When life feels like it’s moving at a hundred miles per hour, there’s a need to slow down. Or stop. Completely stop. In today’s world, there rarely seems to be opportunity to take a breath and notice what’s happening around us. We wake up, get ready for work, respond to a million requests, crawl home, work out, cook dinner, watch TV for an hour or two, sleep, and do it all again the next day. Of course, this is all largely necessary for the world we are in but, for many of us, it’s far from conducive to a healthy and fulfilling existence. Especially when faced with personal challenges which we simply don’t have time to tend to.
According to the yoga traditions, self-awareness is a mental faculty that we developed to find happiness and meaning in the mystery of life. Somehow, it’s a far cry from the holes we often find ourselves in. Yet the mind is a powerful tool that benefits from regular maintenance so that we can use it to gain more clarity, greater perspective and ultimately, make healthy choices for our lives.
When we’re moving quickly, like being on a fast train, we don’t have time to see everything clearly. We might be able to notice what’s in the distance for a while but rarely are we able to focus on what’s close for very long at all. As we keep going, we collate information about the journey but by the time we get to our destination, we have a very limited picture of the whole. So, when we tell the story of our journey, it’s the story of what we’ve seen and what we’ve paid attention to, rather than the account in its fullness. In the same way, constant movement in our lives disrupts the mind without giving it time to see clearly in the here and now. And the stories we tell are based on how we make sense of what we see, which, as we’ve probably all experienced, isn’t always how things actually are.
Just consider a disagreement you’ve ever had where you are both seeing the same situation completely differently. Different life experiences are crystalised as lessons into our personal belief and value system time and time again, leading us to very different conclusions over what’s important.
The primary principle of yoga is to find stillness to allow the mind a chance to settle and see things for what they really are. The process is often likened to a stormy ocean settling to complete stillness. The waves represent all the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and reinforcing actions that create turbulence in our lives. When we start to witness the activity in our mind as a compassionate observer, something shifts in our perspective. We’re able to notice parts of ourselves that needed more love and nurture them toward healing. And slowly, steadily, the stormy waters pass into spaciousness that holds it all.
Stay tuned for more on the mind stuff next Saturday. In the meantime, why not keep in touch on Instagram?