After many years of practising yoga I can usually find peace within a class, despite possible obstacles like the style of yoga taught, what the teacher says, the music or a pose held. However, I’m still challenged regularly by things in everyday life. For instance, as I sit here writing, my neighbour has started up his leaf blower. While I know I should just breathe through it, or better still not even notice it, I can feel my frustration rise and I become tense. Leaf blowers and barking dogs are particular triggers for me!
I can smile at it, though, and recognise it immediately as a perceived obstacle, and I can choose to react or not. Some days I manage not to and some days I don’t. I know that it’s only a challenge because I have let it become so.
Do you ever find yourself sitting in a yoga class feeling annoyed by the heat, the choice of music or the length of a pose? Or perhaps you’re frustrated with the teacher or the person next to you?
It’s so easy to feel one or more of these things, especially as a beginner. Each of these thoughts is a judgement or opinion and each time we have one of these it takes us away from being present and away from our heart and into our ego. This re-establishes our mind’s beliefs and habitual thought patterns, and in doing so, we are restricted in our growth and expansion into more positive and free states of being.
Do you ever feel frustrated by the traffic or annoyed by a work colleague or family member? These repeated reactions keep us locked into ourselves as we are now and have been in the past. It’s tricky not to be angry or frustrated, even if we know these reactions no longer serve us any benefit. The reaction can feel like walking a well-trodden path, almost like an addiction for the mind, and it takes not only awareness but also discipline to create new pathways of being.
Our enjoyment of yoga is an extension of our thoughts, and our experience of life is an extension of the inner workings of our mind. So it becomes all the more important to cultivate through yoga and meditation an open mind, full of space and beauty, presence and clarity…free from old habits and thoughts so that our practice and so too our life, can be all that it can be.
When practised properly, Yoga helps break down physical, energetic and mental obstacles that hold us back. It helps us to see and cultivate the divine, beautiful light that shines within us, and over time this light shines more brightly and more often. Yoga does not help us to transform into something we aspire to. Rather, it helps us become the truest version of ourselves.
In class we ask students to recognise their rising reaction to the heat or pose or sweaty, grunting neighbour, and to let it go rather than react to it. We need to see the emotion rising and see it as a challenge to our ego and just move past it. In life, too, we have this opportunity.
It’s a great thing if we are faced with challenge or perceived obstacles in class because it’s a chance to revisit the imagined impact of these limitations. Over time we learn to genuinely let them go and become more even tempered in class, and with a little more time we learn to do the same in life. Yoga on the mat is a great place to practice skills for yoga off the mat.
We react to certain things in life because we judge them with our mind as being either good or bad. The bad things make us agitated and the things we deem as good make us happy.
What we need to remember is that we are not our minds, or certainly don’t have to be. Our mind is made up of many things but our ego is often rampantly out of control and it’s through it that we see and judge life. If we can learn to detach ourselves from our mind and just be present to life’s happenings then we are a lot less likely to be reactive and more able to stay in the space of love and presence. The Buddha said, don’t try to become enlightened, just stop having opinions.
The easiest way to do this in class is to come back to your breath. Come back to taking in the surroundings of the class, the minutia of the moment so that our minds are full of the now: your breath, the sounds in and outside the room, the teacher’s voice, the air on your skin, clothes on your body, and so on. Like an artist taking in all the details of a scene before taking colour to brush and brush to canvas.
And as a regular practitioner, whether it’s in class or life, just come back to love. Whenever you fall into a judgement or opinion, you feel agitated or annoyed, just come back to your heart. Remember that feeling of falling in love, the overwhelming wave of goodness that we feel physically when in a space of love. Feel that, remember that. Cultivate that and hold that feeling in your heart and in your body. When you are truly in that space with presence, then very little can rattle your cage.
We can use yoga and meditation as a practice ground to cultivate stillness, and in doing so we give ourselves a chance to come back home, back to our centre, to our hearts and create a life from there. Free from old habits and beliefs that no longer serve our greatest good and letting ourselves shine with love. In doing so we set the moment and the future free. Through yoga we find the strength, confidence, presence and discipline to change our lives for the better.