The Complete Yoga Community

“Be the change you want to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi

I so often see people attending seminar’s or reading books on self-help or doing yoga and or meditation and expecting life to change for them. To some degree it will change, in the context of yoga, of course the body changes and all the blockages through emotional constipation can be released, and organs enhanced and mind enhanced, but when does real change happen?

Many people get caught in the trap that doing all these things is enough. Have you ever read a self-help book with a pen or highlighter and underlined almost everything because it was written just for you? But then, nothing in life really changed? Or read the book so slowly as to integrate all the information, all the pearls of wisdom, only for nothing to happen?

When I left New York I had a lot of stuff to go through, to either bring home with me or leave behind. One day I decided to do a ceremony for all my journals I had written over the 6 years there, there must have been about 9 of varying sizes. I couldn’t burn them in my teeny tiny Manhattan apartment, so I intended to tear them all up into tiny pieces! But I was super attached and started reading them all. To my horror, they all said the same thing! Year 1 of New York Experience lamented the same personal shortcomings as year 2 and year 5 and the aggravations of year 3 were the same as that of year 4, only the names and scenarios changed. My mouth gaping, I realized that despite the excellent technique of journaling, I had shifted absolutely nothing (perhaps that is the technique, to see one’s stuff repeating itself on paper?). So I tore up all my journals, save a few pages and resolved not to journal again but rather to do something about it…

This is how change happens, by changing something. I have heard the definition of crazy as “repeating the same thing over again but expecting different results”. In practical terms, it IS completely crazy to keep having the same arguments or discussions and expecting something in the relationship to change.

In yoga philosophy we are taught about samskaras or grooves in the mind. These are created through repetitive thinking patterns or habits. Like a sculptor slowly chipping away at stone to create a form, so we slowly create mental grooves that become our habitual internal dialogue. We have and continue to create our life experience. Once our record is set, all our record player can play is the tune we have created. If you have been creating hard rock it will be impossible to suddenly listen to classical music without changing the record. Changing the record will show you that all life is changing, and help you to flow in that uncertainty. Yoga and meditation are tools of awareness that can help you to eradicate the addiction to your familiar state of being, but with the awareness comes the need to respond, to change the habit of how you respond to life’s experiences.

SO, how to change the hard rock head-banging experience into what I am trying to allude to as a more peaceful experience of the internal dialogue? Get on the metaphoric yoga mat, practice yoga daily, and change is inevitable.

The truth is we can only change ourselves, but if you watch any dialogue you have with absolutely anyone, you might notice how much we are all trying to change everyone else, inadvertently giving our power away, and the result is misery because no one is changing.

The only way to change something is to know what needs changing. So if you wish to improve your life toward happiness, you have to find out what is making you unhappy, you have to explore the habit patterns of the life you are creating through your thoughts, intention, words and actions. I can guarantee you it is not your lover, or friends or family making you unhappy. The simple answer is, you are making yourself unhappy!

Picture yourself at a train station. Trains come and trains go. It’s a busy train station. You don’t get on any of the trains. Each train has one particular loud mouth on it with a foghorn. Which trains do you remember? The trains whose loud mouthed foghorn wielding spokesperson screamed profanities or abuses at you right? You would follow that train all the way to the next station and the next in righteous indignation? That train would take all your baggage and your personal power with it on its round trip to nowhere. If the foghorn wielding spokesperson screamed “you are abundantly successful, and gorgeous, and thin and rich!,” you would probably say “Yeah, right bud!” or “wow, how sweet, what a nice man” and as his train leaves the station you would be looking at the next incoming train wondering if it is yours.

That foghorn wielding spokesperson is your own internal dialogue. Each train is your own stream of consciousness of random thoughts going nowhere or a profound adventure called your life going everywhere.

Do you notice how much you invest in the thoughts that upset you? Do you notice how often thoughts come by that inform you of the truth of your demise and how you simply just aren’t worth it? Have you noticed how your thoughts are random and often incomplete and irrelevant and completely not self-serving?

Somewhere along the line we have deemed everything we think as the TRUTH. If it passes through my mind it must be true right? If I can think it, it makes it so. If I have perceived it, it must mean that it is correct and the answer to why I am so miserable. And so we think ourselves into holes that are our own digging. Yes, our thoughts are creating our reality, but we have the intellect, and the ability of discretion to CHOOSE our own thoughts.

What if you shift your perception? Choose an issue in your life that has become your cross to bear. Perhaps it is that you are always losing money? Or, opportunities happen to other people. Perhaps your issue is that every time you look into the mirror that little voice that is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient says something rude to you like, “gosh, you putting on weight?”. So what if you laugh at that little voice, “you know nothing, and actually, I am successful, always in the right place at the right time and sexy!” It feels like a lie. It feels untrue. So we discard it.

The only thing that is untrue about it is that you haven’t heard it before so it doesn’t have a strong foothold in the sculpture that is your mind. If you repeat it as often as you tell yourself how you are not worthy of much, surely the results will change? Can you accept that perhaps the reality of not being worthy has been your creation through the repetitive thought process sending out that intention into the universe?

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but transformed. Thoughts are energy, thinking them gives them weight. Thinking creates the backdrop of the sculpture you create that is you. What you think is what you become, is the life you create.

Eating pure foods to uplift your energy through all your sheaths is a tool toward a lighter existence. The subtle life force of food becomes our mental environment. It we are feeding our minds with pure healthy prana (energy) rich foods, we will find our minds become much friendlier experiences. These tools can be used at your discretion. Implementing these tools shifts awareness, and like a daily practice of physical asana, each day will be unique, and the journey requires detached faith, as the daily experience is one of change, if you will allow it.

Change is inevitable. All things are bound to change – as we see in nature. All aspects of ourselves we have deemed as irreparable, as not worthy, as great, as the pinnacle of ‘me’ are all going to change. The miseries are going to change. The successes are going to change. Everything changes, nothing stays the same. The journey is to create within an ever changing framework to that life is an adventure.

By understanding our misery, by understanding our success, by employing discretion against our own minds, against our life experiences as a result of what we are thinking, fearing, avoiding, or chasing, we can allow the ebb and flow of change through all of life’s myriad experiences. Life becomes the practice of yoga, a patient daily journey in observation. A practice of FAITH that through the yoga awareness, the inevitable CHANGE will be far less daunting, far less painful, less feared…and life will be at peace.

“The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body. To feel it at all times. This will rapidly change your life. The more consciousness you direct into your inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes. At this higher energy level, negativity cannot affect you anymore, and you attract new circumstances that reflect this higher frequency.”

By Kerry Weavind