One of my favourite things to teach are retreats. My last retreat in Goa last month was no exception. To be with a group so compassionate that they left their jobs, families and lives behind to take care of the wellbeing of themselves as well as make a change to all those charities was a real treat! This group was particularly special to me as they had an incredible ability to support one another on this journey that we took together. They all cared for each other so deeply as though they had known each other for years. They asked one another for advice and insight as we sat around our dining table and it was so heart warming to hear everyone share their life experiences. And one of the main things I love about retreats is the opportunity to learn everyone's story. I love learning how they all have different stories, how they have achieved different goals and have endured different difficulties. Everyone has looked at something in a way I have not before. Everyone is able to offer wisdom and insight. I am consistently amazed and humbled by the people that walk through Namaste's door. Every day I am in awe of how they have an incredible ability to turn adversity into lessons, challenges into resilience and grief into community. Teaching for the past seven years has taught me not to make any assumptions about my students. Wisdom can come from the youngest, strength from the sickest and softness from the hardest. Yet I know that all yet there is one thing that is true to all of them: they are all special. Every. Single. One. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making it possible for me to wake up each day and do the one job that I love more than all others. Thank you!
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The aquarius in me is in a constant and consistent battle of fighting for rebellion and quirkiness. I believe that freedom is an innate need to humans. Freedom is so important to us all that the form of punishment we give to criminals is to confine them. Beyond physical freedom, we all need freedom to express our thoughts through speech, our character through the way we dress, our spirituality through ritual, our affection through touch, our needs through the way we spend, our purpose through our work and our passion through the way we spend our time. Freedom is a blessing that sometimes comes from an external circumstance: being able to afford to travel, for example, and from the internal choices, such as freeing ourselves from rules of society that do not resonate with us. This blessing is not a free pass to everything. Freedom that is true to the soul does not cause intentional harm to others, nor does it work against any of our built-in ethics. Freedom of the soul is simply a spontaneous expression. Freedom is the trust in following your internal compass of love regardless of what the rules on the outside say. It comes with the responsibility of putting it to the best and most conscious use so that we can lead the best possible lives for ourselves. During his last workshop in Bahrain, Max Strom shared an insight that rung so true. He said something along the lines of "when someone says I don't trust people, they are saying I don't trust my own judgement of who to let in and who to keep out". That wise insight got me thinking about all the lost opportunities that humans face from fear of getting hurt. Shields are worn, walls are built and doors are shut in an attempt to avoid pain, rejection, disappointment and betrayal. All those barriers are unnecessary if we had enough trust in our own assessments in individual situations and enough trust in our inner strength to handle it when things go wrong. Those assessments come in the form of a strong intuition, gut feeling or even conviction that speaks in whispers but is very clear and sure. It is the sound of the wise teacher within us that does not force its opinion but rather dangles it in front of us waiting for us to reach out for it, and that sound disappears the moment we turn our head away from it. This sound within each one of us grows stronger the more we learn to listen and never guides us astray. I have found that it speaks louder the more I listen to it but also it is much clearer when I don't have a preference to outcome. What I mean is that the sound of my intuition gets muffled often by the sound of my needy, insecure and obnoxious little mind. The little mind that demands its own desires to be filled, the one that seeks temporary pleasures and satisfaction. This inner sound of intuition is what all rituals are built around, it is the ability to be open to the universal and collective good. It is our internal compass that teaches us when is a good time to let others in and when is a good time to retreat. It teaches us