As I sit down to write this the first thought in my head is how can we be here already?? It seems like we blew through 2010, at least this morning it does. At times in the last year it has felt as if I would never get through the day let alone the year. There were hard days, yes but looking back today I see that I made it through and came out the other side stronger and better than when I walked through the door of 2010. In light of all the changes and things that happened in the last year so much happened it seems unreal that it was only one year. Perspective, perception very interesting things. Then this morning I got an email with a quote in it and I just felt this sense of resonance and found myself nodding my head. "What you see is real - but only on the particular level to which you've developed your sense of seeing. You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving." Wynn Bullock.
This just confirmed for me what I woke up feeling this morning, I have the choice to look back with a sense of respect and awe at what I learned this last year or I can tell the story that it was hard and I am so glad it is over. I feel a little bit of both but in reality I am in awe that I can on this day look back at times when I remember feeling that I was hanging on by just a couple of finger nails and hoping that they didn't break while I was hanging and see that it truly brought me to such a better place. Those experiences brought me right to the space I am today and I wouldn't be here with the appreciation, gratitude, respect, and sense of wonder and joy I have without every single one of them. Attitude is everything... I learned that many years ago while playing sports and over the years I have relearned it several times. Today however I have a different understanding of just how true that little sentence is and I have a sense of awareness that I have never had before.
Moving forward I have the opportunity to expand my reality beyond anything it has ever been. I know that I will stumble along the way, I will have days where I am not plugged in as well as I could be and I will strive to remember that each and every experience brings me something to learn about myself and the world I move through every single day. I have the choice to make it be something positive and life affirming or hard and scary. Just like learning a new yoga pose, it is all about approach. If you approach a new pose with the attitude that it will be hard and you bring perfection expectations along with it, well it will be hard and you very well may not meet those expectations. As I tell all of my yoga students, we all have to start at the beginning, none of us really knew how to do yoga before we started practicing. Yoga is never about comparing yourself to someone else or competing with yourself, it is a humbling, expanding, ever changing and growing experience with yourself. It is about more than just the physical body and the asana's and it has a habit of creeping up in your life without you sometimes realizing that you just pulled some lesson you learned on the mat into your daily life off the mat. Approaching a new pose with the attitude that you may very well stumble, fall, feel frustration and wonder if you will ever "get it" opens you up to learn, have fun and laugh along with asking yourself to move outside your comfort zone. Now if I can do that in yoga on my black mat I can certainly do that in my every day life too.
Giving up attachment to a certain outcome is amazing and freeing. Like doing half moon pose for me is amazing and freeing and like flying. That was my least favorite pose to learn at first and it is now my favorite. There is a sense of openness in my heart and body that no other pose really gives me. It is all about expansion in the pose, expanding open with the front of the body, letting the heart revolve open, drawing energy up the standing leg and sending it through the body and drawing the lifted leg outward, expanding away from the body. Now taking that and looking at life, it would be easy to collapse inward with pain and disappointment, close your heart, contract into yourself. It takes the same amount of effort to do that as it does to expand and open and lift. It is all about energy, drawing it in, sending it through the body. What feels better, expanding or contracting? Speaking for myself expansion wins every single time. Every single time I have offered up expansion and openness in my poses I have been met with such a free feeling and my body has changed and embraced it when I allowed it to. Applying that off the mat has brought me the same experience. Amazing things and people have moved into my life with expansion and openness and allowing..... Ah the key word here being "allowing"...
We can as thinking, intelligent beings think up all sorts of things, dreams, wishes, hopes, best case scenarios if you will but if we do not move into the allowing space it will never come to pass. So for 2011 instead of getting bogged down in the hows and the whens of what it is you want to bring into your life, define what you want in terms of the end result. Live every day as if your deepest desires have come to you, be open, allow and create space and expansion. Remember that attitude is everything, it takes the same amount of energy to expand as it does to contract and trust that you will know in your deepest heart what is right for you in any given moment if you allow yourself to listen and be present. Take the lessons that you have learned in the last year and bring the ones forward that resonate and let go of everything else. Most of all allow yourself to love and be loved every single moment of every single day.
Happy New Year!
Namaste
