Our life is our yoga. It's so true. How we face our life determines the quality of our life. How we face our emotions, our reality, how we deal with what’s coming up for us and our relationship with that – all these determine the quality of our life.
Change – the only thing that never changes – gives us a reflection point for self-awareness. How we interact with change can teach us a lot about where we are inside of ourselves.
To begin the reflective process, it can be helpful to ask yourself the following questions. What's your relationship to change? How do you deal with change? Do you push it away? Do you resist it? Are you tired of it? Are you numb to it? Or do you embrace and flow with it?
Many years ago, when I turned 35, I was shocked when I looked in the mirror first thing in the morning and noticed that my forehead had grown two inches overnight! This was the first time I consciously realized I was getting older. My body was changing. My life was beginning to change. Honestly, it’s been a downward spiral ever since, that is, when it pertains to my hairline! Yet, I have to say, other aspects of my life have improved over time, like my physical endurance, confidence, patience, enjoyment of life, and having a broader and wiser perspective on most things.
Many of us might push away the aging process. We push away the seasons of our life, which on a deeper level, ultimately, is about pushing away death. We say we’re honoring the journey of life. But when it comes to aging, we tend to freak out rather than pay attention to the subtle beauty of this stage of the process. People are so afraid of that last stage of life. I admit there’s a part of me that’s afraid too.
Yoga teaches that if you're pushing away change, pushing away death, then you're also pushing away life.
We must embrace all three cycles – birth, life, and death. Embrace all stages equally. This is our yoga. Even as we witness the changes taking place every day, we need to remember that there's a part of us that does not change. There’s a part of us that goes on even after this body stops.
We have to recognize that our very human organism is designed to embrace change and flow with it. But when we resist change, we become the obstacle to it.
We also need to acknowledge that life is a journey from aloneness to aloneness. We are born alone. It’s not like there’s a team in there with us pushing from the other side. What's nice is if we have a team to catch us on the other side when we come out. But we are all born alone and we're going to die alone. Life is a solo journey of the soul.
When we come into this life, we are in the womb for approximately nine months completely and naturally hooked up to the goddess. While there, we don't have to do anything. Everything is taken care of for us. Then we come out and our umbilical cord is cut. We become an individual. If we want to survive, we have to breathe. We do this ourselves.
As soon as the physical umbilical cord in front is cut, the subtle and energetic umbilical cord or “quantum cord,” as I like to call it, in back, just behind the navel, is activated. This cosmic cord, this soul thread, connects forever to its source. It was always connected and will always be connected. It's like a switch. You switch off the front, and switch on the back.
We remember that we're more than ourselves, and yet we need to learn how to embrace change and not let our changing reality slow us down, stop us, or decrease our joy.
Through change, we gain life experience. We become more and more experienced, more and more ourselves, more and more wise as we go through life. And we can find comfort in knowing that even though our soul journey is solitary, we don’t have to face change alone. There is always support. There's Kula (community of the heart). There's spirit. There's our self. That's the yoga.
To fully embrace life requires a delicate balance of surrender and effort. Fate is what's given to you. Destiny is what you do with it. You have to surrender to your fate, but effort your destiny. If you're in denial about your fate, like if you wish you didn't have the parents you had (well I'm sorry, but you DID have the parents you had), then you’re efforting your fate. Surrendering to your fate leads to conscious awareness where you recognize that everything in life is for your awakening.
Many people get it backwards. They effort their fate and surrender their destiny.
They give up and try to change their fate, change the circumstance of their life, rather than accept it, surrender to it, and embrace it. Instead, they surrender to their destiny, thinking that they have no control over what happens to them, or no control over the direction of their life. This is an unfortunate mistake of victim consciousness which is way too easy to fall into. Is life happening to you? Or is life happening for you?
We need to flip it so that we surrender to fate and accept our circumstances. We must let go into the bigger energy.
This is what gets us connected to source. Then, with just the right amount of effort, we take up our agency. We go forth, follow our heart, follow our dreams, and create the life we envision. And hopefully, that includes serving the bigger energy and making the world better for our children and for ourselves too.
When the quantum cord is open, we feel a deep sense of connection that life has our back, other people have our back, and that we have our own back.
We are designed to be able to sustain every change that comes to us in life. And some of the changes are devastating. I know. Just read my book and you’ll see what I mean. We must pull ourselves up by the bootstraps of agency and move forward. I believe that to have an open heart, the heart needs to be crushed at least once in life. We have to experience the depth of the full spectrum of who we are, both the highest highs as well as the lowest lows.
Embracing change is embracing life.
I think the Tantra is really telling us it's not that we have to simply endure change, bear down, and grasp on tightly as we move toward our final days. The Tantra is saying become aware of it. Dance with it. Appreciate the changes.
When you have the right balance of surrender and effort, your heart cracks open and you recognize your true nature and the larger purpose for which you have come. There’s no yoga like living in alignment with your purpose in service to the bigger energy within all.
May you embrace change – whatever changes you find yourself going through in your life – with ease, curiosity, courage, compassion, and gratitude.
Namaste,
Todd
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