Yoga Practice: Deepening Into Truth
Yoga practice is a wonderful opportunity to surrender to any resistance and allow the breath or prana to lead the way. The asanas we do on the mat are mere formality. The real yoga is how we allow our hearts to serve as a compass.
How are you deepening into your truths daily? Are you choosing to run or exploring the pain?
In this article guest author Charlotte Skogsberg shares her insights on yoga and practice.
By: Charlotte Skogsberg
I have noticed in my practice that if I allow myself to start in stillness, to slowly open my body, then I can access the very deepest of my core’s potential once I take it in to stronger work.
There really are no short cuts. If I’m not there, if I can’t be bothered to open and let the blood bring my muscles to life, I will feel weaker. Starting with opening my hips, I can feel the heat of life running through my body.
It makes it easier, doesn’t it, to talk about something so obvious as the body?
We can relate to that, we can learn from it. Much more than if I would say that it is easier to stay true to my values if I’m courageous enough to allow my heart to be open. But it is the same thing. Can you relate to the rush of having put yourself emotionally naked, speaking what your heart’s true desire is? You feel alive don’t you? It’s scary, because being alive means FEELING.
“We protect ourselves against heartbreak by not loving, and against death by not living. But by this process we also lock our heartbreak into our being, and so our pain persists although we are no longer conscious of it. We become afraid to love and to live, though we desperately want to do both. We can momentarily open our hearts, but we dare not keep them open. We can feel love, but we cannot express it.”
Why is it so hard to stay open?
Because we close to protect. We walk around on protection mode, hoping, wishing for someone to make us secure enough to open again. But we cannot truly receive if we don’t give. We’re caught in a catch 22.
Yet we need to be open to actually receive. It means that we THINK we give, that we are loving and open but we’re too occupied with protecting ourselves to let ourselves receive. And the vicious circle continues. Heart is closed, just waiting for the right opportunity to open. We give and we give, feeling misunderstood and unseen. So nothing can come in.
It’s natural to hold back. What happens if we reveal ourselves? We don’t know! So we are conditioned to run away from the raw feeling of being vulnerable (being alive, really).
It keeps us away from living fully, from being creative and so instead we numb and we become small.
How do we stay open to let ourselves touch what’s here. The only way to love and be loved is to go into that insecurity that lays in the raw feeling of vulnerability, in our fear that there is something wrong with us. What does it tell us?
I was listening to a talk on vulnerability and how we protect ourselves.
– We avoid: keeping ourselves busy,
– We disconnect: Seeking to have the upper hand, to have power of the other
– We lie: Pretending to be something that we are not
So ultimately we would need to do the opposite to stay open:
Become still, sit with it. The moment you stop running away, there is no more reason to flee. Can you take the courage to listen within, to see what’s there and to be with it?
Put your arms down, let them take the control over you and notice how the power struggle has no more space.
What is motivating you in this moment? What is your intention?
What does the heart actually want?
Finally. Speak that truth.
When you set the bar on the mode of communicating, others will either level up to you or orbit away. When you raise your vibration, you pull others onto your frequency.
