No good deed goes unpunished?

Have you ever felt as though no good deed goes unpunished? I have lately. My quest now is to find some lessons to be learned....without having to wait until my next lifetime for the good karma to (hopefully) find its way back to me.

For the last year or so since buying a villa and turning it into a yoga retreat center, my days are a hodgepodge of running our yoga retreat center in the Caribbean from Boston, leading yoga retreats on St. John, raising money to support the charitable work we do for families of fallen firefighters and wounded troops, promoting my new book and building an on-line community for the book's authors, planning the fall 2009 trip for wounded soldiers to the retreat center, establishing our charitable organization as a formal "non-profit 501c3 organization" and working on my next book.

Unfortunately, all of these activities barely produce enough money to cover the cost of the yoga retreat center. This gets stressful, even with my yoga and meditation practice.

I continue to remind myself the words of my yoga teacher, Diane, "Do the practice and all will fall into place."

Do these words apply to those of us who are spend a disproportionate amount of time on unpaid work relative to our cost of "existing"? Doesn't quite seem rational that it would. And yet my heart keeps telling me the financial stress will somehow resolve itself.

I've tried manifesting, praying, and chanting mantras for prosperity and of course every marketing strategy know to the modern world- but the financial situation has only marginally improved. And yet I still feel a sense that sometime in the future things just HAVE to get easier. Is that feeling the positive side effect of my yoga practice, does my yoga offer me that inner knowing that I will be "ok" somehow, sometime? Or perhaps just knowing that things will get easier makes me ok RIGHT NOW.

So short of having Yoga in America selected as the next Oprah's Book Club Pick...I will probably be in this situation for a little while longer, so I might as well learn some lessons.

What can I learn? Well I'm not sure about the lessons to be learned yet...so for now I'll remind myself of some things that I've been taking for granted while wallowing in financial self-pity:

1. I'm alive, healthy and upright at this moment.
2. I have my yoga practice and it feels good...plus it doesn't cost anything to roll out my mat
3. This too shall pass...
4. I have a roof over my head and a meal on the table
5. I can get around just fine without a car (I sold it last summer to pay the mortgage during a month that was particularly tough...obviously, this was before I knew our new president would bail us all out of our mortgages :-) )
6. Not buying new yoga clothes hasn't had any negative impact on my yoga practice...who knew I didn't NEED new lululemon pants every month!
7. Being on a tight budget while running a business has "forced" me to learn a bunch of new skills - web design, wiring the villa for cable TV, cooking for 13 people for 7 nights, planning weddings, cleaning swimming pools, using a tile cutter and countless other power tools.
8. I'm alive, breathing and healthy at this moment too.

Ok, back to work....

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