Dancing Dakini Wisdom

It's that time of year again, when we look back and reflect on how the last year went, good and bad, and assess what we want to change and want we want to keep doing or improve upon. I can say I made some of my goals last year, but not all of them.

I wanted to get back into performing belly dance, and I did that - I tried out for and made my instructor's student troupe and performed with the troupe a few times. For 2015 I'd like to do more performing, so I'll be keeping with this one for another year.

I started going to yoga more often, especially for the summer yoga challenge and once the new Plano studio opened in September. I finally started going to the early morning yoga classes before work. I tried to go more regularly but certain life events got in the way - getting sick, being out of town, and the holidays all disrupted my workout schedule. This is one area I'm going to continue to try to do better, and by better I mean more consistently this year.

I didn't lose any weight last year and actually gained some. So I'm trying some different tactics this year. I got a fitness tracker for Christmas, and I can tell I'm not active enough on days I'm not dancing or going to an active yoga class. Something to work on. I've decided to make some diet changes too, mainly to cut back on, and eventually cut out refined sugars. So, no more desserts after every dinner and reserving dessert for holidays and birthdays. The biggest challenges will be getting my husband on board since this affects him too, and not caving in to what the coworkers bring to the office far too often.

The other area of improvement that I want to work on is my spiritual practice and meditation. My life was in many ways too crazy, hectic, and busy, and a lot of it was with meaningless distractions. My meditation sessions were also very distracted; outer distractions reinforce inner distractions and make concentration difficult to impossible. And now that I'm teaching Buddhist meditation classes weekly again, that is another thing to which I need to devote a good amount of time, as well as FP class on Sunday afternoons and my own personal practice. My biggest outer distraction is social media, so I've resolved to cut way back on my time on the computer when not at work. That means quitting Tumblr, at least for now. I just don't have time for it anymore, and trying to post here on a regular basis has become more of an obligation and a chore, and that's not the right motivation to have. Maybe someday in the future I'll have fewer activities to split my time between and I'll become re-inspired to post again. I don't know when that will be.

I do want to thank all my followers for following, liking, and reposting so many of my posts here over the few years I've been on Tumblr. If anyone ever wants to ask me another question, please send it to the "ask me anything" box and not fan mail, since the "ask me anything" questions get forwarded to my email and the other does not, as I won't be checking my page anymore.

A buddha is an enlightened being, and there have already been many buddhas. Each Buddhist tradition has its own lineage of Gurus, or Spiritual Guides and teachers, and the students within that particular tradition will often view some or all of those Gurus as not just ordinary human teachers, but as enlightened beings, or buddhas. Within the New Kadampa Tradition we view Buddha Shakyamuni as the first buddha of our age and world (there were 3 others before him in earlier eons or worlds), and we will often refer to Atisha as the "second buddha." Je Tsongkhapa would also be viewed as an enlightened being, as well as the lineage Gurus following him, including Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, our living Spiritual Guide. Many in our tradition view Geshe-la as an emanation of the wisdom buddha Manjushri.