Happy Nine Year Anniversary BYSJ! Reflecting on 9 years makes me ponder who I was when I first considered opening BYSJ at the Westgate West Shopping Mall. It was the very beginning of my life as it is now. Anniversaries are about celebrating life, as well as recognizing the ebbs and flows that one inevitably passes through on the journey from that starting point to the present moment.

As many of you know, my mom died of Alzheimer’s at age fifty four. She was forty nine when she was diagnosed with the disease. Unfortunately, there is no defeating Alzheimer’s; there is a battle, but right now, always a losing one, as there is no cure. Many of you have experienced a relationship with dying in some fashion. For me, it was four long hard years of witnessing a life wind down to its terribly sad finish. It was awful to feel helpless and know that nothing I could do would change this course my mom was on. In time, I came to understand that this process was not about me, but about my mother, Donnadae. Once I got over myself, I rose to every occasion to give her in whatever way I could, right up until the very end: tossing the ball with her grandsons, sharing in her favorite ice cream; having the sun shine upon her face…an experience that brought her a true and simple joy.

Dying is inevitable. We all know this. Yet despite having this knowledge, it is very uncomfortable for most of us to deal with our own mortality. But, it can also be a huge gift in teaching us how to live. The open-eyed acknowledgement of our inevitable passing can shake up our entire sense of being, forcing us to question who you are and how we want to be in the world. And this can motivate us to grow and change. Looked at from this perspective it’s a true silver lining, the proverbial “blessing in disguise.”

Experiencing someone so close to me leaving this earth plane made me realize how ridiculousness my fears of dying were. It was a huge moment, the Universe shouting loudly in my ears “What are you so afraid of,” and “what are you waiting for?” The dying experience gives you a big kick in the pants that says, “You better get on with living!” And it really was the best way for me to honor my mom; to get on with this business of living!

So, I started to dance again, taking ballet lessons at Alonzo King’s school in San Francisco. I worked part time at an art gallery and learned how to professionally wrap gifts. (Yes, there is a way!) I studied black and white photography using my grandfather’s very old Canon 35 millimeter camera taking pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge creating a card line named after my mother. I learned how to ride a motorcycle riding both a Harley and a Honda. And, I started yoga. Yep! I wasn’t wasting any time. I was living.

I recall sitting with a good friend that I worked with at Il Fornaio. I used to say to her when I was in the height of all this activity that I just didn’t want to forget.What did I mean by this? Well, during this time, I was also a Hospice Volunteer. Hospice was a big part of my mom’s final eight months. They are the most compassionate and understanding group of people. It’s an organization that owns a beautiful mission about the meaning and quality in one’s life. Hospice recognizes the difficulties that surround all those concerned when a loved one passes. They go to great lengths to give the dying person and their relations a quality of life to the last possible moment, whatever that may mean for the situation. Hospice is not about dying at all, it’s about living.

The Hospice Director at the time was amazing. She was super strong and a great ambassador for this still somewhat unknown non-profit group. She told me that what many people struggle with are those years in between learning that someone is dying and the actual death. She said, “There is a lot of life there.” It was a great moment for me as I came to realize what my mom had instilled in me in those four years – life! That was the very thing that I did not want to forget: the relationship that I had cultivated with life!

In our culture, it is so ingrained in us to reach for the next best thing to make us happy, to make us feel alive. Our society sends us mixed messages on how we need to be. Dying strips away any of that pretentiousness right away. It keeps us accountable to what is real, to what is our true nature, to what is life.

So does yoga. It is my belief that stepping into a yoga class for whatever reason begins the process of creating a profound and intimate relationship to life, your life. And, not because of something outside your current existence, but through the awareness of the positive existence you have in you and with you right now!

Bikram has a great saying that negative thoughts are nine times more powerful than positive ones. He is right. And yoga is the single most powerful antidote to negativity that you can find on this planet! And, it’s just what we ALL need. Negativity comes in many forms: inflammation, lower back pain, depression, cynicism, heart disease, greed. Negativity is anything that removes you from your alignment to life, which is always positive.

The world is a confusing place. We need help in reinforcing the positive. We have to be self-centered in order to be centered. So, do your yoga and dismiss the negative. Wayne Dyer has a great phrase in one of his books which says, “when you change the way you look at things, what you look at changes.” When we do this, then we can follow the words of Gandhi and “Be the change we wish to see in the world.”

