week two update.

"Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah." 

 - Patanjali, Sutra 1.2

"The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga."

-Sri Swami Satchidananda's Translation and Commentary of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

When I did my yoga teacher training last year, I was meditating everyday, multiple times a day.  I was astounded by the positive outcome of quieting "the mind-stuff".  For me, meditation has always been terrifying; it still is.  It takes a lot of commitment. It can be frustrating and sometimes boring. But, I have not one ounce of disbelief in its powers.  It's a hard thing for me to talk about, especially when my dedication to it is lacking, I really don't know too much about it, and I haven't been doing it for very long.  Even with a sporadic practice, it has altered my mind drastically.  My teacher in Bali taught me that one of the most important parts of meditation is the act of returning: I would sit cross-legged, eyes closed, and focus on my breath grazing the skin just beneath my nose. If countless thoughts took over, which they usually did, my most important lesson was that I could notice that had occurred, and return my concentration back to the skin above my lip, and focus on my breath.  She said as long as you could bring yourself back to your breath, you were improving. And once you had been exposed to it, the realization of that present moment, when the thoughts had disappeared and you were simply left with your breath, you could never forget that exposure. Over time, the thoughts became less, the meditation was longer, and I felt more in control of what I allowed into my mind.  I had a completely different view of how I moved, how I observed, how I processed things, and how I responded.  How I breathed, how I lived, and functioned in my body, mind, and soul.  The present moment became clearer.  And, when I can recognize and simply be in the moment, I become completely overwhelmed with gratitude and peace.

For the last two weeks, I have been doing three minutes of inversions everyday, as an experiment/challenge.  My physical yoga and meditation practice had significantly diminished over the past month and a half. I wanted to see if the inversions would inspire me to get back to it.  It has.  And, the three minutes of inversions have become a sort of meditation in itself. I have noticed how much more aware of my breath I am throughout the day.  My breath will interrupt my chatting brain and calm me, if only for a moment, the moments appear more frequently than before.  I really believe that our thoughts cause most of our suffering.  The energy and time wasted worrying about the unknown, creating scenarios, judging ourselves and others with misconceptions and lies... So, if I can decrease the "mind-stuff," the chatter, I think I would appreciate each moment of life so much more. Like I said last week, are these inversions really the reason for these changes? Who knows.  But, there has been a shift.

"They don't realize the limitations of thought."

-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth