a lot more than this. Love by definition is the willingness to invest in somebody else even when it can hurt you. There are distinctive things in my personal life which have allowed me to witness extraordinary displays of love.

I can remember one of my first girlfriends mother dying of cancer  in the hospital. I remember fighting with her in the family room at the hospital (like how I did not want to be there [which was incredibly immature and selfish looking back at it now]), then falling asleep, awakening a few hours later and  going to look for her when she was not there. After a few minutes, I found her curled up with her mother in her hospital bed (this on top of years of love and support taking her to her cancer treatment). Her mother she was about lose. The next day her mother died.

Or look at millions examples of  love in history, Jewish parents begging strangers to take their children as they – now aware – were about to be take off to be murdered at an extermination camp.

So how does yoga fit into this?

Yoga  removes the layers that we accumulate growing up in our society: rules, mores, identity and it allows us to connect with the realest parts of our self: our soul.

When we connect with the soul, we realize that our abilities are limitless and that includes our ability to be compassionate and loving. Yoga is something that allows us to recharge our own energies and in turn this allows us to be a beacons of light and love for others.

Love is not flowers and a card on a specific day, it is when you accept yourself truly and in turn allow others the same, it is when we do this in a real, genuine and human way we begin to experience real love, which yoga helps us to realize.