that all our trust issues don't come from how others behave but rather from what pain we have learned to carry from the past. When we think of who we are, in our minds, we have created a persona of how we think of ourselves, and how we hope others think of us. Others have also created a persona of who they think we are, and their image rarely matches ours. Many of us, especially those seeking self development and realisation are subject to constant change. Therefore, our persona (whether drawn by ourselves or others) also constantly changes. This means that we would find ourselves often at a crossroad: we can either continue to hold on to the old image we have of ourselves and continue to try to entertain the image others have of us or to hit the self destruct button. I have been hitting that button for the last year on the idea of the self with a little "s". I have been demolishing this recklessly like a wrecking ball. It stopped mattering to me what my loved ones, society and even my mind had to say about who I have to be. Instead I hit the Self construct button. My eyes are focused on the Self with a capital S, my soul and my truth. Approval from others, change in relationships and even the internal battle is no longer an obstacle that holds me back from exploring the possibility of what would unveil when I let it all go. As we begin to grow spiritually, we find that our inner circle could drastically change, our support system can be threatened to crumble and our sense of belonging (in the limited sense) might vanish. This change can sometimes bring with it anxiety and grief as we drift apart from people that were closest to us for a very long time. This was something I found challenging and unsettling at first when I got on this path of living exactly as my heart dictates. The heart dictates at all times not desires or the wish for desires to be fulfilled but rather to live in truth and harmony. The heart desires the wellbeing of everyone and that wellbeing is not always easy for us to adopt nor is it always easy for those around us to accept. This change we undertake on this path is not always pleasant nor comfortable. Our internal attachments might mean that the resistance to change can bring misery and suffering. But anyone who has ever gone with the guidance of the heart knows that this change is required. Change towards our true Selves is a lesson that continues to force itself onto our consciousness until we learn it. And although this change brings with it the anxiety and uncertainty, it also bring with it growth and peace. The moment we gain insight on the importance of the lesson we have learned, we develop a feeling of outgrowing our old problems like a dress that is a few sizes too small. Our attachments turn into peaceful surrender and our relationships bring us freedom rather than bondage. Out of everyone I know, I feel high up on the list of people that spread themselves too thin, move too fast and get too busy. I don't say this with pride. I realise that the Ego has got a good hold of me convincing me that creating my own suffering is noble, admirable and worthy. This exaggurated sense of purpose is destructive and is an addictive behaviour that I don't particularly enjoy. I find myself sometimes too serious, too ambitious, too committed. I adore laid back people. I want to spend all my time surrounded by people that take it easy, enjoy life and can slow down often. Yet, they drive me crazy. I find that whilst I can take the occasional time off to slow down and enjoy the random leisurely lunch, I feel restless. My threshold for chilling out is not as chill as I want it to be. I feel my time on this earth is too limited and there is so much I want to do and experience. And although often what I want to experience the most is stillness and contentment, I cannot get myself to do it enough. My chill crew help slow me down sometimes but I often feel held back. My mind convinces me that chill people are in my way. I need to wriggle around them and control the amount of interaction I have with them in order to stay within the standard I had set for myself. But if I was completely honest I would say I feel jealous. There is no other way to say it. Those that move slower annoy me because I want to be them. Years of habitual behaviour and addiction to finding purpose should not be a constant state. The Yoga philosophy emphasises the importance of the idea of breaking out of "Vassana" or tendencies. We all have certain characteristics that somewhat make us stand out. Those characteristics are often driven by both our desires and fear. Whilst our desires and fears are not always visible to those around us, we ourselves are very aware of what matters to us the most, or what we have an addiction towards.
