Funniest thing I read the other day.
Being flexible ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
Doing the splits is not exactly a useful skill.
– Painscience.com
I’ve written about this before, here. But I think it’s important to talk about again.
People associate yoga with flexibility.
I do associate the word flexibility with yoga, but it’s in how we apply flexibility to our life.
That is, we have lots of choices available to us.
People often get stuck and then their choices become smaller, and smaller, and smaller… until they feel something a little like this; boxed in.
What I’m really looking for is this:
Freedom.
Do you have freedom, to do what you want in your life?
Do you have the freedom to BE you?
Skills that may aid in this might be strength. Physical strength if you want to move around in the world. Be able to go jogging, walking, cycling. Even to simply pick up and play with your kids/grandkids.
Maybe you are an office worker or writer and need to sit a lot of the day. What skills might be useful to do that?
A skill may be the ability to voice your opinions at work?
Or the skills required to get a good night’s sleep, so you have the energy for the coming day.
A useful skill may be noticing what creates tension in your body.
Try sitting in a dentist chair for any length of time and notice how you feel? A sore jaw, perhaps, makes sense. But what might your shoulders feel like? Or your leg muscles? Imagine doing this, unknowingly creating tension throughout the day, and what it might create? Pain, fatigue, stiff or sore muscles.
Yoga, is all about the noticing.
Which helps guide our life, …
out of the box, and toward spaciousness and freedom.
Beautifully stated Jody!! I’m so sad about all the misperceptions out there about yoga. The first sutra inform us that Yoga is first informals about coming to know the chatter of the mind and learning to quiet that. That is where Freedom lives… in a flexible, open and non-reactive mind… all else will fall into place.
My favourite quote of all time is from Man’s Search for Meaning-Victor Frankel;
“.Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”