Inside Yoga 188 (2/1/2017)
I had just finished a long walk with my dog across the top of the Mendip Hills in glorious winter sunshine and had returned to my car. I was just about to drive off when I stopped and thought for second. Why am I hurrying off?
The view from the car was beautiful offering a 360degree panoramic view, with no one else around, just the sound of the wind and some sheep in a nearby field. I decided to pause and savour the moment.
As we contemplate the start of January and our New Year resolutions, many of us will feel the need to get on with stuff. We possibly feel a sense of urgency to make changes or the pressure to drag ourselves kicking and screaming back to work and what many people call normal routine.
Christmas was great: we had time to eat, to drink (for some) and rest; and feeling refreshed why are we in such a rush to crash back into the very routines that we collapsed out of into the festive break feeling depleted and craving rest. Do we ever learn?
Perhaps not, but that is why pausing and savouring a moment of tranquillity and peace is such a good idea. These moments might be brief but being aware of them and enjoying them while they last can be all we need to give us the energy to re-enter the mad rush of our daily lives.
It is also important to realise that we might miss these moments as we can be so focused on the next activity that we really do not notice the place we are in.
When practising meditation we notice how our mind wants to move on from the awareness of the breathing and hook onto a thought and get lost in that. It’s a repeated pattern, and we train ourselves to see our mind for what it is – it loves to be distracted and to be indulged by our own thoughts.
And this extends into our daily lives, because we fill our life up with too many things to do – we always want more. So instead of enjoying a hill walk before we have physically left the hill we have left the hill in our mind and moved on to the next activity. Perhaps we were never really on the hill but lost in thought for the whole walk? And as a result we failed to thoroughly enjoy and savour every moment of our walk. (A note for the non-walkers – I do realise that there are other activities we can do to achieve the same moment I am describing.)
To stop this happening we first need to catch ourselves in the act, and then take the appropriate action which in my case was to stay on the hillside a little longer soaking up the views and sounds of the environment I was in instead of rushing off. Simple really but we often ignore the opportunities to really wake up.
Feel free to share this blog with others, and any thoughts, questions or comments do contact me via the blog reply panel below or email me gary@yogabristol.co.uk
