I just hosted a week long luxury yoga vacation in Italy. But when I asked people for feedback about the “best” part of the trip it wasn’t our hotel spa, the incredible Renaissance art, or even my yoga classes — Ha!

What people told me they appreciated the most was being immersed in a group of amazing fellow yogis, all dedicated to having a positive outlook.

So many people told me, “I need more of this!” (If you’re curious about retreats, join me in San Diego this September).
While our trip was amazing, not every single little thing went perfectly on our Italian vacation.

Luggage was lost. Flights were delayed. Trains stopped for no reason. Meals took a long time to arrive. Someone fell off a bike.
But everyone in our group stayed in “the Yoga Zone.”

People stayed patient, pleasant and POSITIVE.

This made it a joy to travel together and explore.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to be more positive about whatever is going on in your life at this moment.

1. Get Grateful

2. Stay Positive

3. Cultivate Patience

Watching my last Italian sunset with a cappuccino in hand, I felt a tidal wave of happiness coming off the success of the retreat. Everyone told me the trip far exceeded their expectations. So it felt like bucket of cold water hurled in my face when I woke up at 4:30am to discover:

a) My flight home had been cancelled
b) I was rescheduled to fly out of a completely different Italian city over an hour away
c) I wouldn’t get home until 6 hours later than expected with a very long layover in Germany

Years ago, pre-yoga, this kind of situation would have made me pretty mad. I’d have felt victimized. Yelled at the airline (which actually never even phoned or informed me). I’d have felt a lot of frustration that my post-retreat yoga high was forced to come to a halt so quickly.

Instead, I practiced staying positive.

As opposed to focusing on the inconvenience, I focused on the fact the timing of the next train I had to take was far enough away that I had time to do a 7-minute forward fold (one of my all-time favorite restorative stretches).

I decided my unexpectedly long layover would enable me to finish all my accounting and paperwork from the trip, so I’d arrive home feeling even more settled and organized.

I continued to think about how lucky I was to be arriving home TODAY at all, as opposed to tomorrow or next week.

Yoga teaches us that our natural state is BLISS. We are always happy at deepest core, but our ever-wavering monkey-mind blurs the tranquility we all have beneath the surface of what’s going on.

Each moment, we have the choice to focus on the positive and stay blissed-out, or spiral into negativity.

Yoga philosophy reminds us that every challenging situation is an opportunity to work through our Karma and arrive closer to our big purpose in life. We can move through difficult moments kicking-and-screaming, or we choose to let the ups-and-downs recommit us to our practice and balance the positive mind.

Focus on the positive things in your life. Get creative. Uncover the positive aspects of the negative.

Need positivity and support right now? Try out my members-only community, Uplifted, today for free. ==> https://www.brettlarkin.com/uplifted/