I M Perfect lady

Tag: Yoga

  • A New Legacy to Begin.

    “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
    Soren Kierkegaard

    I did yoga today, only the second time this week, and I felt the stiffening up of my body, the tight joints and the way I seemed to have drifted away from the presence of me.

    I fall quickly into a world that has little of me in it…for without taking the time each day, I slip away unnoticed.

    My body pays the price; my essence gets left in the background and to the forefront arrives all kinds of reasons to leave it there.

    My weakening resolve plays with any lazy excuse and before I know it a week has passed and I have not spent any time with me just for me.

    What came to me in yoga today (which is another reason to do yoga, great insights) is that we are greeted into the world and then ‘told’ or highly suggested how this world operates and are then programmed to fit in. We learn life from the eyes and perceptions and actions of our parents.

    Imagine instead if we were left to explore on our own, to see freely and build ourselves from the inside out?

    Instead our insides desires and passions, questions and interests are put aside due to the ‘knowledge’ our parents have about life.

    Instead of us gulping up and witnessing the fresh look at life when babies arrive, we stifle it and bend it and hurt it so that the child’s view of life matches our own.

    How backwards and how growth stunting this is to take new fresh energy and make it look old and stiff.

    On my mail route I deliver mail to what we would call ultra conservative families, where the woman are dressed as they did on the wagon trails out west, bonnets and long flowing calico dresses.

    As this bonnet-wearing woman answers her door, there are children of each age at her legs, and I am amazed that she has gone along with this dress code and submissively is led to live as they did 100 years ago…yet what I know is that each generation before refused changes, refused to see progress and actually applauds the legacy that has held strong regardless of progress all around them.

    The youngest ones smile freer, the bit older ones look in awe but with a tinge of fear as they hang back, but the littlest ones meet your eyes and smile wildly for they react naturally untaught.

    Along the route are various degrees of ultra conservatives and what I see the most is the absence of children being children, for they are like young adults, doing adult jobs with adult responsibility.

    In Alice Miller’s books, her main trust is the lost child, how adults greet it with all their issues and steal away the innocence, the lack of pure enthusiasm, love, peace and joy, and fill it up with all things opposite.

    As I completed my yoga, I thought what most of us are craving and thirsty for is the freedom and innocence of babies, to be able to be set free from our parents legacy, to give back our ‘inheritance’ and go it alone.

    Imagine a world of grown up newborns…all living life from what they feel and experience instead of what is acceptable by their parents.

    The parents are our biggest detriment to society and yet they can also be the biggest factors in change…for by changing my attitude and by me seeing my children, my children will see theirs.

    The chain has to be broken in order for it to be fixed.

    You can’t fix things at the same level they were created at, says the wise man Einstein, and I agree.

    I told my daughter yesterday, I had to leave my family in order for the abuse to stop; I had to leave my family in order to save my children. I had to do what was best for the child, not the legacy of the family

    That old legacy had to end in order for a new legacy to begin.

  • New old natural way…

    I am strong enough to become weak and vulnerable.

    I am now open to receive instead of standing in defense, to look at life with an open chest instead of hunched over in protection.

    As I did yoga today, in the postures that required me to have my arms wide open and breathing deeply opening my chest, I visualized me receiving.

    Opening up like a flower bloom to welcome in the Sun.

    Receiving is something that I have forgotten to do for me, yet inside I feel the urge to receive.

    I am not sure what, for it is different than wanting or desiring, it is much easier… just being open and soft and welcoming.

    My hardness was for self-protection and as I discovered my voice, spoke my feelings and set up boundaries, my hardness began to soften and become supple.

    I was growing stronger and softer, exchanging old tired overworked defense muscles for the unused scrunched up receiving ones.

    In yoga I notice you have to relax one muscle and tense up the other, it is letting go and pulling, that in order to go deeper you relax one set and flex the other.

    Inside I feel strong enough to relax and grow soft, to weaken my hyper alertness for trouble and to heighten my awareness for joy and beauty, to be open to trust and love life in a new old natural way.

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  • Where we lead…

    In the past two and a half months, my yoga practice has been very spotty, it has boiled down to two times a week, and I am now understanding the sentiment of caring for your self or more importantly what it feels like again, to not care.

    Without care or interest, to be indifferent to the bodies needs. To feel myself almost going to sleep or in a daze and be too tired to begin.

    What we fail to notice is that when we are too tired to do something, we are actually playing to indifference; we are feeding the lack of care.

    It finally came to me what I have been doing, I have been leaving myself alone.

    Leaving the care of my body, walking away from what it needs and just sitting down.

    I could feel the waves of indifference, what I used to call being lazy, with no umph is actually the expression of indifference.

    You become indifferent to what it needs for its optimum health.

    What I find so intriguing is that when my daughter’s abuse came in and I experienced posttraumatic symptoms, I left my self-care.

    It is strange that when our body needs us the most we are the farthest away.
    It wasn’t that I was disconnected from the stress and wasn’t dealing with life, but what I failed to do was treat my body, to care for its needs.

