Long term coming
There are very few moments in your life where you feel like the cosmos planned every thing up until that point so that you could be in that moment. The practice of yoga, mindfulness and being present is exactly about that. Up until now, I have only experienced yoga from the point of view of people trying to be hip and different. People trying to make a few extra dollars to exploit those who seek a sense of calm but I have been proved wrong.
Since I’ve been in Portland, I have been to five different yoga classes. All of them have been different types of yoga: Yin & Meditation, Hot Bikram Yoga, Hot Power Yoga, Power Vinyasa and Aerial Yoga. All in the span of 2 weeks and I have never been more challenged in my beliefs more. Being certain gives us pride and contentment. Once you are certain that something is the path for you, the certainty becomes your comfort blanket. To be able to make sense, you need to be certain. I think happiness does that to us, it makes us certain.
When my certainty was challenged due to heartache and fear and loss, I felt abandoned and lost. Yesterday, my yoga instructor said:
“Yoga is about building community. It is not about how much you can push yourself, it is about being present and accepting what your body is willing to do on that particular day. It is about being present and being compassionate.”
Something clicked in me when I heard it. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know how it came to be that. By nature, anything that cannot be proven scientifically is gobbledygook to me. However, to be truly open-minded, I need to be able to look beyond my biases, to feel compassion for those I disagree with. See the comfort that even the most misguided notions provide to those who hold them. The true of freedom of mind comes from being certain of the uncertainty.
It is so good to be wrong about your beliefs that we constantly overlook that joy. Being wrong means you have a chance to grow out of your old skin. True transformation and change is only possible when you and your beliefs are challenged. It is hard to do when everyone around you speaks the same language, reiterate the same ideologies and constantly pats themselves on the back for choosing the right path. The definition of right then varies from person to person. This is the downfall of human consciousness: the inability to acknowledge that everyone has blindspots.
(As a side note, I am probably wrong because most of us and given most of the time will be proved wrong.)
For reasons I am unable to fully comprehend yet, I have slowly become accustomed to living under the shadows of my blindspots. My biggest ones have been my trust and my faith in people. In the wrong people usually. One night, I was thinking about certain people who got a lot of leeway from me.
What would I say to my friends if they told me about these people? Rather, what would I honestly think in my gut about the situation?
Once you step out of things happening to you and try to see them without your emotions being tangled up: somehow, things become clearer. Right things are often hard to do: eating healthy, going to the gym, being kind to people who hate you, being there for people when you have a lot of shit going on, stop being inside your head and start to empathise with others that they are stuck too. That is what living is all about.
Yeah, we all want to eat junk all day, lay on our asses, be completely self-involved, get drunk and make stupid decisions. We want those things because those things are easy to do and not actually the fact that we want them. A lot of times, I have entangled what I want with what is easy. That is why it is important to make less choices and focus less on wants and more on longterm goals. You can always eat a piece of chocolate or a scoop (ahem, 1/3 jar) of peanut butter to make yourself feel better but, the truth is: this has never worked.
Why do you think it might be different today?
“Life breaks us. Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”
- Oathbringer, Brandon Sanderson