A considerable number of new students have joined the Yoga Center over the summer. Many of our regular students have been away on vacations or were too busy to attend classes as regularly as they would liked.    The fall will give the two groups a chance to meet each other and the cooler air which is headed our way will give us all new opportunities and new insights.

  We all face the same problems: there is not one among us is who so strong, or brave or clever or pretty as they might wish they were.  In the movies we can admire fictional characters who always accomplish the most amazing things with the least conceivable amount of trouble to themselves.  For the rest of us, far more mundane tasks and obligations can prove to be a very daunting and, in fact, sometimes require so much courage and strength that we have no idea where it is going to come from.

  Fortunately there is a time-honored method that can greatly help us with many of the problems we will encounter on the life path which lies ahead.  It is called Yoga.  This is not a religion.  It is an energy management system that is completely non-sectarian in nature.

  When it is time to make the house payment or come up with rent it is desirable to have money in the bank.  At a more basic level your life can be viewed as a series of energy transactions.  Each of the trials of life draws upon your energy supply and like having money in the bank it would be wise to see to it that there is adequate energy in your system to carry you through the season ahead. 

  Unfortunately, unlike the heroes and starlets of  Hollywood, we can’t use camera tricks and stunt doubles to get us through the trials of living.  The rest of us have to learn the techniques required for successful healthy living and work conscientiously to apply them.

   Some of you have been taking our classes for almost five years and it is now time for us to begin more advanced materials.  You need not fear that you will be asked to do things beyond your ability or that the postures will become more difficult but we will be talking more about your bodies energy system this year and doing experiments in meditation and  energy management which will go well beyond anything we have done in the past.

  We will begin this process here and now with a little thought experiment.  For a moment I would like you to imagine that you are the captain of a great ship.  A ship so large and so complicated that you have never even examined most of it.  Imagine a vessel huge, positively huge, in its scope and mind boggling in its complexity.  Imagine a ship packed full of machinery of all kinds: transformers, generators, pumps, great engines, computers, tens of thousands of miles of wiring and piping to say nothing of many dark areas containing things you don't even know what are, let alone how they might work.   And somehow, like the improbable crew in "Galaxy Quest," the responsibility of commanding this ship has suddenly been thrust, irrevocably,  upon you.

  The movie Galaxy Quest was, of course, fiction.  The great ship and the responsibility for commanding it is not.   You are already the captain of such a vessel.  It was assigned to you on the moment you were born.  It is, of course, your own body and it literally contains all of the things we just described and much more.  For the Master Architect has bequeathed to you a machine and a life and a responsibility having vastly greater scope and potential than most of us have dreamt of, or perhaps can dream of.

  It is time to look at that “ship.”  I wonder how many of you have any idea of what it can really do?  Even if your vessel is quite old and damaged in some ways you may be sure that there is still great power residing in it.