    As I did yoga yesterday I was surprised that my body still remembered the poses, that it did it’s best with stiff and sore muscles, and that it tried to keep up to what I was asking of it, and I felt its struggle for it wasn’t used to this routine.

    The body’s forgiveness is pure nature; it simply follows where we lead.

    (What I know for sure today, is that by not doing yoga I am feeding indifference. So when I sit and feel unable to get up and do my yoga, I know to whom I am dancing with, what music I am hearing, I am hearing the beating of the drum being led away from me.)

  • Life Unfolds.

    Well, I quit the yoga challenge. It became more about the numbers and less about me, somehow I got lost behind the counting, the doing and forgot about me.

    The me that needs the yoga, my body, mind and soul. I forgot to view this from me; instead I was outside of me doing the yoga.

    It was a step ahead of me and I was nowhere in yoga.

    I have taken a few days off, to cleanse myself from the doing of a challenge to get back into being a lady whose body loves yoga.

    Whose body needs the yoga to feel flexible and strong, whose mind opens and breathes, and my life has a balance with yoga.

    It is about me and yoga, not yoga and me.

    This is true in all levels of my life.

    I am not sure if I can explain this correctly, but in the past all that I did created who I was, without doing I was nothing.

    I was defined daily by what I did, the doings created me.

    What I have now discovered is if I do something for reasons that are not birthed within me, I am lost from my life and in some foreign land most likely called your business.

    I believe that when my daughter’s life was in crisis, I hopped out of mine and into hers and it way threw off my balance. And during this time the yoga challenge beckoned me daily to join it, no matter my inner state of being.

    One thing led to another and it led me away from me.

    I had fallen out of my life.

    Now I am gathering me back to me.
    Letting my daughter have her life, her choices, her responsibilities and at the same time refocusing on regaining the balance within me.

    I know that my body and my day run better when I take the time at the top of the morning and breathe and work my body.

    I know that I feel best when I stay in my life and live from the inside out.

    I will selfishly bring me to my life and I will selfishly bring me to yoga.

    I arrive and life unfolds.

  • Who has Control?

    My expectations of the New Year aren’t about the New Year but rather about me.

    The New Year is neutral, a pile of days linked together, and many hours in which we live our lives.

    What we do within those hours is how our year will unfold, or more importantly how we will emerge on the other end.

    I went back on my blog and read some of my entries in January 2010, the beginning of my first 60-day Yoga challenge.

    It was incredible to read about the beginnings of my year doing yoga.

    Below is a section I quoted from Bikram’s book, and it shows the reality of what we are up against when we strive to make changes in our lives, what we are battling is gaining control over the mind.

    “Without control of mind, you can do nothing. You have something, but you don’t know how to use it. The greatest challenge we face as human beings is controlling and properly using our own minds.

    The mind is the communications system between the physical body and the Soul or Spirit; its primary responsibilities are to control the body and supply the Spirit with immediate and exact information. When the mind instead gives distracted and wrong information, the Spirit cannot govern properly – in fact, it cannot assume control at all. The ego-driven mind has had to rule for itself, and now it does not want to give up its ultimate authority over your life. This is a bitter, perverse fact about human beings, but it is the truth.

    Without proper training, the mind will continue to give you the wrong information and divert your focus from your Spiritual goals. The way it does that so successfully is with fear and desire – its primary weapons. Like a drug dealer, the mind gets addicted to these two opposite but conjoined emotions, and when we are constantly reacting to our attractions and aversions to people, things and situations, we can’t see what really is and reopen the channels of our true Self, the Spirit. That’s why I say that the mind has become our worst enemy.

    To overcome this will not be easy. The weak mind is ever growing, constantly feeding on your fears and negative habits. And as my Guru taught me, the natural human attraction to something negative is NINE TIMES more powerful than our gravitational pull to toward the positive- another inconvenient fact.”
    Bikram

    So if you are endeavoring to make changes in your life this upcoming year, please take note, that what you will be going against is a very powerful pull, 9 times stronger than your thought of change.

    Say your desire is to stop eating sweets; you will have the power to eat sweets 9 times stronger.

    And if your desire is to exercise or do yoga each day, you will be fighting a powerful pull 9 times stronger to stay in bed, lay on the couch, and do nothing.

    What I am most impressed with as I look back upon my year of doing yoga (332 out of the 365) is the sheer effort was exerted in getting to the mat.
    Even though the actual 90 minutes of yoga is rough, it is nothing compared to the struggle to begin.

    The real battle is not in the actual doing; it is in the seconds or minutes prior to the event.

    The fight ensues in the actual debate about whether you are going to abstain or succumb.

    To do or not to do is the where the war is fought.

    It isn’t about the sweets, the beer or the exercise; it is about the seconds of power right before, the space before doing or not doing.

    It is on that edge of time, that second where your life is determined, who has control?

  • I Can

    As I look backwards on this year I am happy with the way that I stayed the course in yoga, by not succumbing to the voice that wanted me to give it up.

    Between the voice and the lazy feelings that would sometimes overwhelm me, I stayed the course for the greater balance of the year, and I am proud of that.

    What I intended when I began was to take better care of myself, to do something that would begin a change and to do it for 60 days.

