Inside Yoga 81 (8/7/13)
Confidence, or to put it more precisely, the lack of confidence is a major obstacle for many of us seeking a better quality of life. It represents a barrier that perhaps holds us back from realising our potential or simply enjoying our life. Yoga can help redress this.
Yoga represents a personal journey, as it is not about what others think or do, but primarily it is about what we do and how we relate to ourselves. In many ways the often quoted saying, “heal ourselves before others”, has a lot of relevance and even though it might sound such a cliché the expression does hit the nail on the head.
Yoga and meditation is not a competitive practice – regardless of how it might appear in some places, for example in a busy yoga studio, this practice is about ourselves; and remembering this is important when confidence is a problem.
Think of any situation when we are feeling bad in ourselves – we become irritable and annoyed with everyone and ourselves. And when we don’t realise this we perhaps do not see what is happening until it is too late – by then we might have said or done something we regret.
Look at our confidence. When we feel low in confidence it affects how we take part in daily life – from work, family to play. It takes a lot of courage to take part in the world when we feel so low in confidence. And we perhaps hold ourselves back.
I believe yoga helps: it is does this in the gradual way it helps develop our confidence. The practice of yoga reflects the world beyond, in the way we approach the practice. Learning to work with our body, breath and mind takes helps to build our confidence. We take it step by step, with awareness.
As we learn a yoga posture we are overcoming obstacles, such as the body and breath struggling with a position, and our mind fighting the practice with chatter of distraction or perhaps internal comments of “I cannot do this”. When we find we can do this posture (however well that might be as any improvement makes a difference), the negative mind has been vanquished and subdued, leaving a more positive mind. Step by step we can say to ourselves that we are getting there, improving, doing our best and so forth.
This approach also involves a mixture of kindness and discipline. We motivate ourselves with discipline to practice, which in itself helps to build our confidence as we can see as we keep the practice (this includes attending classes) going that we are sticking to something and doing our best. And then when we feel we cannot do so much and find something difficult we show some kindness to ourselves. We don’t always have to give ourselves a hard time. Telling ourselves that we are doing what we can and doing well is helpful.
It is important that we remain mindful of what we are doing and not doing. Awareness of our actions and our relationship to our actions is an important key to this practice. We work hard at the practice but some days we might need to push ourselves while others we might need to be gentle and kind.
Gradually, using this approach I have seen how yoga helps build up confidence. It is self-empowering as whatever we achieve, we can say we did ourselves – the teacher can only show the way, as we have to do ourselves. And when we have we can say to ourselves: “well done”.
