"We need to create a statue of responsibility on the west coast to balance the statue of liberty on the east coast"

Viktor Frankl. You can have whatever you want. Aparigraha, or not covetting, will help you to get whatever it is you are seeking. The literature on yoga, manifestation, the law of attraction is full of reference to this fact: Letting go of whatever it is you want is the perfect way to welcome it to come to you. In my personal experience I have witnessed this happening time and time again. It is through being responsible in the present moment to what is happening now that we can be balanced enough and ready to receive what we need and want from the universe. You can have it all when you know you are responsible for all that is. When you are in that place of power, that place of supreme responsibility, you can see how you created where you were in the past and where you are today. You will thus also know where you are going and will be well equiped for the journey there. Through self-study and learning from the masters past and present you have all the tools you need, ready to use. When you choose to use them responsibly you will be blessed with an abundance of seemingly miraculous occurences, often giving you all you asked for and more, in a way that you might never have imagined on your own. So open your mind and heart, let go, and let God. My personal sadhana, my path on the spiritual journey of self-discovery and self-realization that is Yoga, began in earnest when I was 14 years old about fourteen years ago. I knew then that I wanted the physical freedom that yoga asana practice could give, and I wanted also to attain through meditation to the superior levels of wellness and satisfaction that I'd heard of through reading of the experiences of adepts in Yoga. I wanted to be able to create what I wanted in my life. Loving what is, not covetting the things I desire, nor clinging to where I am today, has been one of the most powerful practices that I have learned along the way. Recognizing personal responsibility for my attitude, and seeing how that affects the world around me, has given me much to be joyful for and much power in creating my life as I want it to be. Sharing this experience with you is another way for me to practice aparigraha. Through not covetting my experience, but sharing these powerful tools and techniques that have been so beneficial to me, I know to be the way forward for me at this time. I have received so much from the Asian Yoga community, starting with my work at Pure Yoga in 2002 until the present time when I find myself in Indonesia teaching Yoga at Yoga at Forty-Two Degrees in Jakarta, that I feel a great debt of gratitude. So it is my sincere desire that you might take a away some pearls of insight and of practice from my sharing today to help you and your community to grow in delight, contentment, and peace. In many books and articles in my study over the past 14 years I have often seen quoted a man by the name of Viktor Frankl. He passed through a virtual purgatory in his experience in the concentration camps of World War Two. Yet through this experience he survived and came to see that the most lasting freedom we have as human beings is the freedom to choose our own attitude no matter what the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It is precisely through assuming responsibility for our own attitude in life that we gain the ultimate freedom to create the world in which we want to live. Now granted most of you reading this will not be experiencing anything nearly as devastating as what Mr. Frankl and millions of others went through in the great war. Therefore you are at an perhaps a better advantage for learning this responsibility and freedom and putting it to use. Aparigraha is not-covetting, or another way I have seen it translated is not owning. When something "bad" is happening in our lives, if we choose to own it and see it as permanent, we suffer. Yet if we see it for what it truly is, if we see it for its transciency, we can be free of it, we can be free to focus our minds of the positive experiences we have had, and surely will have later. We can even find miracles in what is going on in the present moment. We might even remember that it is our choice to make: There are no miracles, or there are miracles everywhere. So how we choose to respond to life of the utmost importance, equal to what liberty we choose to exercise in guiding life to suit our needs and fancies. Recently I read "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor Frankl, and was delighted to learn that the meaning of life is not as important as recognizing the importance of who is doing the asking.

