If you learned along the way that to meditate was to sit in agony for an hour, wasting time, watching your breath, getting bored and slowly going bananas, who wouldn’t run for the hills? Prepare to be re-educated. This meditation was taught by the Buddha Himself and protected in the monasteries of Tibet from cultural defilement for centuries, with nothing added or taken away: all of the original instructions are here. Thousands upon thousands of meditators have used these very steps to reach enlightenment, which is a fancy word for HAPPINESS.

Meditation, the way its taught in this lineage, is one of the most exciting, gratifying and blissful things you can do. Let Kelly guide you through The Preliminaries, which are the first steps every meditator takes to prepare their mind and heart to perceive the nature of reality directly.

Ideally, use this recording a few times, memorize the steps and then do them on your own, at your own pace. Some days might be 20 minutes, other days an hour. You may find in the beginning that you spend a lot of time in the ‘confession/purification’ part. That’s normal. Most of us have a lot of negative karma to confront, clarify and clear.

But most importantly, you need to do these steps with an understanding of karma and emptiness…a.k.a. Where Your World Is Coming From…FROM you, not AT you. Everything you experience, you made someone else experience first, in the past. You planted a seed, a karmic seed in your mindstream, with every thought, word and action you took. Those seeds bore fruit and you call said fruit “My Current Life”. Everything you think, say and do NOW is planting seeds that will create “Your Future Life”. Everything you make another experience NOW, you will be forced to experience later. That’s how it all works. Knowing this, it’s crucial to get control of the mind, which is reckless in it’s endless stupidity, every moment creating problems for us.

The Tuscany Retreat in October will go much more deeply into The Preliminaries: where they come from, their internal logic, what each step means and how to do it perfectly, how to clean up past karma, how to exponentiate good karma, how to find your teacher, how to develop The Wish and more. If this meditation makes a light go off in your mind, think about joining us. Please email Kelly any questions or concerns (see below for full details).

Use this meditation to deepen your relationship with your teacher, broaden your love of humanity, clean up past karma, create new positive karma and to experience your life in a whole new way.

Some advice:

1) If you are sitting in the morning, do not check your email or phone first. Wake up, splash water on your face, have a cup of tea if you need to and sit down. Try not to talk to anyone. Go to bed earlier and wake-up a 1/2 hour earlier.

2) Make sure the phone is off and your computer’s mail system is off, so there are no sounds (Kelly should be on your iPod and coming to you quietly through your ear buds). The room should be the quietest room in your home. If sounds do come in, just let them become a part of your meditation, don’t get upset.

3) It’s nice to have a little area set aside, with a small altar (this can mean just a picture of a holy being, a flower and a candle. Altars can be very simple or crazy elaborate. Up to you.) It should be a place where you WANT to sit, because the space feels special and holy.

4) You are totally comfortable in your seat. Your spine should be straight. If this means sitting on MANY blankets, with pillows under your knees, that’s fine. If it means you sit with your back against a wall, that’s fine. The most important thing is that once you are settled in, you don’t move, not at all. No scratching, itching, shifting, nose-picking, etc.

5) If you start to cry, just let the tears roll down. If you really get into the preliminaries, there will be tears. This is a good thing, it means you are purifying. Just remember that once you purify, the negative karma is gone and can’t hurt you anymore in the future (unless you have other similar seeds or continue doing the behavior that you are purifying).

6) Try to sit every day, no mater what. It’s difficult to change who you are when you are busy being yourself, after all.

7) Actually do all the things the lineage suggests, as listed above. If you find that meditation just isn’t ‘for you’, make sure you are really doing all the things advised FOR REAL. Or, just suffer some more and when you’re ready, come back. We’ll be waiting….:)

Please email Kelly with any questions at all or to share any experiences! Most of all, practice! Take the steps necessary to remove the causes for your suffering and get happy!

PLease also take the time to pass this along to anyone who might benefit, even though it’s time-consuming.

LoveLoveLove, Kelly

The next June class will go up this week, promise.

All love, Kelly

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

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

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..:)

(This class is not for beginners, I repeat, not for beginners. It is a flowing class for students who already have a developed practice. If you are a beginner, videos and podcasts are not for you, period. Find an actual class and come back when you are ready).

If you like what you experience, buy an all-access pass and each month, receive 2 live, brand-new, 1-hour yoga classes with Kelly delivered straight to your computer, ready to roll. We know how hard it is to find the right teacher, at the right time, at the right price, in the right place. Now you can practice anytime, anywhere: in your hotel room, in the privacy of your home, with a group or alone, half-in or all the way in: you decide. And unlike Kelly’s class in the city, this class will start on time…your time! On the other hand, no more excuses…

“Kelly is my greatest inspiration in my pursuit of yoga.” -Russell Simmons, CEO, Def Jam Records, CEO, Phat Farm

“Class was wild tonight…don’t you wish you had been there?” -The New York Times

For less than the price of a single class, each month you’ll get 2 awesome classes, right in your living room. CLICK THE PINK BOX BELOW and experience the sample.