The Kelly Morris Yoga Podcast

(Free online class, scroll way down. To sign up for the Dharma Dose, go to right hand side of the page). Spend this fast-paced, challenging hour testing your limits and helping a friend at the same time. It’s said that the bodhimind (a mind intent on becoming a Buddha) is the one thing powerful enough to eliminate all past bad karma. While it will take more than an hour to erase your whole hard drive of nastiness, selfishness, bad moods and self-absorption, it is an excellent beginning.

Think of a friend who is suffering (anything from bad hair to cancer to isolation) and dedicate your efforts to removing those pains and instilling the seeds for happiness. Start to re-fit your internal hard drive with new, positive, others-based karmas and see you and your world start to shift.

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Everyone around you is suffering. If you aren’t aware of that yet, open a newspaper, turn on CNN or take an open-eyed walk outside your own front door. This is the sad nature of samsara: everything goes bad, always.

If it’s true that the world you perceive is a perfect reflection of how you have thought, spoken and behaved in the past, then everything around you belongs to you, is your responsibility, because it is YOUR projection.

Spend an hour doing something truly altruistic and hence highly unheard of. Use your breath and your understanding of karma and emptiness to take away all the pain in the world and to give it everything it needs to create perfect happiness: generosity, kindness, patience, effort, stillness and wisdom. Give world what it needs to save itself from itself and be saved in turn.

All love, Kelly

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Spend the first few minutes gathering your mind into that single intention, then dive into this relatively chat-free hour of pure asana and breath. Focus on your breath, making sure it is fluid, even and deep…and allow that focus to generate a fluid, even and deep experience in your mind and your body. Class is as easy or challenging as you care to make it…bend the knee in Warrior II all the way or just half-way: up to you. What serves you and your aim best today? Do you need to get deep and heavy or do you need to keep it light and easy? Every day is different..honor where you are and remember the aim…to help someone else.

Love always, Kelly

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THE STEPS TO BLISS RETREAT with Kelly Morris and Brook Cosby. Assisted by Lisa Jacobson

Kelly Morris, Brook Cosby and Lisa Jacobson invite you to spend a glorious and uplifting week in Italy, learning The Steps To Bliss!

Yoga is a roadmap to happiness, if we practice conscientiously and with proper motivation. But what does that mean and how do we start? For that matter, is real happiness, let alone bliss, even possible?

The Buddha replied ‘Yes, it is.’ His proven meditation practice for creating bliss will form the basis of this special retreat— 7 sacred steps that have succeeded in bringing so-called ordinary people to extraordinary states, again and again, for over thousands of years. The steps include finding and relying upon a spiritual guide, an investigation into where your world is really coming from, the cultivation of compassion, the purification of wrongdoing, the celebration of rightdoing and the offering of our humble attempts to the happiness of all beings. When done correctly, daily and with proper motivation, this practice re-generates you and your world anew, until one day, your world has turned from one of suffering to one of pleasure…the pleasure of goodness.

Immerse yourself in these holy and profound teachings in one of the most beautiful places on earth: The Ebbio, in Tuscany. Sink into 3 hours of yoga in the morning and then skip to Siena and explore it’s churches, divine shopping opportunities and perfect wines. Or, simply soak in the old wine barrel transformed into a unique floating pool or horseback ride, donkey trek, wander the grounds of the 14th c. farmhouse or hike Tuscany’s spacious hills in the dreamy afternoons. Bliss indeed!

Kelly, Brook and Lisa are lineage holders in the Gelukpa tradition of His Holiness The Dalai Lama. Kelly has been initiated and empowered into several uncorrupted mandalas and has been a leading teacher in NYC for over 12 years. Brook has been a close apprentice of Kelly’s since 2004. Both Brook and Lisa both graduated from The Conquering Lion Yoga Teacher Training Program/NYC.

Cost: 1500. per person for a shared room/2000. for a single room. Cost includes all yoga classes, kirtans, guided meditations, sweet lodging, breakfast and dinner.

For further info, please email Kelly @ info@kellymorrisyoga.com To check out Ebbio, please go to www.ebbio.com

“By whatever virtue I have here accrued, From the making of this song, This guide for entry on the Bodhisattva way, May everyone begin to tread the path to Buddhahood.” -Master Shantideva (8th century, CE)

Emptiness, the absence of everything, paradoxically, makes possible the presence of everything.

Without a profound understanding of this absence and this everything, nothing about the teacher/student relationship makes real sense. For example, when we see someone making prostrations, offerings, and paying obeisance to their lama/guru/teacher, it can come off as simple, stupid sycophancy, the sad behaviors of those who are lost, directionless and brainless. And it can be all those things; if you don’t have a clear understanding of karma and emptiness, and you are doing these things, you are a brownnoser, a flunky, a puppet. In short, a droid.