Over the years, we’ve celebrated our yoga, our relationship with our families and friends, our relationship with each other and our community. We’ve recognized and continue to honor that relationship we have with our Source. This year, our ninth year, as we open into new experiences in our new studio, let’s celebrate our relationship to LIFE!

It takes a village to create a dream. Thanks to all of you that helped to crystallize a vision into a tangible loving realty. Dave, Darren, Tom, Sean, Jeff, Kathy, Andrew, Donnie, Todd, Matt, Ken, Steve, Bob, Arbel, Farzam, Nick, Donna, and Randy are just some of the names to single out. Thank you Ban. And the biggest thanks to my wonderful manager and friend Chris for protecting my vision and adopting this dream as his own, assuring me that we could do this even in those times when there was extreme doubt. You all get a rose.

This could not have been possible if I did not do the yoga every day, sometimes, twice a day. Along with the energy it gave me, the yoga also kept me grounded, clear, detached and in alignment with my intention. Thank you, yoga, and thank you Bikram for this yoga. You get a rose.

Three years after we opened in what is now our old studio in 2003, we were already at capacity. From that point on we added more classes to keep up with the demand and held the facility together as best we could. It was then that we planted that seed to expand. Through those years we looked around, talked to our landlord, and met with banks and city officials to learn more about what we could do. There were lots of “no’s” but we persevered. Nothing was right until now. Seeing your faces as you enter the studio makes my heart sing the most. It was all worth it. Both Chris and I appreciate deeply your patience and your trust in us. It’s you BYSJ members that get the final rose. You will see a rose on our back reception desk everyday honoring YOU! Thanks.

For me, even with all the distractions, when you have a dream, you don’t hear the sound of the noise. There is a great quote by Brazilian author, Paul Coelho, that says, “And there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.” That inspired me.

Soon, you meet the right people and you begin to collect “yeses” and the right path shows up. One of the right people that came into my life when we first opened in 2003 was my business coach, Alon Sagee. He and I worked at building a brand and created our current website. He really knows BYSJ. I brought him back on board as we started to create this new space. I shared with him our community, the commitment you all have in your practice, the amount of new people we continually brought in each month, the diversity in our members. He was lit up and said “There is a movement happening.” I love that. Yes, there is! Alon and I created what is our second Invitation. This tells the tale of who we are now so eloquently. You will begin to see this revised “invitation” everywhere as you come to the studio and read our promotion pieces, website and social outlets. A portion of it reads, “There is a movement happening now. We’ve heard hundreds of stories of how this yoga has impacted lives in infinite and miraculous ways. We don’t really know how it works; we just know that yoga makes everything better. Because of our participation together in co-creating the spirit of BYSJ, we can now empower many more to live the best version of themselves through the practice of yoga. Our new and larger facility is simply a reflection that we can make a difference.

In the last three to five years, I’ve also been collecting art or pieces that are meaningful to our community. I was on a cruise years ago and we stopped at a small fishing town. There was this amazing store filled with collections of brass and some of them shaped as Buddha’s. That is where I found our door handles in the bathroom. The grand Buddha in our lobby was eyed more than 5 years ago. My Feng Shui master told me a few years ago that I should have something with big energy like a piece of art with colors of red and gold close to my entrance. I immediately thought of this Buddha painting and called my friend in Colorado who was with me when I first saw this piece. Ironically, he was around the corner from this gallery. He went in and there it was hanging on the wall and now marked ½ off! Of course, he grabbed it and had it stored it at his house in Boulder for three years, until the new studio was ready. The slate you see in the lobby was important to me as I wanted all of us to feel the earth beneath us. And it’s important to have a beautiful ceiling in the yoga room because we are on our backs 1/3 of class.

All of these ideas, collections, notes drawn on napkins, serendipitous insights were all fueled by you! Your emails about how the yoga has changed your life, your individual stories about how yoga gave you something that made you a better person, the comments about how much you love the fresh flowers, how thought provoking the inspirational cards are to you in the bathrooms, your requests to bring your kids to class, and your smiles and exchanges with each other only further kindled my passion and creativity.

This grand space is only a small reflection to the enormous uplifting platform you’ve given me to live out my dream. Please use the magnificence of this new home of ours to do nothing less than pull out the enormity and magnificence in you.

