It’s been a time in my life lately. Mmm, it feels like the whole year has been a time. I’m not sure how to describe it other than, whoa what a time it has been.
I think until recently I had been in an intense state of what felt like growth, and truly there was growth but all the work I had been doing was an outward expression of growth and the growth I walked away with was a sharp inner growth that comes when you make a lot of mistakes when you’re too busy to be present.
What happens when you take your attention and place it all outwardly? The exhaustions builds and for some reason you cannot understand why, the anxiety gets louder, the sickness and body pains come quickly and seem to get worse, and then at the end you’re in this depressed little ball thinking, whoa how did I get here?
And this is why I come here today, I come here today to remind you that being present and checking in with yourself is so important. When we don’t we miss key insights that tell us what we are needing. We sacrifice those needs to meet external demands which admittedly often help us reach other needs but we cannot pick and choose our needs and expect to escape in one piece.
I know that felt hard to read, hard to hear, hard to sit with, maybe the message even lost shape and meaning because your brain said that’s a bunch of woowoo stuff. The fact is we don’t live in a world that supports personal insight and personal care and those messages have been engrained inside of us from childhood and so when we hear another call for self care it feels too hard, we feel too frazzled, or it feels like too much because our external world is screaming for our attention and we allow it to win.
Until the exhaustion, anxiety, sickness, pain, and depression gets so loud it can no longer be ignored. It will not be ignored.
And so to keep this short and to the point because my aim is always to help you find that presence, know that you don’t have to meditate for 10 minutes, you don’t have to roll out a yoga mat and perform asana, you don’t have to soak in a bath, take a long hike, etc. You just need to be still for a few moments. Turn the screens off, let go of the expectation to need a perfect environment in order to tune in, and take a deep breath. Soften the toes, the fingers, the area between the brows, and the jaw. Breathe again and just notice. Notice what it feels like to be in that moment, don’t make a plan just yet to fix it, just feel, see, hear.
It’s hard but so is suffering when we run from the most important work of caring for ourselves.
I’m always here, friends. Just a message away.
Yoga with Kate 