Last time I wrote it was about setting an intention, maybe for your yoga practice or for your day or week. But what happens when you maybe um, didn't choose the best intention. This happened to me last week. I set this intention to look up, both to look up physically more to help some to he neck pain I'd been experiencing, but also to look up metaphorically. To aim higher. That was Monday. Tuesday I had a day of full on neural fatigue, a result of my brain injury. I was had a hard time seeing, I was exhausted, emotionally drained and felt like a failure. Wednesday felt better, but Thursday I was a mess again. My intention was definitely not in alignment with where I was last week. And Tuesday Erin thought "great you messed that up too".
I have a wise friend who is also a yogi who gently reminded me to sit with it. That means to not try and change the way you are feeling but to fully acknowledge it, and be with it. Our experience of emotions being either positive or negative is purely subjective. It is our own attachments that hold them in that place. So I sat in my tiredness and uncertainty, and reminded myself that it just is. It isn't good or bad. This was just where I was at that moment.
This is one of the gifts of intention setting. I gives you tools to examine your own patterns and thoughts. When that "negative" feeling, and I put negative in quotation marks to remind myself that it is my own judgement, can I see it as a reminder that I am using some sort of thought process or idea that is no longer serving me. How do I need to adjust my own behaviour and thoughts to bring myself in to my true alignment. I read somewhere that the universe throws the same thing at your over and over so you can practice your reaction until it naturally happens in alignment with your highest self. So those times when a familiar problem pops up, you can maybe think to yourself "it is just a test to see if I am there yet" rather than "honestly, how many times do I have to got through this!".
The idea of brahmacharya, to walk with god, but often interpreted as non excess, asks us to just be with our emotions. And it seems that this may be a time of the year for me to think about this, because two years ago I wrote my first blog on this topic. And I was back revisiting it again. And that is what yoga invites us to do. We revisit the same issues over and over and over, and each time it gets a bit easier. We gain insight and learn about ourselves (svadhyaya). We move a little forward. We can be okay with not being okay (santosha).
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