But armed with a understanding of karma and emptiness, you see that the lama/guru/teacher has no nature of their own. The only nature they have and could ever have is the one your karma decides you to see. Why else would some adore Christ and others, his own brother even, want him dead? Why else would millions adore His Holiness and others want him dead?

Here are the options,karma-wise, on this:

Terrible karma: “What a charlatan, brainwashing these these weak, lost people. What a hustle. I can’t wait to tell everyone what a con this guy is.”

Bad karma: “Oh, another so-called ‘Teacher’ who has surrounded themselves with toadies. Look how no one dares to defy the teacher. People are so gullible. I am free, I decide my own path. I don’t need help. Let’s grab a drink.”

Neutral karma: ”Oh, this person seems nice enough, they are saying some wise things in my opinion and also some stupid things. If it helps people, that’s nice. Its not really for me, though. Are we late for Terminator 22?”

Good karma: “What a wise person, and how amazing they have devoted their lives to helping others. I admire that. I think I’ll come back and check it out further.”

Excellent karma:”Boo-yah! This dude’s the bomb! He’s saying things I have been waiting to hear my whole life!”

Unsurpassed karma: “ This being is God, to me. I KNOW she has the answers. I will never leave her, wild horses couldn’t drag me away. I don’t care if the whole world thinks I am crazy, this is it. Period.”

Your karma (the perceptions you have of beings as gurus or quacks, in this example) all come from how you have thought about, spoken to and acted towards other beings in the past. What you see is being created by the goodness or not of your own mind.

The teacher/lama/guru has no qualities of their own. How you think about them, how you speak to them and about them, and how you act towards them creates them for you. The proof of this is very simple: not everyone feels about them the same way you do. Why? They have their own set of causes from the past that are forcing them to perceive what they perceive.

The karma each sincere practitioner wants to get as quickly as possible is the karma to perceive a Fully Realized Being in their life. Why? So that they can then receive the teachings they need to get to the goal of yoga, enlightenment (aka. HAPPINESS), as quickly as possible, so that then they can help others to accomplish the same.

If you are interested in creating the causes for perceiving a Holy Being who can actually help you get out of this unholy prison of dissatisfaction called Your Life (the one where you are born, suffer a bunch, get sick, get old, and then finally get dead), you find a being who is close enough to your ideal and then you start actually treating them as if they were the Buddha Herself, or Jesus or Moses or Mohammed or what have you.

Not for them! For you! After all, whose perceptions are you working on? Yours or theirs? How would you act if Moses himself walked into your yoga class? Would you stay lolling on the ground, chatting with your neighbor, hoping Moses comes up with something interesting this time? Or would you leap up in amazement and fall down at their feet in gratitude and beg for their help?

Which response creates the causes for the perception you seek? Use your noggin. That’s what it’s there for, after all.

All love, all the time, Kelly

Putting the welfare of others, putting the happiness, desires, needs and wants of others before your own is the key to your own happiness. As we progress along the path, it can feel as if we are doing this, or at least approaching doing this. But we know we are not really doing it if all it leaves us feeling is angry, resentful and deprived. When we really drop our self-concern and live each moment dedicated to the happiness of others, the feeling within us is matchless in it’s joy. Just keep thinking to yourself, with each being you meet, ‘what would make them happy right now?’ and then just do it, joyfully. By meeting and exceeding the needs of others, we find our own needs magically met. We find ourselves happier and happier, more and more confident, less and less lacking. As this happens, we are better and better able to help others out of suffering and into the potential for happiness.

All love, Kelly

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Listen to the perfect words of His Holiness, The Seventh Dalai Lama, as He begs his lama to protect him from his own weaknesses and shortcomings. Listen as he carefully goes over each and every one of his failings, leaving nothing out. See how hard even He had to struggle to make spiritual progress. Find comfort and take hope in your own efforts. When you find a true master, offer everything to Him or Her. Allow them to guide you out of suffering and into happiness. If you have not found your teacher yet, continue to expand your own goodness and He or She will come, like a bee to honey.

Love, Kelly

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(TWO SPOTS LEFT FOR MAYA TULUM!!! EMAIL ME!!)(To sign up for the Dharma Dose, scroll way down) Moreover, you will NEVER reach the final goals of yoga while keeping only the tiniest toe in the deep end…You can put bindis on your forehead, wear impressive ‘guru’ outfits, have minions running around carrying your harmonium for you, talk about ‘love for all beings’, but until we have the kind of understanding of karma and emptiness that the Buddha did and ACT on it, as the Buddha did, it’s all a posture, a smiling face with evil little thoughts lurking everywhere, waiting for the smallest opening to take over your mind and set up shop. Until we are ready to give life and limb to every single sentient being, we are far from the goal. Imagine if someone came up to you, someone you maybe didn’t like so much and said “I really love that watch”…A true yogi would hand it right over, with joy. Would you? We have to be ready to cut bait on EVERYTHING in this samsaric world, every ignorant attachment causes us nothing but pain, pain, pain. Give it all away, get real, be real, don’t be a faker!!!!! How can you get to paradise carrying all that shit anyway?

