THIS OR THAT? ALL OR NOTHING?
OCTOBER 21, 2009: Just like you my every day provides endless opportunities to make healthy choices. Recently I have been trying to decide whether I should sell my house or not and I could see myself weigh out the options in a growing dualistic way of “This or That”. My thoughts started to overdramatize my reaction to this potential change. I was seeing the change as an All or Nothing scenario where selling my house was going to mean something was taken away from me and I’d end up with nothing.
Well as a result of my yoga practice I came to the realization that LIFE IS ABOUT ADDITION, NOT ABOUT SUBTRACTION.
Every change we encounter whether difficult or easy ADDS to what we already know and we get progressively smarter. Thank goodness for our humanness whereby each day, each moment adds to our life’s blessings and our story gets richer. We see this in class in how we grow our knowledge of a pose, even something as fundamental as Downward Facing Dog. Yes Dog pose is challenging yes it does get easier but the real blessing is how precious the learning is as we evolve our consciousness in this pose. And to think every pose is like that.
You see I was getting stuck thinking I have to keep subtracting stuff from my life when making decisions and the concept of “All or Nothing” was weighing heavy on me. But every experience every choice we make just adds to the All. So in reality, it is not All or Nothing….in a nondualistic way it is always ALL or ALL.
I shared this epiphany this increased awareness with a friend and they said this to me in response, “I think you are making progress in your thinking regarding adding things to life...I mean, it is not about complicating so much as enabling more growth.” It is about having the courage to face our lives directly and not make it all this or that but embrace more. That practice of saying to ourselves I will be 10% kinder today or 10% more peaceful or 10% more loving or 10% better Downward Dog. As my friend reminded me “at some point, one would think that you would hit the maximum limitation for kindness, but no, you can keep expanding, growing, increasing.”
So today with warrior spirit face your choices, make your decisions seeing that they will only ADD to your life. Even our pains, our limitations and those things that scare us are opening us up to more possibilities. So keep adding, keeping living, keep breathing bigger! Big love in ALL ways, Silvia