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, has been one of the most influential books in the Yoga tradition. For centuries people have looked to it for understanding the human condition. So with this knowledge I have since the beginning of my Sadhana been fascinated in this ancient yet completely up-todate text. I have read translations, memorized the sanskrit chanting of the sutras, and explored the many possibilities of meaning therein to some degree, and still feel like a complete beginner in many ways. Yet I have garnered much understanding of myself and my world from exploring it and highly recommend it as a source of wisdom and self-study for all interested in Yoga and in the human condition. Patanjali in verse 39 of chapter 2 says something like "By staying firmly established in not-covetting the aspirant can come to know all his births." I take this to mean in part: If you stay free in your ability to choose your attitude, if you don't covet what happened, is happening, and might happen later, but are completely open to see what truly is, then you will know how you led yourself to where you were in the past in all situations, you will know how you got to where you are, and you will see thus how you can weild your personal power to bring into being your future experience. Thus you come to that place of pure responsibility. You come to the place of right-mindullness where you are the master of your own attitude and thus your own fate. Having lived for about four years in Thailand now, being married twice with Thai women, one of whom I am currently happy to share my life with on an ongoing daily basis, I have come to have deep respect for Thai culture. The Buddha is highly revered in Thailand. Being in a culture with such deep reverence for the lord Buddha and his teachings is one of the factors that has encouraged me to explore Buddhism. The Buddha also teaches that grasping, clinging, coveting, and its inverse of aversion, is one of the great sources of suffering. The way out of suffering as described by the buddha is an eightfold path of right-living, where the aspirant takes responsibility to live in such a way that s/he sees truly what is going on and behaves accordingly. Again we have that same method of letting go of desires and fears to be instead in a place of mindful responsibility in the present moment to create exactly what we want, which I believe it fair to say for the majority, if not all of us, is freedom from suffering and thus a life of contentment with what we have. Actually it is interesting to note that both Buddhism and Yoga (Yoga Sutra Chapter 1 verse 33) give an identical remedy for going beyond all suffering, all obstacles in life: Maitri, Karuna, Mudita, Upekshanam. Or in plain English: Friendliness, Compassion, Delight, and Equinimity. So if you can keeping an even head, be delighted, compassionate, and friendly with all of your experience with yourself and others you can live a great life. Ah but how to do that... Of course one can find numerous tools in Buddha's teachings, and the teachings of Yoga for how to live and practice those four qualities listed in the above paragraph, but I would like to venture out of the box a little to share from other teachers encountered in my personal experience who have some great simple methods for fixing this habit us humans seem to have of grasping to things that make us feel bad and holding on. One day in 2007 in Surrey, British Columbia, I was staying with a friend, renting a room for a few weeks while trying to manifest a home in Asia where I could live with my wife, after she was denied a visitors visa to Canada, and we weren't in a position to apply for a permanent resident visa. My friend and landlady was a sound healer, and she used crystal bowls. She invited me to sit in on a session. I was amazed at how much like the chanting of Om these bowls sounded, and how much like the creative mantra Ahhh, which I'd learned from a manifestation book by Wayne Dyer, and so I lied down and started letting go of my fears, my clinging to the precariousness of my personal situation, and getting into the feeling of oneness and that everything is perfect as it is. I started to correlate my emotional state with having what it was that I was wanting. I looked behind up and behind me and a book almost fell off the shelf. "Ask and It is Given" by Abraham, as Channeled by Esther Hicks thus became a friend and teacher in my quest to create a job in Asia where my wife Morn and I could live and enjoy. Abraham shares many techniques for creating what you want. The one that I found extremely helpful at that time, and still to this day use to great benefit is simple. It too is about owning responsibility for one's thoughts and the resultant emotional state. Simply put, each of us experiences emotions as a result to the thoughts we are thinking. Emotions either feel good or

