Darlings,

In Lady Yoga fashion, it is my goal to look back in history to see where we have come from, find the yoga in the moments past to keep us rooted in the present and passionate about where we are going in the future.

On that note...

Chrysalis is the process a butterfly makes when it develops from a small claustrophobic state into it's beautiful spread winged wonder.

On February 17th, 1904 Puccini's Madame Butterfly opens in Milan Italy. It's an opera in three acts. It was panned.

An opera that emphasized living and dying for love, Puccini ever so in love with opera and the story, went back to the page and rewrote.

He was met with resistance, walked and wrote through it with courage, and came out the other side with an opera that is a staple of standard operatic repertoire for companies around the world and number one in operas list of top twenty preferred operas.

Puccini dedicated his life and love to opera writing La Bohem, Tosca and Turadnot.

Let us use whatever resistance comes up for us as we practice or read, meet the resistance with courage and come out like Puccini did, on the other side, with dedication, passion, love and gentleness.

Art begins with resistance. At the point where resistance is overcome, no human masterpiece has ever been create without great labor. - Andre Gide

A ship is safe in harbor but that's not what ships are for. - William Shedd

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance. - Samuel Butler

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear - Mark Twain

Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation. Emile Lahud

Every moment of resistance to temptation is a victory. Frederick William Faber

I asses the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures, and knows how to turn its advantage.- Friedrich Nietzsche

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. -Sun Tzu

To fly we have to have resistance. - Maya Lin

What is to give light must endure burning. - Viktor Frankl

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure. - Mevlana Rumi

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. -Winston Churchill

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be un-lived, but if faced with courage, meed not be lived again. - Maya Angelou

Courage is the discovery that you may not win, and trying when you know you can lose. - Tom Krause

If we're growing, we're always going to be out of our comfort zone. - John Maxwell

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it. - Jesse Jackson.

And on THOSE notes, I close this week, the week of hearts and flowers, the invention of the teddy bear and chrysalis on inspiration by Madame Butterfly, with this, that said of Christopher Robin to Pooh, the most zen Teddy Bear of our time and written by A. A. Milne ~

Promise me you'll always remember - You're braver than you believe and stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.

~Lady