Your Daily #HappinessRx: Please bring your palms together in namaste and with an inward focus toward our own hearts breath deeply.

As you close your eyes you turn into the darkness to see that inner light within the untouched place known as maja. It is a place unblemished by sadness or meanness or anger. It is the seat of wisdom known as our spiritual heart. The yogis believe that each of us replicates the world at large, embodying “rivers, seas, mountains, fields…stars and planets…the sun and moon” (Shiva Samhita, II.1-3). The outer sun, they asserted, is in reality a token of our own “inner sun,” which corresponds to our subtle, or spiritual, heart.

So, when we practice Surya Namaskar, which is a humble adoration of the insight of the self it namaskar stems from namas, which means “to adore.” (The familiar phrase we use to close our yoga classes, namaste—te means “you”—also comes from this root.) Each Sun Salutation begins and ends with the joined-hands mudra (gesture) touched to the heart with the intention behind it of “I adore myself”.

So today no matter the cold, snow or emotional challenges outside you see it is always sunny and sweet deep inside. Amidst the chaos of life there is an inner calm. Or as the poet writes, If the sun were not in love, he would have no brightness, the side of the hill no grass on it.

You light the fire of love
in earth and sky
in heart and soul
of every being.

Through your love
existence and nonexistence merge.
All opposites unite.
All that is profane
becomes sacred again.

#Rumi