The Four Desires: Creating a Life of Purpose, Happiness, Prosperity, and Freedom - Hardcover

Stryker, Rod

 
9780553803983: The Four Desires: Creating a Life of Purpose, Happiness, Prosperity, and Freedom
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553803980 ISBN 13: 9780553803983
Verlag: Delacorte Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

“Desire is here to stay. The challenge we all face, and which I intend to guide you through, is to learn how to take into account the full measure of who you are and use the positive force of all four of your soul’s desires to lead you to your best life.”
—Rod Stryker

According to ancient Yogic tradition, your soul has four distinct desires:
 
• The desire for purpose, the drive to become who you are meant to be
• The desire for the means (money, security, health) to prosper in this world
• The desire for pleasures like intimacy, beauty, and love
• The desire for spiritual fulfillment and lasting freedom
 
Learning to honor these four desires is the key to happiness, and to a complete and balanced life. But how can you discern what will truly satisfy your desires? How can you increase your capacity to achieve them? What if your desires seem to conflict with one another? Is it really possible to live a spiritual life while also wanting material pleasures and success?

For more than three decades, master teacher Rod Stryker has taught yoga in the context of its deepest philosophy. His course, called The Yoga of Fulfillment™, has helped thousands recognize their soul’s call to greatness and to achieve their dreams. Now, in this wise and richly practical book, he has distilled those broad teachings into a roadmap for becoming the person you were meant to be. It is filled with revealing true stories, provocative exercises, and practices for unlocking your inner guidance. And even if you’ve never done a yoga pose, you can follow this step-by-step process to:
 
• discover your soul’s unique purpose—the one you came into this world to fulfill.
• recognize the goal(s) you need to focus on at any given time and enliven your capacity to reach them.
• overcome self-defeating ideas and behavior.
• recruit your deepest energies and strengthen your resolve to meet any challenge.
• learn to live with joy at every stage of your growth.
 
The Four Desires is nothing less than a complete path toward living your best life possible—a life that is rich in meaning and in means, a life that attracts and emanates happiness, a life that is your unique gift to yourself and the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rod Stryker is the founder of ParaYoga®. Widely considered one of the preeminent yoga and meditation teachers in the United States, he has taught for more than thirty years. A longtime resident and teacher in Los Angeles, he now lives in Colorado with his wife, Gina, and their four children, Jaden, Theo, Asha, and Atreya.

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chapter 1

The Power of Desire

Ten years before I met Dean, he was at the top of his career as a broadcast journalist. After more than a decade covering a variety of conflicts in the Middle East and Asia, he was now appearing nightly on network television. Just when it seemed that he had attained everything he had ever aspired to and spent his life working for, Dean's life as he knew it came to a devastating end. He had experienced various levels of excruciating pain for the past six years after suffering a fractured vertebra and declining surgery. But now he knew that something was terribly wrong. Rushed into emergency surgery, he woke from general anesthesia to a doctor standing over him, giving him the grave news that the operation had "failed" and that Dean would be "permanently disabled."

Unable to sit, barely able to walk, Dean returned to the States, literally and figuratively a broken man, his spirit as broken as his spine, his career over. Within months, he was little more than what he described as a man "pickled on painkillers."

Over the next couple of years, little changed-until his wife gave birth to their first child. His time celebrating Finn's birth was cut short, however. Dean's health, which had been deteriorating since the failed surgery, had taken a turn for the worse. Tests revealed a new, life-altering diagnosis: cancer. His prognosis was "a year or two to live." With his physical pain and mental torment more severe than ever, Dean's doses of prescription painkillers were increased and now included a morphine drip.

Months passed with Dean bedridden and in all but a hopeless state. Then, with less than a year to live, Dean had an epiphany. Lying in bed with his young son playing nearby, the nightmare of the past few years and the weight of dying suddenly came crushing down on him. He was overwhelmed by the realization that he was moving irreversibly toward fulfilling the doctors' prognosis; he and his son-the most precious thing in the world to him-would soon be separated forever.

