Tag Archives: spirituality

Being Self-full

Walk the path the universe laid out for you. Stay focused. Stay humble. Stay determined. Trust your body. Trust your intuition. Trust your decisions. Trust your intelligence. Respect your own boundaries. Don’t lie to yourself or to anyone else.

These are all the things that I find very hard to do. Yet, everytime I do them, they set me back on track to being my best self to MYSELF.

Our relationship with ourselves is the foundation of all our relationships; how we treat ourselves is how we treat everyone and everything outside of ourselves. More importantly, how we treat ourselves is how we allow others to treat us.

So, the best way to shift our life’s projectile is to make the change at the core of “how” we are with ourselves. Everything else adjusts accordingly.

The Role of Fear in Yoga

You are being challenged by our environment to adapt. You are being asked to grow your sixth sense– your intuition. But, when you try to listen to your intuition, you notice that you are being bombarded with messages from an overly anxious friend– your mind.

Most of these messages are junk, repetitive cautions. So, how do you know what is just habitual mental noise and what is intuition? You have to start challenging the noise.

When you begin carefully examining your mental noise, you notice that most of the noise is just the mind’s way of protecting you from either real, potential, or least likely dangers.

The real and potential may be valid. It is the least likely that you must challenge. Because, as you challenge the least likely messages, they lose their power. The mind simply (albeit slowly) learns that these messages are pointless, so it stops producing them.

As with any case, when the noise lessens, the silence heightens. In that silence, you begin discerning intuition from mind. Hence, becoming silent enough to listen is key.

This is what we are doing in yoga through meditation. You are intuition, your mind is, well…the mind. As you practice watching the mind, you are separating yourself from the mind. How? By not responding to everything it says.

You are allowing the mind to speak, but you are not doing as it commands (unless it’s cautioning about real danger in the moment). Instead, you are just watching.

As soon as you do as it says, you become one again. The more you let it speak without reacting, the more you become aware of your separation from your mind. Your ability to act autonomously from the mind increases.

So far, you had done what the mind had said to do. Now, you are doing different from the mind’s command. You are separating the servant (yourself) from the old master (mind). You become aware of yourself as the new master and the mind as your servant.

Why There is No Hustle in Yoga

The difference between a student and a non-student is that a non-student is trying to achieve something and a student is trying to achieve nothing. A student has one understanding: nothing can be achieved. A student knows that there is nothing to be achieved. A student has tried and learned this. She is simply allowing the teachings to be absorbed as they come. There is no hustle about it!

Becoming a Student is a Milestone

Becoming a student is a very important milestone. We aren’t born a student. We have to reach that state and it’s reached naturally. After we’ve tried all our tactics and cleverness and realized that nothing is working. Nothing is working to satisfy that deep deep longing in the heart.

It is after we are burned and burned and burned some more from all our avidya (ignorance of truth) that we reach a point of surrender. We may have cooked (metaphorically) for lifetimes until we are finally done and want the truth and nothing but the truth.

We reach a point when we say, “Money, sex, power, worldly knowledge, fame, respect, etc…nothing is doing it for me. I am not here for all these things, I am here for something else. There’s got to be more to this life.”

This is what makes us willing to drop it all and walk-in empty handed. This is when we are truly ready to receive that which CANNOT BE ACHIEVED.

So, first, we enter each day to become a student. Once we’ve fully surrendered to being a student, then the learning begins.

Life is About Becoming a Student

Life is about becoming a student– a student to life. You put down what you know and then relate to life as your teacher. You go in hungry and ready to receive whatever and however much will be given to you on that day. You bow your head and receive it. That is what being a student of life is about. 

Everyday you start from the beginning. You never go in knowing. You do this until you become a student. You go in with an empty stomach because you’ve dropped all the worldly knowledge and beliefs. A student is an empty vessel who’s willing to put aside every knowledge that doesn’t align with life, the teacher. 

So, you go into class with an empty stomach. Where is this classroom? The classroom is called life. You are a student to life and life is the classroom.