The work

I've been dealing with a certain level of stress for the past months. With the support of my partner and the encouragement from friends, I stepped up my game as a yoga teacher. I completed my registration with Yoga Alliance, as a school to provide teacher trainings, and rolled out the first retreat under the program in August.

There were a myriad of challenges and emotions that came up whilst doing this. Many of which were my own judgements, attachments, and projections. I finally decided that the best thing to do would be to hold off doing the retreat. I needed to take a step back to get more clarity on what was actually happening, before embarking on the project again.

Ram Dass often writes, that the way to conquer what the ego mind is feeding us, is to make it the servant and not the master. In order to train the mind to recognise its place, we must first understand what traps us, how it traps us and why it traps us. He says suffering is grace...

It is a lot of work. I'm constantly tripping over and finding myself starting over, because it is easier to just allow emotions to take the reigns. It is easier to let our minds drag us into a thick soup of anger, fear, guilt, shame, despair. We get buried by an avalanche of emotions and we can't come up for air. We can't be quiet enough to separate the present situation from our past regrets, or the nervous future.

So we let attachments and fears dictate our reactions. We reject the notion of letting things be in the flow, because to follow the path of least resistance is often to wallow in judgement and blame, in self and in others. And the harder we try to push these "negativities" away (because it's the "right thing to do") and find justifications for our less than desirable reactions, the more we contract and separate from being one with the universe, being connected to the beings we care for, being Love.

So this is my work now. To keep practising opening my heart, and allowing it to break over and over again. To understand that it's not about pushing away pain but to be with the suffering, and act from the place of equanimity - not indifference nor vindications. To polish the mirror of the heart, and see truth from the place of Love.