Love, Kelly

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“DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU.”

- JESUS CHRIST (truly the Superstar)

(Please scroll was down for the free yoga class, for subscription classes and to sign up to have The Dharma Dose emailed to you directly.)

How many times have we heard something like this? How much easier is it to just do what you FEEL like doing unto others or doing what you decide they DESERVE to others or doing what you determine they NEED to others?

Everything you see, everything you touch, everything you hear, everything you smell, everything you think and feel, is COMING FROM YOUR MIND. There is nothing out there in ‘the’ world or here inside you that you did not create. The word ‘the’ is misleading, because it implies a world that exists outside of the one YOU project. But in truth, there’s only YOU and YOUR world or ME and MY world.

And what is your mind made up of? What makes up this all powerful thing that is creating everything in YOUR world and YOUR experience of it?

Your mind is made up of KARMIC SEEDS. Karmic seeds are everything you have EVER thought, said or done. Those karmic seeds are recorded and stored in your mind, never to be forgotten, in exactly the same way that you remember every misdeed done to you by a particular someone (your ex/present-girlfriend/boyfriend, your parents, your abuser, your boss, your President and so on). Except your mind is recording 65 discreet seeds EVERY SECOND, ALL THE TIME, DAY AND NIGHT, EVEN WHEN YOU ARE DREAMING.

Your mind nurses and coddles every karmic seed, just like a mother with her children, feeding them, growing them up to be big and strong, capable and effective at creating you and your world.

For example, if you have money, it is because sometime in the past, your mind recorded itself being generous to someone. Your mind then tends to those seeds, nurturing them, preparing them. Sometime later, when the seeds are ready, they blossom, projecting themselves outward; you have the perception of money coming towards you.

And if you don’t have money, it’s the reverse. Sometime in the past, your mind recorded itself being selfish with someone. Your mind tended those seeds, nurturing them, preparing them. Sometime later, when the seeds were ready, they blossomed, projecting that wretched selfishness outward; you have the perception of yourself struggling to make end meet.

And that is THE ONLY WAY you will EVER have or not have money. Your mind is the projector and you and your world are the screen.

The perception of money in your life DOES NOT COME from how smart you are, how educated you are, how well you apply your ‘insights’, how connected you are, how talented you are, how pretty you are, how hard you work, how ‘lucky’ you are or how ‘on top if it’ you are. STOP BEING AN IDIOT. If all that were true, then everyone who had those ‘qualities’ would be wealthy and clearly they are not.

It’s PURE LOGIC, not some fruity, new-age, wouldn’t-that-be-nice and isn’t Kelly naïve/stupid/insensitive/irresponsible. Everything you want you have to give to someone else first.

And for those of you thinking to yourself “It’s better if I TEACH someone how to make money”. Yes, but ONLY if you teach them is where money REALLY comes from. OTHERWISE, whatever method you teach them will ONLY work IF THEY HAVE BEEN GENEROUS TO OTHERS IN THE PAST. Hard work for hard work’s sake is not a virtue. Working hard at being generous work is a virtue.

Most of us have been both generous and selfish, so our financial situation is in a constant state of flux and uncertainty. Will a generous seed be ripening tomorrow on the floor of the stock exchange or will a selfish seed be ripening? Oh, the anxiety. If you were generous ALL THE TIME, your financial future would be assured. You could relax and forget about 401k’s, tax shelters and investments.

Why is it so hard for us to give others what we would IN AN INSTANT give to ourselves? It is hard because we continually misunderstand where our world is coming from. When we understand, we give everything, to everyone.

Love, Kelly

P.S. My teachers Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally and Lama Marut are in NYC for the next two weeks giving public teachings. Go to http://www.yogastudiesinstitute.org/ to find out where. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to study with some of the greatest masters alive today.

(Scroll down for your Free Yoga Class) Under ‘links’ on the lower right-hand side of this page, click on ‘The Yoga Peeps Interview’ to hear Yoga Peep’s fascinating interview with Kelly, one of the modern yoga’s pioneers and a NYC favorite. Learn about Kelly, what inspired her to dump fashion and pursue yoga, what beginners need to beware of when looking for the right teacher, the meat taboo, The Kelly Morris Teacher Training Program, The Emptiness Retreats, how to shine up your diamond, what the REAL purpose of yoga is, how to be happy and much more.

Zero discussion of celebrity clientele, the Jivamukti ruckus or the Maserati crash. Kelly is on a cellphone, she sounds inordinately loud. We apologize!

Rated PG-13, some profanity, counter-cultural instructions and love talk..:)

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