My lovely Yoga teacher, Katchie Ananda, in San Francisco described Ganesha ( the god that creates and removes obstacles) like this one day in class:

Imagine you’re walking down your path and a big elephant comes and plops himself on it.  Now what are you going to do? You can’t go around him, you can’t push him out of your way and he’s too big to crawl over. You try yelling at him. You try asking him politely to please leave. He, of course, just watches you try all of these things that are completely futile with amusement. Finally, you are so tired you collapse and lay prostrate before him.  All of a sudden the elephant has disappeared….

So how do we translate this into real life?

Internal fires will keep us from the very things we want. What if you knew how to put them out?….

-Aurora