The Yoga Hour: Enlightenment in Everyday Life
Enlightenment in this lifetime may seem like a lofty and unattainable goal. Author and spiritual teacher Susan Kaiser Greenland finds enlightenment anytime in life’s highs and lows, offering insightful tools and strategies for awakening in this real everyday world.
Susan Kaiser Greenland says you can find it any time in life’s highs, its lows, and everything in between. Susan Kaiser Greenland is a mindfulness educator and bestselling author, specializing in distilling global wisdom traditions and scientific research into straightforward everyday practices. In the early 2000s, she helped pioneer the introduction of secular mindfulness into classrooms through her Inner Kids model. After decades of working with children and adults and writing two widely translated books, Susan’s latest work has culminated in a new book called Real-World Enlightenment: Discovering Ordinary Magic in Everyday Life which we will be discussing today. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and CNN.
WEBSITE: SusanKaiserGreenland.com SOCIAL MEDIA and YouTube: @susankaisergreenland
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THE YOGA HOUR TEAM COMMENTS: I feel that this is an important topic for those who are spiritual seekers. We feel that enlightenment is only for those sages who continuously meditate in a mountain cave, not for those of us who are dealing with everyday life. Susan Kaiser Greenland says, that although the experience of our innate enlightenment is difficult to describe “it’s a common experience of love and well-being that reaches far beyond us. Some call it awe, while others call it wonder. The mystics call it oneness, where we sense that everything is connected and there’s no separation between the already perfect cosmos and us.” This is very much in alignment with the teachings of Yoga philosophy which teaches that we are already enlightened. We don’t have to achieve anything. We just need to peel away the obstacles to our awareness of it. Both she and Dr. Trujillo have studied and practiced for a long time and through their conversation give us hope that we can experience our own enlightenment with awareness of our surroundings, our mental state and our emotions. Susan gives us simple tools and techniques to do this. I highly recommend this podcast episode.
DR. TRUJILLO’S COMMENTS: I really enjoyed our discussion about Susan Kaiser Greenland’s book Real-World Enlightenment. It was a pleasure to discuss enlightenment as something that is possible for us to experience every day, rather than something lofty and unattainable. Our discussion centered on attention, which we can build with the practice of concentration which is one of the 8 limbs of the classical path of yoga. We also touched on balance, compassion (including self-compassion), playfulness, and how our sense of the need for safety may pull us back from experiencing our growing edges.