    The sixty days turned into 120, than 180 and then 240, it was then I faltered a bit and began missing a few days.

    Yet even in the last month, I have done more yoga than not.

    Tomorrow is the last day of the year, and the tally stands at 331 days of yoga done, (after I do today’s, which I best get going on soon) and 33 days no yoga.

    I am feeling it was a successful yoga year.

    A year of not listening to the voice and feelings that would have me believe, I can’t.

    Learning to overcome the voice by doing, and changing the tone to I can.

  • Joined them back together.

    The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

    I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

    It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

    Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

    Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

    I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

    What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

    When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
    cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

    Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

    I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

    What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

    A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

    My father was happy and desiring me.
    And I was happy to please him.

    The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
    And my head seemed detached from my body.

    My body and head separated.
    Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

    I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

    When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

    The mind and the body separated.

    The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

    Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

    In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

    To live as mind body and soul.

    Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.

  • Yoga is the Winner this year.

    I began this year with a promise to do 60 days of yoga in a row, and I did. I then decided to do another 60 days in a row and I did, I believe I did 4 back-to-back 60-day challenges before my streak began developing holes.

    Today I am down 20 for the year.

    As I approached the mat today my body was stiff and weak and just not in the mood.

    Each posture I did my best, but my best looked like a beginners effort. I felt I was being asked to perform something far beyond my level of effort.

    What continues to surprise me is that the pain in my joints, my hips and lower back still persist.

    And along with the pain come the tears.

    You wonder how much a body can hold.

    What I wanted most was to be wrapped in a cotton blanket and swaddled in a quilt with a fluffy pillow and suck my thumb…to not move to make another joint scream.

    It still surprises me that I go to the mat for this torture, for the blanky option is available each day as well.

    I am not stopping on December 31st I will continue to yoga along, in hopes that one day I will come to the end of the body’s pain.

    339 days have passed by and I have tossed my blanket aside and stood on the torture mat for 319 times.

    He says, you can either suffer for 90 minutes or 90 years, pick one.

    Yoga is the winner this year.

  • Yoga Heals a Loveless Self

    “The purpose of yoga is to heal.

    Most people start practicing Bikram Yoga to flatten our stomachs, stretch our tight hamstrings, and/or to prevent future injuries. And yes it will do all of that, but those are the secondary benefits to practicing Bikram Yoga. The purpose of this yoga is TO HEAL and that healing takes place from the inside out. It works on a mental level (and spiritual level) to heal our minds. Only then can we begin to change our self on the outside.

    Bikram says, the yoga practice teaches us how to like our self and we start taking better take care of our self then we fall in LOVE with our self!”
    Karen Buckner

    What I didn’t know when I began this practice was how out of love I was with myself, and how my love of my self depended upon another.

    If they loved me, I was okay.

    I never loved me alone, by myself without doing for another.

    It is shocking how dependent we are taught to be on another’s good opinion, how we act/be/live/think/believe to be loved.
    To have another love us, yet we don’t stop and think what it would take for us to love us, alone.

    Doing was my self worth, which I mistook for love.

    I was worthless unless I was doing.

    Imagine this type of self-love where you give and give and give until there isn’t any energy left, until you are filled with resentment of the takers who are your love givers.

    Giving to get love?

    My damaged body is what drove me to doing yoga, with an arm hanging limply at my side, my upper shoulders and neck one huge knotted ball, I began to work on self.

    What I didn’t know was that I was actually filling up my empty tank inside and dumping out all the past beliefs about how to love, changing my inner beliefs of my self, one-second at a time, as I paid attention to my breath and body.

    Each day I brought my body to the mat, and focused on my breathing, as I twisted and bent this constricted body into unimaginable poses, I was changing deeply inside.
    It is a like strenuous physical magic, while I was concentrating so hard to change my body, my insides were healing, my sense of self blossomed, my inner strength to be me became strong, my mind sought clarity and the willingness to face what is…the list goes on and on.

    Yoga heals a loveless self.

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  • Love of Self

    A good friend responded to my post on Sprouting Self Hatred, with a great visual, a thought that I could picture.

    “That picture is: yoga being poured as if out of a fancy vessel and killing the sprouting self hatred–over and over again. This yoga is like emotional Round-up!!!! What a concept. There is “out of body Beth” pouring Yoga on self- hatred.”

    She is absolutely right, doing yoga has been killing me softly, the me that was birthed in Self Hatred.

    Taking all the false beliefs and destroying them, eliminating the source of low self-esteem, little by little, pose by pose, I have been wrestling with hatred of self.

    What a battle.

    Sometimes it took Herculean energy to get me off the couch, out of bed, and on to the mat.

    Bringing my old self to do yoga, an old self that didn’t have any energy to love me, to care for me, it was that person that arrived on the mat.

    And each time I successfully accomplished another day of yoga, the hating me weakened and the Loving Me was strengthened.

    The stronger love I have of self, the stronger I can love.

    Jane Fonda yesterday was speaking to Oprah and she was talking about falling in love, how it is best to stand strong in love.

    I am learning to stand strong in love of self.