A Letter To Me

The 6:05 Standing Split

My dear,

Not quite the perfect "6 O'Clock", and looking more like a 6:05 on most days,
this IS your Standing Split. Remember the first time you stepped onto your yoga mat? You could barely reach past your shins, let alone grab your ankles with both hands and KISS your shin. When you signed up for teacher training, there was nothing in the training manual about being 'perfect', visually nor spiritually.

With the explosion of yoga on social media, it's pretty easy to be sucked into the trap of wanting to 'look' perfect. Remember why you practice in the first place. Do you practice to express, or to impress?

Yoga is not a be-all-end-all practice to gain mastery in something. Some days you make progress, and some days you regress - learn to be okay with it. Embrace the flux and uncertainties, ride the highs, laugh at the lows, and let the authenticity of the practice reveal itself.

The daily practice of yoga creates tapas (heat). This deep, internal heat that burns away the "could have's" and the "should have been's" will eventually make space for a deeper and more personal exploration. Learn to trust the journey, and remain open to what might be.

After all, darling, you were born to be real, not to be perfect.

xoxo

Ignite My Fire

Inversions.... I absolutely love them.


Once you find your tipping point and stay effortless in an inversion, there's just something so endearing yet quirky, in looking at the world the other way up.

The miles you put into staying in an effortless inversion don't come free. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've fallen down from Sirsasana straight into Savasana, when I first started my yoga practice!  The countless (and frustrating) times you fall down, is just part of the journey of awakening, to what is happening within the body and the mind.


This feeling of awakening, is what is called "tapas" (or heat). This is not necessarily a physical heat but more of a metaphorical burning.  


"When people first experience tapas, there is often a sense of discomfort, a desire to squirm away from the situation because it is so authentic; it is as if a border of life is being eaten away by fire.  But if we stick with the observational practice, if we do not run away when we reach the juncture where tapas first arises.... there is a residue of clarity and relief that is discernable in the breath and is actually felt in the body.  Our very own body, which is immediately available to us, becomes a laboratory of consciousness, a field of exploration into the truth of our own existence, so that, our body becomes a temple for open awareness" - Richard Freeman, in The Mirror of Yoga.

Do you remember your first tapas experience?