Change

February 2022

Winter beckons us to slow down, to rest, and to nourish ourselves deeply in preparation for the next season’s uncoverings and growth.  Has it been easy for you to do less?  Were you able to make peace with short days, dark nights and cold, all of which encourage us to hunker down in a relative hibernation? Or do you make war with WHAT IS, complaining about the weather, craving the light, and essentially steeping in an attitude of general discontent?  No one is immune to feeling a bit dragged down by being in an atmosphere that makes it more difficult to feel free.  These days the flip-flops sit in the back of the closet, while we wake earlier to make sure we have time to scrape the windshield.  When you can’t just jump in the car, roll the windows down and be on your merry way, life can seem more like work than pleasure. 

Sadly, many people live their lives with some level of underlying dissatisfaction.  Maybe we curse the weather as the rain starts again.  Or we attempt to fill an unconscious sense of lack with material goods.  Perhaps we are shelling out beaucoup bucks to Stop aging already!  None of this is wrong per se, but over time repeated thoughts create grooves, we end up slipping into the grooves more and more often, the grooves deepen, and it becomes a cycle on repeat.  This is how a thought turns into a belief.  The possibility of seeing life any other way becomes more remote, just as a body that has hardened into chronic misalignment is more difficult to bring back into healthy shape.  And so, we must be full of care with our thoughts, as they become our habitual ways of perceiving the world and have a strong effect on our realities.  Just as honing alignment in asana can change the physical form if done consistently for a long period of time, choosing different thought paths over and over and over again can shift your perspective and thus your entire experience of life.

This is when the slope gets slippery, because change is scary, uncomfortable, exceedingly difficult, and sometimes unwelcome.  THIS is what we practice for!  In our daily practice we work to replace the little insidious thoughts that seem harmless but certainly aren’t positive, we change the way we bear weight in our feet for better balance, we lengthen exhalations to calm the nervous system, we sit down and do nothing for a while to replenish our resources.  We keep showing up for ourselves so that we can tread a little lighter on this earth, be kinder to strangers, listen better, and ultimately to reside in contentment.  You can change negativity and discontent.  It’s not easy, but the results are certainly worth it.