It can be really interesting to notice the habits and attitudes that we bring into our practice. Observing how we treat our bodies, what thoughts we let take up space in our mind, the ways in which we speak to ourselves. We can learn a lot about who we really are.
Something I notice quite often, as a practitioner and a teacher, is how much pushing and forcing we do. We want the body to be, or look, a certain way. We are determined to perform a particular movement. We expect the practice to give us a desired feeling or experience. So we push, and force, to try to make it happen.
When we practice in this way, it can often feel like we are in a battle. Fighting with our body, our breath, a pose, the teacher — and by the time we lie down and find stillness, we are exhausted, disheartened, and more tense and tight than when we started.
This habit of pushing and forcing is not just something that we do in our practice. It is very common to see this pattern in many other aspects of our life — in our relationships, with others, at work, in our careers, our life goals. We can be so desperate for things to be, or stay a certain way, that we do everything, and anything, to make it happen.
When we live like this, just like in our practice, our life becomes a battle, full of tension and tightness.
Ironically what we are really trying to learn in our practice is how to be with things as they are. To be with the body, the breath, the sensations. To watch things arise, to watch them pass away. To be with the moment exactly as it is, rather than how we want it to be.
This is one of our biggest challenges as a human being — letting go of the need to control. To accept the reality that things are going to keep changing, and we can either learn to move with it, or continue to fight against it.
One of my teachers Pema Chödrön likes to say that our life is just a continuous play of things coming together and falling apart. It is so easy to get swept up in thinking that the point of our practice, and our life, is to figure out how to stop it. To make things be, and stay, a perfect way. So we use all of our time and energy trying to fix things up, or hold things together, and really all we doing, is going against the very nature of all things.
So the challenge is to give up the fight, to let go of the struggle. To accept that in life, everything changes, and theres nothing we can do to stop it. What we can do, and where our work lies, is learning how to relax into it, to lean into the uncertainty, to remember that things will fall apart, and they will come back together again, and this is simply what it means to be alive.
