Greetings again.
The last two months have been refreshing, educational, and pretty busy. I stopped working at Dahn for various reasons--the main one being that Zack got a really good job and I started working at the Yoga barn. Now I'm working there 1-3 days a week. The rest of the time, I'm at a chiropractic clinic. I also started the Advanced Studies course at the YB, and so far I've been to two weekend workshops that have given me a lot of insight into my practice. There's a lot of action going on in my life, and I'm happy to say it is all focusing on (or at least revolving around) yoga.
That brings me to my proposed topic for this posting - Kriya Yoga. This was the topic of our first Advanced Studies workshop. Tapas, svadhyaya, isvara pranidhana. After some consideration, I feel that I should bring my journal back into my practice as a form of svadhyaya. When I started writing this journal, I didn't really have a specific intention in mind for it except to reap some sort of benefit that related to my practice as a whole. As I read through it to get a sense of where I thought I left off, I could see that here and there I commented on a few--my writing ability was improving, I had an outlet for self-exploration, and I felt like I was accomplishing something that previously was hard for me to do. That was all well and good, but it did not keep me coming back to the keyboard every day without some feeling of dread for the task at hand. I can see now that this feeling of dread in the face of activity is one of my biggest hurdles and that overcoming it is not simply a matter of willfully erasing the dread. I need a system to follow that promotes non-dread.
I think that tool is intention.
With this blog and certainly every other activity that I engage myself in, a certain quality of mindfulness is essential. It is not helpful to simply throw myself at the task with the belief that the task itself will magically erase all my problems. If I set an intention for every task that needs doing, I can direct my full attention to that task because I will have a point to focus on. I've always thought of myself as a person with the ability to concentrate fully on something. When I can't, I get frustrated at myself because I get the idea in my head that I must be doing something wrong. While that is true, my wrongdoing is based on the fact that I spread my mind too thin rather than my simple inability to concentrate on anything. If I give myself one point to concentrate on, the rest will flow with ease. It's like setting the title and then writing to that. My blog gives me a little space to type that in, but that is not so apparent in every area of life. That's a good visualization--for every task that I have, I need to create a title for it before I can go ahead and do it. With the intention set, I have a much better chance of attentively dedicating myself to the task rather than haphazardly throwing brain power at it until it gets done.
How's that for ahimsa?
