You have a goal and that is your long-term aspiration. Perhaps it’s to be happy and stand in good relation to the world around you, to be rich so you don’t have to worry about your standing, to conquer a particular area of knowledge or activity and earn recognition to ensure your standing, or simply to live an uncluttered, peaceful life, wherein you gain enough inner peace and enlightenment not to even care about your standing. Your targets are projected landmarks in time with potentially measurable results, the achieving of which you expect to draw you closer to your goal — mastering a specific yoga posture, for example, getting a particular job, reaching a certain profitability in a business, or passing an exam. Then you have your threats. These are all factors that threaten to prevent you achieving your targets — whether it’s the weather, other people’s agendas, ill-health or other possibly unforeseen contingencies. Finally, you have your remedies, the measures you take to counter or prevent the threats. These comprise both the requisite mundane countermeasures to keep your temporal plates spinning externally and, more crucially, internal adjustments to your own state of mind and energetic flow, to enable you to attain the inner balance and clarity necessary to realign your vision with your goal, when the threats, potential or actual, have temporarily obfuscated that vision. No matter how apparently complex the mundane details in need of attention, the internal readjustment process remains consistently simple. For a few moments in the midst of activity, stop whatever you’re doing, mentally relax your muscles and sinews, lengthen your spine, broaden your shoulders and pelvis, desist from holding your breath, soften your chest and breathe freely, allowing your belly to expand with the inhalation and contract with the exhalation. Let all thoughts about your situation and condition drift and be momentarily empty of self. Draw your. point of gazing out at the world back from your eyeballs into the center of your brain, between and behind your eyes, equidistant between your ears. Envisage your goal clearly and tell yourself, "I can do this!" and you will.