bad. There is a spectrum or a scale of these emotions from the worst to the best. The worst? Fear and the other like emotions. The best? Love, joy, appreciation and bliss. Abraham teaches that to create what you want in your life you need simply to think thoughts that get you feeling how you want to feel, and then seemingly like magic you can attract what you want. So you simply experiment with different thoughts and try to get yourself feeling a little better, and then a little better, and then the best, and your on you way to live and work in a beautiful tropical paradise island teaching yoga by a beautiful beach in the south of Thailand, or at least that's what happened for me. I had simply been practicing this and other techniques from the book, taking responsibility for my mental and emotional states and visualizing some of what I wanted and presto, I was online chatting with Adrian Cox, the owner of Yoga Elements in Bangkok, and he hooked me up with this amazing job teaching Yoga on Koh Lanta. Actually, seemingly miraculously, the right information appears just when you need it when get responsible for your emotional state. Like the old adage says, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." 'Manifest Your Destiny', by Wayne Dyer also showed up for me in a like manner. I was in a downtrodden state, and I said in my mind: "I will end this. I will go into that library and pick the twenty-fifth book from the bottom shelf of the third book-case in from the window and I will know what to do." I did as my mind suggested and I picked up 'Your Sacred Self' by Wayne Dyer and then was drawn to the book next to it. 'Manifest Your Destiny' teaches nine principles for manifesting anything you want. It comes from the Yoga tradition of the Siddhas of South-India. I have used the process described therein to manifest many things in my life, including becoming a Yoga teacher. After following the nine principles in trying to manifest becoming a yoga teacher, I was offered sponsorship to the Bikram Yoga teacher training from Lisa Pelzer and Danny Dworkis, the owners of Bikram's Yoga College of India, Vancouver. I also succesfully applied this process to get a yoga teaching position somewhere warmer than Canada, when one morning I received a phone call recommending I get in touch with an acquaintance, Patrick Creelman to see about working in Hong Kong in 2002. I got the job. Wow I am glad I followed intuition and let go of my clinging to my negative state and took responsibility. It is pertinent to mention that in the nine step process the eighth principle is: Patiently detach from the outcome. This too is applied aparigraha. By patiently detaching from the outcome you are trying to create and recognizing the truth that you are intimately connected to it, you welcome it into your experience in even more marvellous ways than you might imagine. While I have more to share I also respect that there is only so much that can be said in an article like this. I'd love to point your interest to Non-Violent Communication as described by Marshall Rosenberg, an excellent way in which you can use letting go of your judgements as a way to create harmony in your relationships. Also I'd love to share how Ho'oponopono can take you to a place of complete responsibility and thus zero limits in creating what you want, as Joe Vitale showed me in his book, 'Zero Limits'. Katie Byron might help you to transform your life by asking you: What would you be without your story? It's up to you to decide to act responsibly, let go of your weakness and thrive in the life you truly want to live and love. By sharing with you here it is my hope that you will find the effortlessness in the effort, the vairagya balancing out the abhyasa, and take aparigraha into action and create the space for miracles to be your everyday experience. If I can do it, so can you. The tools are here for you right in the present moment. It is with deep respect and reverence that I suggest you be like Hanuman in loving devotion to King Rama, and apply the sufficiency economy as taught by His Majesty King Rama the Ninth of Thailand, and make with what you have right now true contentment, through letting go of all self-perceived limitations. Embrace the power of now. Hear the sound OM in all sounds, with aparigraha applied to any feelings of some sounds being annoying, then you will surely go past your notions of seperateness, past all obstacles, just as Patanjali teaches in verses 24-28 of Chaper 1 of the Yoga Sutra. You will be only what you truly are. You are a miraculous being of light blessed with the power to create ultimate realization and fulfilment if only YOU can let it go. The ninth principle in 'Manifest Your Destiny' is something like: Responding with Gratitude and

Generosity to all that Shows up in Your Life's Creation. It is with gratitude to you that I write this, for as a good friend and fellow aspirant, Lux of http://unication.org says, "A pleasure shared is more than doubled." It is also in the spirit of generosity that I offer this effort of writing as Tapas in my Sadhana, to you that you might benefit from it in some or all or the ways that I have and more. Taking responsibility in your practice of Aparigraha may not always be easy, but like all the Yoga practices you enjoy, it will bring great rewards when applied continuously with great effort over long periods of time. To end I will share a prayer I learned from the Hawaiian practice of Ho'oponopono as taught by Dr. Hew Len Ikealeakela: If at any time in all my births, I have ever caused harm to you or any close to you, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.