Feeling good | Good feeling

I've been in a world of feeling over the weekend at the Yoga Intensive with my teacher in Melbourne. We worked a lot on integrating the arms and shoulders back into the spine, we investigated feelings like cohesion and adhesion in the postures and we did ALOT of backbends!

There's a misperception that yoga is all about feeling good and that you should look good doing it. The truth is yoga helps us to feel better and by that I mean it opens us up to explore feeling in the body, to get comfortable with sensations that can sometimes be intense or uncomfortable and to identify where there is stagnation, blockages and leakage in our systems.

Sometimes this looks like a lot of repetitions of the same thing, lots of sweat and to the untrained eye, sometimes it looks like there's not much is going on at all.

When we practice yoga faithfully, we get familiar with energetic pathways in the body and we can start to discern subtle sensation and in doing so we can create change in a system that tends to hold onto past conditioning and hurt in order to keep us feeling "safe".

We can't just hope for change in our lives,  we have to commit to seeing reality as it is. One way to do this is to be in a practice where we can be up close with what is truly going on. Otherwise we live in delusion.  If we are just practicing to feel good or to look good to others we cannot grow.  All that we are cultivating is delusion, and perhaps aggression and bullying. We are forcing something upon ourselves. 

One of the by products of practice is that we might feel better, but more truly, what we are doing is being more honest with ourselves and those around us. We are living an authenticity that can't be shaken.

We don't follow trends or chase the next big thing.  We work steadily towards uncovering all the ways in which we settle for less, or dim our light or shy away from the hard truth.

Find yourself a practice, one that asks something from you. One that can help you know the joy of true self development, and then see how contented your life becomes. And find a teacher who walks the path ahead of you lighting the way.