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Written by Baron Baptiste

I really like his yogic philosophy. I’m not really looking to give myself a 40 day revolution, but I enjoy what he has to say about life. Some good meditations in here as well. I really want to learn to meditate.

The Twelve Laws of Transformation (The list itself doesn’t grab me, it’s his explanation of each one that meant something to me)
1 – Seek the Truth
2 – Be Willing to Come Apart
3 – Step out of Your Comfort Zone
4 – Commit to Growth
5 – Shift Your Vision
6 – Drop What You Know
7 – Relax with What Is
8 – Remove the Rocks
9 – Don’t Rush the Process
10 – Be True to Yourself
11 – Be Still and Know
12 – Understand That the Whole Is the Goal

Step out of Your Comfort Zone
The comfort zone may feel cozy and familiar, but it is like sweet poison, silently killing off our childlike spontaneity and our vitality. When we choose our comfort zone over growth we get stuck or worse, because ultimately we are either awakening and growing or numbing out and spiraling downward. Life is never static-we either grow or we die.

Commit to Growth
Never making a decision is making a decision unto itself. It is a decision to stay in a personal fog, we never have to face the mundane that comes with committing to a path.
Very few of us would ever find ourselves in a situation that doesn’t have at least one secret little exit door, a place where we can sneak through and out if we have to.
In our spiritual practice, we learn that even if every inch of our being wants to run in the opposite direction, we stay.

Equanimity
It is so easy to get reactive when we feel like we aren’t in control. In happens every day, in a thousand small ways (and sometimes big ones). We spill coffee on ourselves on our way to work, we react. We hit a traffic jam, we react. The boss takes his or her mood out on us, we react. Our kids act out, we react. Again and again we get caught in the endless cycle of stress, reactivity, blame.
Equanimity is the art of meeting life as it meets you – calmly, without drama or fuss. This is the way out of frustration. Living this way there is a brightness and a creativity very much like that of a child. It’s our naturalness. You don’t get there by fighting or wrestling for control.
An inner revolution is not about taking control. Control has no real healthy place in our lives, and only robs us of our serenity. We think we change things by taking the bull by the horns. But if you think about it, grabbing the bull by the horns would be a crazy thing to do. We change by finding equanimity and learning to relax right in the middle of conflict-filled moments.
Buddha taught that throughout our lives, we should expect to encounter four specific joys and their opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. The world conditions us to seek unchanging pleasure, gain, praise, and fame. The problem is that things don’t always work out that way. When we experience pain, loss, blame, and disrepute, we take it personally as if something is deeply wrong with us. Equanimity releases us from unrealistic expectations about what life should be and allows us to stay centered amid the inevitable highs and lows.
When you want to come out of a pose is the moment you come face-to-face with your psychology. When you hit a threshold – and we all have thresholds – it is an opportunity to see yourself clearly and ask the winds of grace to carry you. Remember, they are always there, willing and ready to carry you if you just raise your sails.

So why do we intelligent humans still consume lifeless fast-food cheeseburgers and fries and pour soda down our throats and those of our children? The answer is easy. We are living out of our legacy of distraction. It is easier to distract ourselves and go along with the status quo than to feel the discomfort of growth and change.
We may not realize it, but we are literally involved in biological warfare with ourselves. We use what I call “biological grenades” – drugs, sex, sugar, food – to continually alter our chemistry to avoid coming to peace with ourselves. We shift our moods to create a wall of separation between reality and ourselves, then blame these biological grenades as the problem…

The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.

The Daily Practices
Preparation – Have a good set of habits as a foundation in your life, for when the difficult moments arise.
Compassion
Being Spontaneous
Intimacy
Being Nonreactive
Being Honest with Yourself
Equanimity – Practice this when the winds of obsessive, compulsive, and addictive reactions and behaviors come knocking on your door.
Not Resisting Change
Relationship
Slowing Down
Forgiveness
Coming Clean