Alive Inside

It’s not enough to automatically go through one’s life: signing up for the right programs and paying the bills. It’s also important to make your own way, even to cut your own path.

In the springtime, gardeners turn over the soil to get it ready for this year’s plants. Similarly, we need to till our own internal space so we can be alive to the changes life inevitably presents.

Just because we don’t see something, doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. We might keep a clean, fresh environment inside our personal homes, but what are we doing to the larger shared world? We might see the closest thing to our eyes, and think that what we see there is everything. But when we think that way we are not thinking clearly. The world is bigger than any personal view.

If the world is restricted to what we already think we know then the internal landscape is stagnated. The earth inside is packed down from the heaviness of the winter snow and clogged by the leaves that fell last fall. It’s time to till the soil, and to allow the terrain to breathe freely with new life. There is an incredible richness in this old growth that gets turned under, in fact it nourishes the new life. So the past understandings are a good foundation for fresh insights. In fact we need those old leaves and decaying matter of past events to create the richness of our current being.

And just like we can pilot a remote controlled car from afar, we can also put the body through the paces of a yoga-style workout without much personal investment. But, when we work this way we are missing out on the deeply rejuvinative benefits of a mindful yoga practice. It is important to be open to a fresh perspective. This can come from trying out new instructions from a teacher in class, or from listening and responding to feedback from inside your own body. Keep it fresh!