Suddenly, as though breaking through the dark cloud that had been overshadowing his whole life the past few years, Dean saw himself through the eyes of his son. If nothing changed and he was to die, Finn's only memory of his father would be that of a man who had committed to nothing other than being a helpless victim. Dean realized that he had so succumbed to self-pity that his son had never seen his father do or be anything that Finn could look back on and be proud of. It was not Dean's fault that he broke his back or had cancer, but Finn had not seen him even try to make the best of the time he did have- that was Dean's responsibility. Someone somewhere in the world had it worse than he did, Dean realized, and someone somewhere was doing better than he was with far less.

Dean immediately made a resolution. He would change. There was no way to know if he would survive cancer or ever be an able-bodied father who could play baseball with his son, but he made a commitment nonetheless. For however many days he had left, he would be a living example to his son of how a man could, or in Dean's eyes should, live his life. He would face the circumstances in his life exactly as he would want Finn to face his own future challenges.

A few days later, Dean found himself doing yoga for the first time in a class that was being offered at his rehabilitation center. Within minutes, he knew he had, in his words, "found his path to healing." He had no way of knowing whether the healing would be spiritual and physical or just spiritual, but he sensed that it was the beginning of a new chapter in his life.

Driven by his resolve, Dean immersed himself in learning everything he could about well-being, spirituality, and cancer therapies and applying what he learned. He consumed books on diet and nutrition, yoga, spirituality, positive thinking, visualization, and meditation. He dramatically changed his lifestyle, inside and out. He willed himself to practice yoga and meditation for hours a day-in the beginning, crawling out of bed to get onto his yoga mat.

As the months passed, things began to change. Dean could sit up for ten, then twenty, then eventually sixty minutes at a time. Soon after that, he was able to walk to the kitchen. He cut back on his pain medication and eventually stopped it altogether. More victories came. Eventually he was able to drive. And then came the one change that meant more to him than any of the others: he was able to lift and hold his son. Miraculously, and to his doctors' amazement, Dean had healed his broken back. But his transformation didn't end there. A short time later, about the time he was supposed to be dead, Dean received a new diagnosis: he was "cancer-free."

Dean's story is extraordinary. A person can do all that he did (and more) and still not be cured of cancer or heal a broken back, but his is more than a story about beating the odds. It is an illustration of the power of desire coupled with the willingness to use every resource available to achieve a goal. It is a telling reminder of just how potent you can be in affecting your destiny. Viewed from a different perspective, Dean's story can also be seen as ordinary, in the sense that it portrays the very definition of what constitutes a human being, what in Sanskrit is called a kama yoni, which means "the species which has the privilege of performing actions and which thus can change the course of its destiny." By seizing his resolve and taking positive command of all the resources available to him, Dean was embodying the principle that defines us and sets us apart from all other species.

This idea was eloquently expressed by French essayist Charles Du Bos, who I believe conveyed the essence of all yogic teachings as well as the formula for achieving a truly fulfilled life when he wrote, "The important thing is this: to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."

Take a moment to consider who you would be and how much better our world would be if more of us would "sacrifice what we are for what we could become."

Dean came to one of my Yoga of Fulfillment workshops after he had healed physically. Wanting a clearer understanding of what had transformed him, he was hoping to make use of the same power to overcome the current challenges in his life. Working with the processes of the Yoga of Fulfillment allowed Dean to see that having to face the prospect of imminent death, of being permanently separated from his son, had been the catalyst he needed to be willing to change his life. His intention to be "a living example" to his son for whatever time he had left altered the course of his destiny.

Dean's miracle-like accomplishments had everything to do with his willingness to sacrifice what he was in order to become what he could be. It began by him acknowledging his desire and finding a specific goal that he knew deep in his heart was absolutely worth achieving. Dean's overriding desire was to give his son a father he could love, respect, and perhaps even one day emulate. The Yoga of Fulfillment helped him realize that he had intuitively applied the principles that the ancient tradition teaches are key to achieving our goals. Once he learned the principles, he was able to apply them systematically to successfully meet the new challenges in his life.

Dean's intuitive unearthing of a singular and compelling purpose for his life combined with his all-consuming commitment to fulfilling it is a powerful illustration of a profound truth that was something of a credo for my first teacher, Mani. Drawing from an ancient scripture, he would constantly repeat, "A person can achieve almost anything, can surmount any difficulties, if they can harness their power."

The good news is that you don't need to be facing life-and-death circumstances, as...

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Verlag
Delacorte Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553803980
ISBN 13 
9780553803983
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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