Evolve in your practice. Evolve in your being. Evolve to higher levels of consciousness. Discover. Help your friends and family discover. Then discover more. We have signed for 10 more years and I look forward to the thousands of life changing stories that I will hear coming from the grace of this good space, our home. Welcome home.

Being in Boulder, Colorado watching 8-10 inches of snow cap the mountains and huge pine trees was a life enriching moment. I almost cried, as I had not seen snow like that in many years. It was breathtaking and special. Boulder has the fortune of having sun 300 days of the year (much like San Diego), so to experience sun-kissed snow in tolerable temperatures was exhilarating as my lungs took in that cold air. I felt so alive. Such heightened moments, if we stop and partake of them, make us feel so grateful and enthusiastic.

Traveling is a gift despite the stresses of departing and arriving. But through a process of elimination, when you narrow it down, the ability to be somewhere else not usual to your routine produces great effects that can enhance your outlook on life. Without the baggage of “things you need to do” that come up every few minutes in your everyday life, you are left with a wide open channel that allows the flow of joy, imagination, creativity, insight, contemplation and gosh, much more. It is said that the most important relationship you can have in your life is the one you hold with “source” (whatever that is for you). For me, Boulder and all the interactions I encountered there fueled my connection to that source. When that happens, I often feel the Universe giving me this loving wink that says “Yes, Michele, you are on the right path.”

Driving down Saratoga Avenue seemed like a new experience as I returned to the studio from my three day trip. Not yet immersed in the big and small tasks waiting for me, I absorbed the striking beauty of the colorful trees that line Saratoga Avenue. The bright, glowing, surreal looking trees to my left caught my eye as leaves fell to the ground, creating this carpet of tangerine yellow. I felt so lucky to experience this vision. It was another gesture that enriched my life at that moment. Again, I was out of my filtered way of cerebral thinking, which allowed for a higher level of experience. I noticed the long drive down Saratoga Avenue amongst these trees on the left and the right leading me right to BYSJ. Perhaps my second wink from the Universe that says “Yes Michele, you are on the right path.”

The instant camaraderie I feel with all of you the moment I walk in the door is another experience that enriches my life at that moment. I am truly rejuvenated without having done one half- moon posture! Without even knowing the content of the conversations going on, the sound they make is music. Not being around this for a few days—as my time in Boulder was more quiet and serene—I felt another sense of being alive with people that I not only enjoy but truly love. My life was enriched again in that moment.

It’s the holiday season, and how crazy it is to even try and filter out the lists to accomplish in the weeks ahead. It’s the end of the year and we may have additional work related tasks to accomplish. We have a new studio to open in a few weeks, which definitely pulls me away if I’m not careful. But maybe the loud, repetitious exposure of Santa this time of year is really another message. Santa in his red suit is not literally real, however what he is can be of great value. Children represent that part in us that has remained innocent, care free, in wonder of life. Without restraint, Santa asks us for our “wish list”, not caring if it’s practical or not. He represents our imagination, creativity, and hope that we often times can’t tap into because of the “rules of the road” we must follow in life. Go ahead and make your wish. While you may not get what you ask for, what you are left with is a more sharpened and available capacity to ponder and contemplate, to use your creativity, and to feel joy. It was a gift to be in Boulder and have that chance to step away, but I can’t take Boulder with me. What I do get to keep is the “mental muscle memory” and bestow this upon what I see and do every day.

As we move from one “front door” to another in the next few weeks, I feel flooded with ways BYSJ has deepened my relationship to source. Of course, it won’t stop as we move to something that gives us the space to continue on that “right path”, but our intimate home that we are leaving behind provided us all with some very big moments: BYSJ, like Santa, often hears our “wish lists” as we begin our practice: a better back, heal my knee, give me confidence, etc…Maybe you didn’t get what you asked for, but I do bet, you received something greater. I did.

All of us at Bikram Yoga San Jose wish you and yours a magical, wonderful, joyous holiday season. It’s the perfect time to segue into our new digs. The season’s energy, when unencumbered with the hustle and bustle of things to do, is filled with gratefulness and opportunities to enrich our lives every single moment. If you have a chance before you leave the studio one day in these final weeks, take a moment and reflect on and share with us a wish you once had as you started to come to BYSJ and the gift you received. We’ve placed “leaves” in the lobby for you to write on. These individual stories when connected will create our family tree —our BYSJ Holiday Tree— leaf by leaf.