Light in the Dark

I believe that feeling blue sometimes in a world that insists on being so troublesome is a perfectly normal response.

It’s not to do with a lack of joy. Many of my students know depression, yet they are the most joyful people, they laugh a lot and they see humour everywhere. They have an eye for beauty and they see and appreciate the small things. They are the gentlest people too, their friends and families rely on them for their kind steadfastness. They are often sensitive people, noticing when friends are in need of a hand, finely tuned to the moods of their beloveds, hopeful that they can help when help is needed.

If you are a kind, sensitive, gentle person who knows that joy lies in the tiny things that many people miss and who hopes to give as much as you can to those in need, or to work to spread more joy and kindness in the world, then it seems obvious to me that sometimes life overwhelms you.

You get tired, that’s all. Your gifts, so needed, do not make you a superhero - you can only do what you do in your little corner of the world, you can’t change everything. Plus, the internet lives and breathes on the dark things - why we click them more and make those guys even more money is something that someone will research and understand one day.

You need to rest.
You need to restore balance.
You like to be out, but you also need to be at home, quietly.
You need good food, gentle exercise and warmth.

Of course I will say that you need yoga: to breathe well, to relax your nervous system and to keep your body moving. It will help to restore you and it will help you to sleep the deep, restorative sleep that you need. Yoga teaches acceptance: fighting against the exhaustion, the descent of the dark, is just no good. It will only take you further down and keep you there for longer. There are rhythms in life and we can choose to flow with them or fight them. I recommend learning how to flow.

Look after your gentle, tender, joy-knowing, beauty-loving, compassionate, loving self. You will soon be on the other side.

Tender

We should be very tender with our grief, I think.

We ought to nurture it for the small, fragile thing it is, that holds all of our weight and memory and possibility.

We all have our griefs, all of us. They tell us what we have loved and they remind us of who we were once and the things we have had to let go of as we made our way through life.

We can grieve for someone lost, for parts of ourselves that faded or died, for a future that we thought we would have, for the person we will never be.

Grief whispers quietly of our most secret sorrows and shows us how to be gentle, with ourselves, with others.

Grief does not rage or fight, it does not shout or throw itself about. Grief is what lies beneath.

Grief is the smooth pebble of our knowing, that we keep in our pocket and stroke from time to time. It brings the parts of us that were lost back to being, holds them close, speaks their names.

A life without grief is a life without love, without care, without tenderness. We have all met the ones who run away from their grieving selves, but truly it takes up such a lot of energy and every time they turn around there it still is. Inescapable.

I don’t want my grief to be a hidden, frightening thing. I want my grief to stand as a testament to who they were, to who I was, to what I have lost and to what I still have.

We should be very tender with our grief, I think. It is a precious thing.

20 Minutes to Change your Day

I once met a man called Hugh who did a lot of yoga. 

We were on a yoga weekend and ended up sitting next to each other at lunch; apropos of nothing I commented that on the days I practised yoga, the day seemed then to roll out more evenly and beautifully afterwards, as if there was all the time in the world for everything (as opposed to that horrible, I'm-never-going-to-have-enough-time-for-all-I-need-to-get-done-today feeling that has become the default setting for too many of us). 

Without missing a beat he replied that yoga makes you realise the things that matter and the things that don't, so that after you have practised, you don't waste time on the small stuff.  You breathe more deeply, you take more time, you trust more that everything will get done in its own right time.  

I'm not sure that I had put two and two together before and made this realisation, but it was so obvious when he said it and of course, he is absolutely right.  Yoga reframes your day, and when you have practised regularly for long enough, it reframes your life.  Yoga helps you to acknowledge what is important and to leave aside the other stuff.  It teaches you to live with your brain fully engaged with whatever it is you are doing and that helps you to do things better, more successfully, more easily.  You rush less and make fewer silly mistakes.  You deepen the quality of the attention given to any situation and this improves both the way you perform in that situation and your experience of it.

Try to remember that the days when you feel that you have no time for yoga, are likely to be the days that you need yoga the most.

Commit to the idea that it is within your power to take 20 minutes out of your day for yoga and thereby to make your whole day better.

Many days put together become a life.