So Just Where are Your Heels?
While blowing warm air on my toddlers icy feet the other wintry morning, I asked my 4 year old if she knew where her heels where. ‘Yes’, she replied easily, ‘They’re near my socks.’
I just loved her definitive answer. Seemingly so simple, there was no doubt about it. But how she might go about keeping track of her heels if she was barefoot? Surely there were more reliable ways to find them. How do we choose to set our compass and what happens when we unwittingly set it to a false north?
We are on a never ending search for comfort and happiness . We think we can shop for it, as if a new pair of shoes could ever lift us more than momentarily. We choose time at work over times with friends and family, we choose the search for money over the search for wholesomeness, we get caught up and are not be there for people in need, we cut corners with our health using fast food, too much tv and too little exercise and we adopt questionable moral behaviours to get what we think we want?
With this in mind, and nearing mid winter, what better time for a bit of introspection and some warm fitness. I attended the Australian Yoga Therapy Conference earlier this month. One quote in particular stuck me ,
“You cannot heal a single human being, not even with psychotherapy, if you do not first restore his relationship to Being” – Martin Heidegger
So, the answers lie within, not without. It’s about the ‘now’ moments. And in a way it’s elegantly simple; I know the more I exist in the now, the happier I am. How do you drop into your being state? That present moment awareness. You know, the times in class when you are really focussed on your body sensations, or observing your breath or your thought patterns (and not those times pondering your pedicure or thinking of what’s for dessert). For many, the best thing is just to come to practice. Or, as the ancient yoga sutras so cheerfully put it, guaranteeing success if you ‘Practice for a long time, with great enthusiasm’ (I:14). The way to calm all those pesky fluctuations of the mind is a well rooted practice over a long period of time. This will bring about constant awareness of states without separation and this will allow us to exist in that seductive ‘being’ state.
Now, it might be you need a bit more help restoring your relationship to being (in which case, click here for our upcoming workshop with psychotherapist Mischa Telford on Yoga for Stress Anxiety, Depression)
But otherwise, just keep up your practice over the cold winter months. That way, if ever you lose track of your heels because you get your socks knocked off, you can refer within, find your compass with little time lost, set forth and sail.
See you in class,
– Christina