Good Grief
Grief is personal. We all have it the same but completely different. I can’t tell you what to do with yours, you can’t tell me what to do with mine. It can tear you apart, it can make me feel heavy or light. It comes to us all whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Bury it dwell on it chase it. Somewhere it leads.
It has an energy, as it closely circles love and sadness to varying degrees. So what do we do with it? Doesn’t have to be anything, right? But as with love and sadness, there is power. And so with power there is also choice to let it sit, to dwell on the sensation of its vibrancy as it pulsates through my body my mind. Untethered it can run free in the background and certain days, it can bury the world in a fog creating an artificial gap between me and the world. because it is close to me and I cling to it sometimes as if it will somehow keep me connected to its source.
What follows it? Regret, loss, shame, guilt these emotions circle both with it and in response to it. What to do with it? It’s power changes perhaps wanes with time? In that charge of its rising, what if you transform and sublimate it into something else. In many ways it led me to my yoga practice which has deepened my connection and understanding of myself in both mental and physical spaces. Both have been forever transformed in its wake.
The power of grief indirectly led me to my practice but also gave me such an intimate way to be with it. In equanimity. Just being with it, somehow it fuels me. A reminder of attachment, bookmark of love and dreams. I sit with it and it changes as I twist turn change perspective so does grief. Upside down sideways into a literal pretzel. And so I follow, but not blindly. To not just see where it leads, but to experience every single fucking moment of it.
The Minotaur
When it’s quiet…
Where do you go when it’s quiet? No lights, no phone, no sounds? Do you go somewhere dark? Or do you see light? How do you fill the void?
All these things tell us a lot about ourselves. With careful and consistent observation, suddenly we can see the nakedness of who we are. Or is it layer upon layer of distraction? Phone Netflix music buying shit a temporary fix. One after the other. Not all these things are bad but if what’s drawing you to them is quiet, where does the quiet lead you?
Sadness? Could just as easily be happiness. Pain be it psychological or physical can distract in and of itself, what if the pain and suffering don’t allow quiet? Does distraction then become quiet? Does noise become welcome?
These things fill up our lives but we often forget how or what led us to them in the first place. It’s likely good to revisit habits and patterns as with time we change. It’s strange how old habits are as difficult to quit as new ones are to start. Things are too hard, it’s too late in the day, it’s too late in life… that is when we die, when we refuse to change.
Daily practice 🙏🏽
Time is relentless
When looking into the future at change, things seems far away and buried behind hurdles of effort. When looking back, where did it all go? In the same breath, I can feel like things are moving at a snails pace, but in the moment, it’s already all in the past.
Often when I think about trips or events I’m looking forward too, my mind is already melancholic with the memory of it being over. I can feel the nostalgia of a family gathering or vacation that hasn’t even happened yet. Concerts coming up, man those were fun. That trip to Greece in July, I’m already feeling the longing of missing it all as I take that final stroll through the airport scrambling to find something to help me remember it all.
Routine and habit, although comforting, seem to play that dual role of distraction and productive progression. Within it all, time is a void within which we each try to fill with things that will somehow help us become victorious in a battle we can’t win. Rich experiences, flow states, moments of clarity, glimpses of enlightenment… all just tiny bubbles in a giant void of carbonation. To what end? Who are any of us to judge how we all fill the void? The emptiness of time? Consume, repress, suppress, repeat.
What if we could just feel the time, the depth of each moment to a point where every detail is absorbed and we become one with the sublime, the divine. Indeed, is it then that time stands still? When the brain is too engulfed to try and register the March of time. The ultimate rebellion, mind games that turn seconds into minutes into hours into days into weeks. You can’t buy it, but we try. One box at a time.
Stop searching…
I need this to be happy. I need that to be happy. These things could be material or immaterial: a car, a bigger house, a new hat, a calm state of mind, relaxation… The constant quest to improve or progress. But what if we were to pause and simply identify what is already there, learn to be happy from there and then determine if the quest is truly worthwhile. The struggle is really just to peel back the layers, break through the surface of things and to find the source.
Is all seeking is an effort to improve or uncover the contents of consciousness? Like if I’m searching for freedom or enlightenment, how do I know that I’m not already free or enlightened? In some way yoga is here to remind us that we are all free or enlightened but we have attached too many qualifiers to that truth.
The interplay of thought and emotion
just as we can identify with a thought or emotion and allow it to color our experience, we also have the capacity to separate thought and emotion and thereby maintain more equanimity and less reactivity .
Thoughts come up, just as emotions come up. I may have an anxious thought which feeds into anxiety feelings. I may have an anxious feeling that I connect to an anxious thought or memory. These things are actually separate. But if we are not conscious and aware of this exchange we can literally lead ourselves into a loop of reactivity and imbalance. So if thought and emotion play off each other, the challenge becomes can you not then use this to curate your experience?
How much of the way we feel or the way we think is just the result of a decision? If I have a choice to let certain thoughts go and certain thoughts stay, do I not also have the ability to then use thought to positively influence emotions? choose to be with the thoughts that feed you let the other ones go. If thoughts lead to anxiety, let them go. It is literally that easy.
Embrace the challenge
Handstands in Greece
I felt a certain lightness in each expression of handstand, adhomukhavrksasana. In my frequency of practicing this pose over three weeks in Greece, I explored it in multiple spaces, different terrains, each time feeling lighter and lighter. The regularity of practice specifically in this pose gave me greater experience and body awareness that introduced me to nuances of this asana.
At the citadel of Mycenae
Sunset in Santorini
At the Acropolis 
At Ancient Nemea 
In the streets of Monastiraki
pk8/yoga 