How to Listen to your Soul

Go somewhere you find beautiful: the beach, an art gallery, the woods, your favourite part of your favourite city. It helps to be alone.

Walk and walk and look about you; stand for as long as you want to and stare at whatever catches your attention: a crack in the pavement, an image or piece of art that moves you, the sky, other people. It is important that you do not rush. And nobody should be expecting you. You must not put a deadline on your wanderings, nor should you have someone waiting for you at the other end of your journey - hearing your soul speak takes time and patience, so give yourself just that.

Walk. Sit. Look. Eat. Drink. Write if you want to, but do not read; books are just inanimate versions of other people's voices and you will not hear your own voice if you continually overlay it with other people's words, thoughts and feelings.

Don't actively seek your soul's voice; it cannot be hunted down and found. Your soul's voice emerges when you are doing something else, when you are looking at the sky, or walking across the sand with the wind blowing in your face. Just put yourself in the right place with a certain level of quiet and wait. Make of yourself a blank canvas upon which your soul's voice will draw the colour and image.

If there is fear, let there be fear - you are safe in your favourite place, let it be. There might be joy, or excitement, sadness or pain, just let it be. Your soul's voice cannot be heard above mental struggle, or above your efforts not to feel what you feel. Just walk, stop, look around, absorb what is.

Do it once.
Do it again.
Turn your ear inward as often as you can. Turn every dog walk into an opportunity to listen, every train journey, every delay. Learn how to live alongside your own true voice. It won't ever pretend you are what you are not; it won't ever be unkind to you. Which is not to say that your soul's voice will always be an easy listen - the truth you already know is not always comfortable to hear.

The answers to our own questions are always waiting within and you can trust that quiet voice.

If you stop trampling all over your own soul with your intellect, your struggling, your self-judgment, then you will find it there waiting for you, wondering ‘My dear love, what took you so long?’

Sarah x

Yoga for a Lifetime - Patanjali's Yoga Sutra 3:6

Yogena yogo jnatavyo
Yogo yogat pravartate
Yo prama tastu yogena
Sa yoga ramate ciram

Only through yoga, yoga is known, Only through yoga, yoga progresses, One who is patient with yoga, Bears the fruits for a long time.

I have always loved this chant. It is from Vyasa's fifth century commentary (the first that we know about) on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

The point of each of Patanjali’s sutras, is that it states a teaching in the most succinct way possible; with the guidance of your teacher, you extrapolate that sutra to uncover its depth of meaning and to apply it to your life-practice. Vyasa was one of those teachers and the above is from his commentary on Yoga Sutra 3:6, which reads:

tasya bhumisu viniyogah
Samyama (complete meditation) must be developed gradually

The essence of this sutra is that patience is required when one practices yoga. Yoga is a practice that benefits from slow and steady progress, commitment and the willingness to wait and see. One of the joys of yoga is how we simply begin where we are, however we find ourselves, and let whatever happens happen.

In fact, the strength of the path of yoga lies in part in its slowness; the lessons that you will learn on your mat are the lessons of a lifetime, not a few months. This is not a quick fix, a cure-all, a handy package that will pick you up, make you strong, calm you down and set you rolling; it is a gradual unfolding of awareness and understanding that will enrich your life and everything you do in your life. This is why yogis need not fear growing older, for there is always something new that will be learnt, a new view, a different way of being that changes, improves, teaches... it never stops; we never get 'there', we only learn how to learn from everything that comes to us in life.

Moreover, it is often the case that we are wrong about what we think we are doing when we start to practise yoga and where we think we are headed with it. I know scientists who have become yoga teachers, accountants who are training to be school-teachers, athletes whose main practice now is meditation and mothers who have become midwives, all of whom express surprise at where they have ended up at the same time as they acknowledge that where they are now is exactly where they feel they are supposed to be. Transformation is mysterious: you just don't know where you are going. Better to put your faith in your practice and let it guide you, rather than push it around, trying to make it look like you think it should.

The only thing that yoga asks of you is that you do it, and this is encapsulated in this sutra and in Vyasa's beautiful explanation of it. You can't read about it in a book; you can't have someone tell you about it; you can't dip in and out of it; if you want to be a yoga student and to discover all its riches, then you have to turn up, you have to do it (and remember that leaping about on a yoga mat was never the apogee of yoga practice that some yoga studios and students would have us believe - asana is the means, not the goal).

Yoga requires patience and teaches patience, it's wealth lies in the way its lessons open to us gradually, giving us time to acknowledge, understand and assimilate the things that we are learning, seeing and encompassing in our lives as we continue with our practice. You start where you are every single time you practice, with a beginner's mind and a humble heart and these techniques, handed down, refined and shared over generations, help you towards a healthier, more whole, more established and simple way of being.

Your practice is like the ripening of fruit over a summer, which happens quite naturally and in its own time. You are simply ripening over a lifetime.

Setting Boundaries

Setting boundaries will help you to preserve your energy for the people, events and things that are really important to you. They will help to move you away from a frantic life in which you have too much to do and too little time.

Our days can become a whirlwind of racing from one thing to another, finally collapsing in the evening/at the weekend with very little left to give the most important people in our lives, or the creativity that makes our hearts sing.

Boundaries are simply a way of making intentional decisions about what you let in and what you keep out of your life. They are a way or making sure that you save your energy for the tasks, people and creativity that you really want and need to do.

If you are clear about your boundaries, then it is easier to say a kind, but forthright no when someone asks you to do something that you don’t feel comfortable with. You won’t feel forced to say yes against your better judgement and end up wishing you’d hadn’t, ending up wasting your time, getting upset or frustrated because you could be spending that time doing something else.

If you are clear about your boundaries, then it is easier to take the time before answering a request to make sure that you give a genuine answer.

Try not to complicate things: boundaries are simply a way of managing your energy. Energy is limited. Use it wisely. No matter who we are, we only get the same 24 hour period in every single day. How are you spending yours?

And boundaries are very personal. Don’t explain your boundaries to anyone - how could they understand your reasons? And their approval is not required.

Boundaries will help you to understand and fulfil your own needs so that when you come to your job, or your friend, or life in general, you have plenty to give. You are no longer running on a permanently empty tank, racing to keep up with yourself, or waking up wishing you’d done something differently. Instead you become as calm and joyful and open and loving as it is possible for you to be.

It is not always easy. What you are addressing here is your very real need to be loved, to feel known and accepted. You might be the person who always says yes, the one who can always be relied upon to sort out problems, the one who always listens when people want to talk. Perhaps you are all three … in which case you are no doubt exhausted!

But you don’t need to make everyone love you. You are surrounded by people who love you. The ones who need you the most are not usually the ones who make the most noise about it.

So begin. Make a small one. Keep it quiet. Try it out. In a couple of weeks, make another. Be honest and stay true to yourself. The deeper work is self-compassion and you’ll be working on this for the rest of your days.

Sarah x