Guest Author - Jen Blackert

Yoga teaches us how to go with the flow when things are not going exactly as you planned. Life sometimes seems like we are constantly reaching to achieve our goals and sometimes the seems our of reach.

The week I have focused my yoga practice on Happiness! How can we be happy today and everyday without feeling we are always wishing and wanting? Please read the below poem and see if it offers some insights for you?

"So Much Happiness," by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press) -- The Amazon link is below.

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.




What does this poem offer to you? For me, I love that I can be happy no matter what I face in the external world. I just need to be.