One of the first words in the Panatajali's Sutra, the basis for the philosphy of yoga, is atha or now. The word is simple, but direct. The purpose of stating atha, now, is to tell yoga practitioners to live now and not in the past or the future. You may be asking yourself, how do I live now, in the present when my mind keeps fixating on the past or future. Let's say, you're on vacation in Sri Lanka (not as random as you would think, I was just there) and it's the last day before you have to take a long twenty hour flight home. In your mind or my mind in this case you're panicking. I was panicking. I kept thinking how am I going to be able to sit on a plane for twenty hours when, as I stated in earlier blogs, I have an extreme type A personality. I like to be constantly on the go instead of in one place. Instead of ruining my last day on a gorgeous beach in the Indian Ocean, like I would have in the past, I taught and simultaneously took my own yoga class. I traveled with two other yogi and hiking fanatics, which means a perfect group. This not only helped calm me, but in Yoga, I was so fixated on connecting my movements to breath, that I couldn't think about the future, I could only be present. The moral of the story, is to not only never fly with me, (I hold strangers hands during take off, pace the plane, and sleep in a non-wakeable sleep for hours on end), but to practice yoga. Yoga will help instill the sanskrit word of atha, now. Which in return will remove most worries and anxieties about the past and the future.