“An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates, as quoted by Plato
While I do not believe that an unexamined life is not worth living, I do believe that living an “examined” life – a life that is grounded in reflection and introspection – is an infinitely more rewarding way to live. In fact, with tongue firmly in cheek, one of my dearest friends and I often say that neither of us is remotely at risk of living an unexamined life.
Your life is made up of your moments
When I pause to think about our little inside joke, I realize that living an “examined life” is the single greatest way that yoga has changed my life. Yoga’s constant message that the only thing that matters is this one precious moment reminds me that my life and its meaning is made up of a billion such moments. And 99% of the time, “this one precious moment” would be deemed insignificant if you looked at it across the sweep of a lifetime.
If asked, I’d have to say that this is also the most transformative impact that spirituality has had on my life. My spiritual practices have taught me that if I pause, pay attention, and ponder, I can find a depth of meaning and richness in every single moment of every single day. Even the moments that seem meaningless and uninteresting hold gifts that I could easily miss if I wasn’t paying attention.
Practicing can help you to pay more attention to your moments
It is probably because I first wandered into a yoga class just as I was beginning to explore the world of spirituality, that I have always approached both yoga and spirituality as practices. A practice, to me, is something you show up and “do” regularly in the hopes that it will take root in you and change the way you are living and experiencing your life.
What do these practices look like? I unroll my yoga mat many times a week. I sit down to read and write in my journal just as often. Both practices offer me a little quiet within the hubbub of my regularly scheduled life, a little time turned inward to sense my priorities, my yearnings, and my connection to something greater than myself, and a little space to gain a more generous perspective than my own narrow point of view.
It is important to note that I do not show up to practice yoga or spirituality to get better at doing yoga or to become a spirituality “expert.” To borrow an illustration from Elizabeth Lesser, these practices are like practicing the piano. You don’t play your scales to get better at playing scales. You play scales to develop control, adroitness and deftness of touch so that you can make beautiful music. My practices of yoga and spirituality are meant to help make me more graceful at living this life of mine.
We don’t practice to get better at practicing. We practice to get better at living.
Though these two practices of mine require me to step out of the hustle and bustle of my life for a few minutes most days, every gift I receive from them is meant to be brought back into life and living. When I learn to be patient with myself on my mat, what I have really learned is to be patient with the people I love. When I get a glimpse of God’s goodness in a moment of pain or sorrow – one I read about or one of my own that I explore in my journal – I become less resistant to the idea of my life taking a turn that seems impossibly challenging.
Practices like this are self-fulfilling prophecies
The transformation that occurs because of both my yoga and spirituality practices is slow motion change. Honestly, it can be almost imperceptible – at least until I surprise myself by being less reactive and more accepting in a moment that would have thrown “old me” for a major loop. Moments like this are great for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it is pretty awesome to catch yourself acting a little “enlightened.” Being able to think, “Look at me go!” feels great.
Beyond those little ego boosts, though, there is a greater good in moments when I surprise myself by acting like my yoga and spirituality practices are “working.” These moments keep me coming back to my practices! Both yoga and spirituality are self-fulfilling prophecies. Once you get started, you will quickly see changes, in part because both practices strengthen your “paying attention” muscles. Noticing changes feels good, which inspires you to practice more, which leads to more change, which leads to more practice … and so it goes.
I hope that living an examined life is contagious
It is exactly moments like this that I write about in these essays of mine. Little moments –both incidental and profound – that have allowed me to glimpse yoga and spirituality at work in my regular, everyday life. Writing these essays is good for me in the same way that writing in my journal is good for me – doing so allows me to unpack moments that feel “charged” but that could easily sail right by if I wasn’t paying attention.
But mostly I write these essays in hopes that one of my moments might make you notice a similar moment in your own life. And, when you do that, you might enter into a self-fulfilling prophecy of your own where your noticing leads to practice, which leads to more noticing until – suddenly – you find yourself at no risk at all of living an unexamined life. Rather, you are living an examined life where every single moment feels precious and rich with meaning.
“It’s the little things that are infinitely the most important.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle