A Courageous Heart

"A brave person is a yogi who will withdraw all the senses inwardly and try to realize the inner purity. By watching others, we have lost ourselves and lost our inner purity. With yoga practice, you slowly get detached from everything and look inside and try to realize the purest form within." ~ R. Sharath Jois 

The act of simply stepping onto our yoga mat takes courage. It is here where we often come face to face with our greatest fears, our past hurts, and our most deeply stored emotions.  To address these things takes a courageous heart. Yoga teaches us to bring our awareness deep within ourselves, to cultivate compassion and love for ourselves, and to maintain a steady, calm, and serene mind in the face of our greatest challenges. 

Each time you practice, you come closer to yourself. And when we get to know ourselves, then we truly begin to cultivate compassion for ourselves. The practice of ahimsa (non-harming) applies to social ethics and how we treat the world around us, but it also addresses how we use and treat our own body. Fighting through pain (true pain, as opposed to discomfort) or forcing our way into poses our bodies haven't opened up to yet only do damage. They create bad habits, samskaras, or marks, essentially, that get etched into our being and hold us back. Yoga helps us to erase those old marks by focusing on what lies deep within. 

I love balance poses for the single-pointedness that it insists we find. In a balance pose we address the practice of Dharana, in which we focus on a single point (a drishti) or a task, such as breathing.  With calm, focused concentration, we rid our minds of distractions, in other words, our thoughts. When our thoughts interrupt the steadiness of our mind, they also interrupt our physical balance.  Our physical body needs things for balance such as core strength, but it is our inner state that has the biggest impact. It is within, without thoughts from the external world, radiating from the very center of our heart, that we find our true courage and our strength.

Finding balance on the mat requires us to come to our center. It requires a steady mind, steady breath, and a steady gaze. When our world feels out of balance we tend to forget to breath. Yoga reminds us to find and mindfully use our prana, our life giving energy, and to direct it to the parts of our body that need it. Outside of our practice, it's easy to become overwhelmed by challenges and tasks. We forget to look within and remember what is truly important. Yoga teaches us to direct our energies mindfully and purposefully, sending it to things that need it and letting go of those things that do not.

In doing so, we begin to clear the clutter - in our mind and in our lives. We begin to build a strong, steady, and clear, mind.  With a clear, pure mind, we can accomplish anything. We will not falter when we come up against challenges. Instead, we will face them with serenity and calm.  Yoga invites us to focus our attention inward and to direct energy into those places of the body that need it. It shows us that our job is not to waste energy on things that are not ready to receive it but to send our energy to all that is open to it. We remember what is important when we draw inward and connect with our courageous heart. 

As we draw deeper into our practice, stripping away the veils of the external world that have covered our eyes, we may want to bring our new-found understanding to the rest of the world. When we are faced with resistance, especially from those we love or who are close to us, we may feel angry or disappointed that they won't see things our way...but this is where we must stop and remember all that yoga has already shown us. Our energy is wasted on those not ready to receive. "Your work is not to drag the world, kicking and screaming into a new awareness. Your job is simply to do your work...Sacredly, secretly, silently...and those with 'eyes to see and ears to hear' will respond." (The Arcturians)

~Namaste