Some of us believe that our happiness comes from health, wealth, family, friends, romantic love, career, fame, spiritual awakening, power or some other concept. And whilst having goals provides us focus and purpose, it is important that our goals are not dominated by one aspect of our lives only. When our perception of where happiness or even pleasure comes from is spread across various facets of our lives, we are more likely to feel happy. When our happiness is not dependant on one area of our lives then we go about life with ease and can find joy in many places. A way in which to find multiple sources of pleasure comes from two different approaches: the first is to understand what we believe our desires (or absence of the thing we are fearful towards) will provide. For example: if we think a successful career will give us status or power, then we can think of other ways to feel powerful. A strong body or the ability to help those in need can make us feel powerful too. Being honest and authentic can give us the feeling of status. The second is to accept the many ways in which what we desire can be provided. For example: if a successful romantic relationship is our idea of intimacy, safety or even excitement then those qualities can also be satisfied elsewhere. Intimacy can be shared through spiritual connections, safety can be felt within a strong support system and excitement can be achieved through travel. A balanced life is one that does not crumble when one aspect of it falls short. Balance comes from being open to receive what we are given in each moment as life unfolds. For those who follow our instagram account you may have noticed that we have been talking about mental health and in this instance, about BPD or Boarderline Personality Disorder. BPD is very interesting because it is widely spread (about 20% of people have it) and yet it is rarely talked about or understood. From my understanding, BPD is about fluctuations between extreme feelings of happiness and sadness. This leaves a BPD person with tons of highly charged emotions that are difficult to control or manage. When I posted the information about BPD on social media, many people said "this sounds like me". While I think most of those people do not have BPD, I think most of us can relate to this. Managing emotions is a vital life tool that can save us from making reckless choices, being able to create and sustain meaningful relationships, finding our life purpose, understanding who we are and what we stand for, expressing emotions in a skilful way and seeing clearly. I am a true believer that "the body weeps tears that the eyes cannot shed". I believe that all emotions should be expressed and processed in a healthy and productive way as opposed to suppressing or denying them. Nobody is exempt from emotions, yet some of us deal with them more easily than others, and I wonder why. It is such a complex topic that I won't be able to nor know how to cover here. Does the mind effect the emotions or do emotions effect the mind? Is it a genetic thing? Does it come from previous traumas? Can people be retrained to look at emotions differently? Perhaps the answer to all of the above is "sometimes". But what I think what "always" is possible, is that we try or even consider, whenever we can, to have compassionate understanding of others explosive reaction that might seem dramatic, even when we don't completely understand it. I just went into this one week practice of Ashtanga Yoga every morning. I had tried this style of Yoga before, but this time, it brought with it new insight. For those of you familiar with Ashtanga, many of the postures are held for five breaths. The lesson that this had brought me is the way the mind fluctuates. When my mind likes a posture, it can become attached and not want the five breaths to end. When my mind does not like a posture, it is restless in its waiting for it to end. The most joyful practices I had in that week was when my mind was "waitlessly waiting" for the five breaths to pass. Waitless waiting is a joyful state in which you are observing moments pass by without the anticipation of what is coming and without the attachment of what is going. It is the quiet and peaceful observing of each experience as it unfolds. It is being open, willing and strong enough to trust the journey regardless of how it feels. To me, that is the only kind of waiting that I can live with. Sometimes we are iron men/women and sometimes we are butterflies. That switch can be turned on in a second, grief can do that. A week, month or year ago you might have felt like you could take on the world and yet today, the simplest word, gesture, image, smell or thought leaves you feeling helpless and in despair Going through a traumatic, life shattering and extremely painful experiences can leave us feeling raw and sensitive. It can feel like being skinned which would heighten our experience of pain and lower our threshold for handling it, even the tiniest touch could hurt. When we are at that stage, our reactions might seem irrational, we might seem overreactive and we might not be as fun being around. At this time, it is important to surround ourselves with people that will support, accept and love us just as we are. This allowing is what "skinned" people need more than advice, ideas for change and even worse, judgement. If you have a "skinned" person in your life, be there for them. They will always remember it. When we are in pain we are often isolated, neglected and abandoned because not everyone can be comfortable around the pain of someone that is "skinned". "Skinned" people need the outer support but also need the time and space to process their feelings. Not burying feelings but completely experiencing then releasing them can help in building the strength to process life and the (hopefully thick) skin to roll off sensitive encounters skillfully. |
AuthorWeam is the founder of Namaste. She had started a very deep and intense spiritual journey at a young age having refused to continue to suffer with the common challenges of her generation: depression, anxiety and being lost. She insisted that there must be more to life than the constant rat race she was in Archives
January 2020
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