Peace on Earth & Goodwill Toward Men

I was raised Roman Catholic but I have chosen not to believe in Jesus as my own personal savior. You can go ahead and pray for my soul if it makes you feel better. I believe in a lot of things but I don't like celebrating Christmas because Christmas is a celebration of Jesus and his birth. Not that I don't think Jesus deserves to be celebrated because he seems to have been a very good human being but it's not what I believe so I've really resisted celebrating for many years. But, I have kids and I'm prone to my own kind of peer pressure. I have come to enjoy buying gifts for people at this time of year. I needed to figure it out so that it made sense to me and I wasn't doing something just because everyone else was. 
This year I have been struck by signs that people have put up, decorations that bear the word peace. In my determination to not be swayed by the opinions of others and celebrate something that I don't really believe, I forgot some of what is really good about the holiday season. It does still gall me that these practices are not put in to practice during the year as often as they are at this time of year but I guess it's better that they are put into practice at all. 
I'd like to focus this week specifically on peace. It can be difficult concept to employ and I agree that peace needs to happen on an individual basis before there's any hope of it happening on a grander scale. 

What if we included the concept of peace in our gift giving this year. I don't mean that we don't buy gifts for anybody because I see how much fun that is. But what about including in our gifts something that helps make lives more peaceful.

I love giving massages and I don't mean physically handing out massages. I mean giving gift certificates so that people can go and get massages. I've discovered that getting them to use it is a different challenge altogether but I think a massage is something most of the people that I know need. 

So this week, not only am I thinking about all of the stuff that I have to wrap that I purchased for my children but the ways in which I can better myself to give their lives more peace. If they can grow up with that calm tranquility inside of themselves then they will diffuse it to the world and it will be a rarity to find young people with a sense of purpose, a sense of groundedness. That's not to say that they'll always have it. There will still be hormones and peer pressure. I'm sure we all still have those distractions and challenges in our lives from time to time, but if we took a moment to consider the possibilities of sharing peace in our lives we will take important steps toward spreading it and having the chance of making it stick.

We will practice asana in a way that lets the breath lead; allows the breath to be the peacemaker, as my teacher has said. Do not move in a way that compromises your breath. Allow your attitude toward your efforts in practice to be one of calm contemplation. You do not need to push harder, just breathe deeper. The choices you make that create shallow, erratic breath should be avoided, while anything you do that creates calm, deep, smooth breathing should be encouraged. There are practices that will push you to your limits and those practices have value, but that is not the goal this week.