Being With What Is
If you are on my Instagram page, you may have noticed most every post for BunnyDog Yoga centers around the theme, What does a Yogi do….???
It has been my intention to show that people who do or even teach yoga are just normal people doing everyday things. I cook, play in my garden, serve my church, all while struggling with yoga poses and a lifestyle that brushes up against the 8-Fold Path. Not to say that the path of a yogi is not special because in many ways it is. Having been on this path for over a decade now, I can safely say it is not for everyone, but in many ways it is.
Being a yogi is simply one who does yoga or is on a mystical/spiritual life following the practices of a yogi lifestyle. In the western world we casually toss that word around as someone who takes yoga classes. Instructors will often refer to their student body as yogis in a tender and endearing way. We don’t like to think of there being any hierarchical structure on the path of yoga; we are all wounded birds trying to fly back home. The real guru is yourself, the person at the head of the class is just the one who wrote the sequence of yoga poses. I promise my students will teach me more than I ever teach them. For that I am eternally grateful.
What does a yogi do on a Wednesday afternoon? She loses thousands of brain cells trying to create a vlog and get it loaded onto her social media pages and website. I am soooo not equipped to do this technological stuff, but I muddled through and only had to call in tech support, i.e., my husband, at the very end (and even he will admit he had to dig deep to find my answer to a loading problem). I decided today that I will have to create and load one vlog a day until I get the process down. LOL! This is hard, it shouldn’t be this hard.
This brings me to one of my steps on this yogic path, being with what is. I believe that suffering comes from having an expectation of what should be and not accepting what is. We cannot make any changes on a personal, local, or global level until we are with what currently exists and then restructure it into something better.
Having an expectation for an outcome or the overwhelming “it should be…” towards life is like living with clinched fists all the time. You have no room to receive with a clinched fist. I offer a sequence in my chair classes where we clinch our fists very tightly and hold them there. I encourage my students to summon any aspect of ill being that comes to mind. Maybe they just got a letter from the IRS, maybe someone made a snarky comment on their social media page, maybe the conversation didn’t go well with your family member. Whatever is most present in mind can be dredged up and felt again getting very present with the emotion. We hold this for several breaths (which we notice get short and stutter-y). Then we completely release our hands. We notice the fingers do not uncurl on their own; we have let go of the emotion, but the hand is still not willing to receive anything else. We do this three times and then I encourage everyone to shake their hands strongly. “Shake it Off!”, in the words of Taylor Swift! Once we are present with what is we can move it through the body, release it, and, using guidance from your higher power, allow a re-write. I promise the solution will come to you, but not with clinched fists.
This is the power of yoga. This is how we process the good and the bad from a day. We take the time to stop, listen, move, and breathe. Collectively we need to stop. Stop moving so fast, stop trying so hard, stop believing more is better. The body is begging you to stop and let it catch up to your brilliant mind. Can you be with what is in love and compassion? It may take several steps to get there but that is the only way we can create change. It must be with and through the power of love.
I’m going to take the difficulty I had today from working on my website on a long walk with my husband. No doubt the rhythmic movement and deep breathing will make it all better and tomorrow when I try again, I will have a kinder mindset and much better results. It’s what a yogi does.
