I was at a hot yoga vitality class on Monday and we were doing a bit of breath work to start. The teacher asked us to set an intention for our practice. As we inhaled we would focus on our intention, expanding it within our core, and contracting the energy as we released anything no longer serving us with our exhale.

I chose to breathe in love, which I visualize as a gold or white light. I began by  exhaling that which is not love but that seemed kind of long and clunky. After a few breaths, I began to release resistance to love on the exhale. Breathe in love, breathe out resistance to love. A few more breaths  I wound up shortening it to simply breathing out resistance.

I felt tension melt away from my body and I found myself relaxed completely. Once I had let go of all resistance, the pattern spontaneously changed to inhaling love and exhaling love. Once the resistance was gone, love was all that was left. It was beautiful. It’s a feeling of perfect peace, like being home.

Starting the practice was challenging in my bliss-ed out state, but I was able to bring myself back to the breathing pattern often. It was a fairly fast paced and innovative class which made it harder to focus on breath, but the added challenge made it more satisfying to eventually lay back in shivasana, and just breathe in love and breathe out love, dripping with sweat,  head swimming, blissed -out on pure love and buzzing on endorphins, what a rush.

Since it was so effective at yoga, I tried incorporating this meditation into my day whenever I feel myself resisting. It was typically a resistance to the present moment, which is an incredibly useless endeavor.

Resistance to whatever happens to be just creates tension, which is felt physically, mentally and emotionally as stress.

Releasing resistance creates acceptance. Acceptance allows us to be perfectly present. If you stop resisting the present moment, you find peace. That doesn’t mean that you sit back and never take action if things aren’t as you’d like them to be.  On the contrary, it’s a powerful tool for effecting change.

Accepting the present moment just as it is provides illumination of just exactly what ‘is’ in that moment. This knowledge is powerful. It puts us in direct contact with source energy, (which is the vibration of love) and allows us to work directly with it. Once you start working with this energy, everything becomes easier. Seriously, life just gets better.

Releasing resistance to love means that you stop holding on to anything that is holding you back. It might be a pattern of behavior, beliefs you hold, or perhaps it’s fear;  fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being hurt, fear of being wrong, fear of being right. Fear holds all of us back in so many ways…. But as I kept writing out the word fear, it seemed to lose all meaning.

Once you let go of whatever weighs you down, you become limitless! With no resistance, no fear, we are suddenly weightless and free! Love comes rushing in to fill the space once filled by resistance to love and then that’s all there is.