Many of my students wonder if the still mind promised by yoga would be boring. It's a fair question. After all, everything feeling we have - from happy dances to the exhaustion of grief - makes life worth living. So I promise them (and you) that yoga doesn't eliminate feelings, but it will calm those all-consuming feelings that steal us away from the moment and from our ability to be our best selves.
My dogs are always 100% curious and excited to discover what is on the other side of any gate - even one we walk through every day. They might be onto something. Ask yourself - what if I did not assume I know what is going to happen next? What if I gave myself the thrilling space to wonder and to be surprised? Couldn’t that help us to savor every moment of these precious lives of ours?
Is there something you hate doing, yet somehow find yourself doing it again and again? Like grooves on a record, habits keep us singing the same old song. With practice we can smooth away these habits to free ourselves to sing any song we want. Creating new habits is not a quick-fix. In fact, it can take a lifetime. In the wise words of Glennon Doyle, “luckily a lifetime is exactly how long we have.”
Tomorrow is the winter solstice - the day of the year that the darkness most outweighs the light. Perhaps this would be the perfect day for us to pause and notice all the flickering lights - metaphoric or actual - shining steadily in our midst. Perhaps tomorrow would be a perfect day to light some candles or a fire in the fireplace to feel cozy and held in the metaphoric or real-life darkness of the day. Merry Yuletide!
It's a busy time of year and you might be feeling overwhelmed or distracted. Which means that that this is a good time of year to remember that your life is made up of your moments. Even moments that seem meaningless and uninteresting hold gifts that you could easily miss if you aren't paying attention. Why not embrace a practice that helps you get better at noticing each moment so that the holidays - and (egads!) your life - don't fly right by you?
I hope you are basking in the grateful after-glow of a happy thanksgiving day. In that spirit, I offer you a different, super-simple take on a gratitude practice. It involves nothing other than holding still for a moment. Pause to soak in everything about the moment you are experiencing. There is nothing like holding still and paying attention to allow you to feel the thrill of being alive. And when you're thrumming with aliveness like that, any day can be a day you're grateful to be alive.
Just when I thought I'd heard all of my husbands childhood stories, he surprised me with one he'd never shared before. 99.9% of the time we simply do not know the whole story and it is likely that we are filling in many gaps. The same is true of everyone else. Is it any wonder we misunderstand one another so often? If we can allow others to surprise us more often life will be much richer. We can start with the folks we see every single day.
For a week or two each autumn, my morning walk with the dogs is in synch with the dawn. Watching the sun come up can change your whole state of mind. But the thing about dawn is that if you’re not paying attention you can easily miss it. If you, like me, are considering how you might rearrange some furniture or are pondering what meals sound good for the coming week, you can look up and realize with some surprise that it’s no longer dark. You will have missed out on the power that the outer world has to change your inner world.
It's fairly easy to let go of control and allow life to go as it will go when everything's going great as it was for me on a recent pretty-perfect fall getaway. It turns out this is much harder to do when things aren't going at all the way you'd hoped they'd go.