It’s super cold and I’m sitting inside a coffeehouse today watching the trees lose the last of their leaves. I love the way bare trees look and right now, as is reflected in my recent artwork, I am very inspired by this aesthetic. Winter trees are super symbolic to me. Just bare, no fancy stuff, even the little skinny ones standing firm, strong and calm, preparing to face the drastic Kansas winter.
I’m at the coffee shop to plan my yoga lesson for tomorrow. I typically do this planning at home but I felt like I needed to get out. I don’t really know what I was thinking, though, because I’m a weirdo and I can’t actually work in this atmosphere and I know it. I can only people watch and eavesdrop on the conversations happening around me. I zone in on the conversation to the right of me and it’s a girl breaking up with her boyfriend. The people behind me are discussing the pros and cons of a new and drastic haircut. Interesting stuff.
My favorite yoga classes to attend are the ones where the teacher magically hones in on my needs. It’s the most wonderful feeling when you walk in and suddenly, she/he knows exactly what you are going through and what you need to do to work it out. My goal as a teacher is to be able to do this with my own classes and I’m learning that to do this, I only need to understand that the people that come to my classes are always a reflection of me and vice versa. I’ve begun centering my lessons on whatever is relevant in my life knowing that what I am experiencing is connected in some way to those who will attend my class.
So I’m sitting here, I look at the bare trees outside and the little snowflakes beginning to fall, I watch the people come and go, I try to make some sense of the completely random playlist, I smell the various smells...soup, coffee, muffins, coffee. I’m not accomplishing anything, but it’s cool. I open my book randomly and the words “we can’t change the world, only ourselves” pop out at me. I’m a believer in signs and this one seems pretty obvious, so I say “ok. Change, it is.” I'm definitely experiencing my share of change, currently.
More specifically, though, for this blog post I want to discuss what motivates us to change and the importance of adding meditation into your life. As my yoga practice progresses, I am learning that my motivation or intention for change is everything. If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that you absolutely get the changes you ask for in life, but if you are not aligned with the truest desires of your heart, the changes you seek are meaningless. This is why in my yoga classes, meditation time is a heavy focus, because this is the aspect of yoga that has been the most beneficial for me and what I feel is most beneficial for others. Many people come to yoga seeking change and I feel that the best way for me to help people with this is by teaching them how to meditate. So we spend a good part of the time with our eyes closed, simply observing the breath.
Here’s a little story to help me make my point and perhaps you can see the parallels in your life. Ok so as a kid, I moved a lot. Every school year we started in a new place. It was rough at times, I won’t lie. I can be very shy, but I look back and I feel like for the most part, I kept a good attitude about it. Surprise, (not surprise) I have always been nerdy, awkward, quiet… quiet and yet somehow full of super weird things to say. It’s true, so I had trouble making friends. I pride myself on my nerdy weirdness now, but I can’t pretend that fitting in wasn’t an issue for me then (or now, haha.) I was picked on in about every school that I attended and yes, I absolutely hated it. But oddly enough, this is why my attitude towards moving was decent. When a school year ended, I got away from the mean people! And though I dreaded the move, leaving my family and the few friends I did have, I can’t pretend I didn’t delight in the possibilities of what could come from a new school. Each year went by and at the start of each school year I made a little plan on how I was going to start fresh this time, stop wearing my mom’s/stepmom’s/big sister’s clothes, act super cool, quit saying weird stuff and maybe actually brush my hair once a week or so and perhaps this year, maybe, just maybe, the popular kids will think I’m one of them? Maybe? Actually, my senior year, yes…..kind of…..not quite, it doesn’t feel that way…but yes, I did somehow manage to become prom queen my senior year. I can’t explain this. Actually, I can but that's later. In the moment, I was horrified because I actually thought it was a practical joke on me. I thought they were all going to laugh at me and that at any moment, the pigs’ blood would drop from the ceiling, ruin my homemade dress, and I’d have to burn the place down with my telekinesis. But it didn’t happen like that. I was just the prom queen and mostly, everyone was nice. But the real question is, did this satisfy me? No, it did not. Like I said, I didn’t believe it and thought it was a joke being played on me….inside I still felt the same insecurity because I was so used to being picked on.
When I got some distance from the situation, I realized I had gotten exactly what I asked for. However, it didn’t feel right because my intention was not clear. What I was seeking was more like the opposite of what I didn’t want….which is so not the same thing as what I do want. Had I known about meditation at the time maybe I would have been able to see that what I was really wishing for was acceptance within myself, not others.
But I was a kid. I’ll tell you, though, when I look back on this, I realize I was lucky to have this experience because even though this didn’t feel like I wanted it to, I did begin to understand an essential lesson in life. And that is, that you become what you think about. This is the most important life lesson a person can learn, in my opinion. However, focusing your intention is the key. My dominant thoughts were clearly social acceptance mixed with insecurity. So that’s exactly what I got. I was simply emulating behavior that I thought would make me happy because I thought it made other people happy.
And this is the problem for me and for lots of people when it comes to making changes that are fulfilling. It’s because we are completely out of touch with ourselves and with that, our actual desires. We are bombarded by media and advertising telling us what we need and want to be happy. We are forever comparing ourselves to each other and wanting what That Guy over there has because he looks happy and so we just kind of do what he does. However, That Guy, he doesn’t actually know what makes him happy either because he’s just doing what the guy before him did and so on. But he looks happy and he has all the stuff so we just do what That Guy does and we get all the stuff That Guy has and then we wonder, ‘why isn’t this working for me??’ But it’s because we are forgetting completely that we are not even That Guy! We are THIS Guy and how can we possibly make any satisfying changes when the desire for change is not aligned with who we actually are?
In yoga we talk a lot about aligning with our True Self, the part of you that is not your body or your thoughts. You might call it your soul or spirit. We talk a lot about accepting who we are and how our life is right now, being present in the moment. As my yoga practice progresses and I learn to quiet my mind through meditation, these ideas are sinking in further each time. I am learning that it is only from this quiet space that I can understand what I actually am and what my deepest desires even are. Only from here can I make any kind of change that will actually matter to me. I can look at my life and know that I have achieved or attained, over and over, exactly everything I have ever really wished for. And over and over, these things have left me feeling empty and unfulfilled. But meditation gives me a clarity I have never experienced before. From that clarity, I see that my desires have been coming from my own feelings of emptiness or insecurity and not from a feeling of self-love and acceptance. From this clarity I’m slowly learning that unless my desire for change comes from my True Self, no “thing” that I think I want will ever satisfy me.
“Be the change you wish to see.” We see this quote all the time and we share it all over the place in our social media because deep down we resonate with this statement. From our hearts, we know this to be true! However, so many of us don’t truly understand how to do it. We keep trying to do what we think is right, but a feeling of powerlessness or emptiness persists. The solution, in my opinion, is to change your perspective and it is also my opinion that you can only do this through meditation or quieting of the mind. It takes practice! But here’s the really beautiful part. When you shift your perspective and launch your desires from your heart, magical changes DO start to happen all around you. And the best part is that the feeling of fear or anxiety disappears and you are left with a calm strength, an inner knowing that what you wish for is on its way. You know that everything will be ok because everything already IS ok within you. You are connected to your source.
You know, I was going to wrap this up with a graceful and poetic reference back to the winter trees and how they are able to remain strong and calm during the constant change of their lives by staying firm in their roots and because they are connected to their source they just know what to do…there is a very clear metaphor here…..but I’m bad at ending. I'm more of a painter than a writer. Perhaps I’ll meditate on it….? Be like the tree, everybody. Namaste :)