“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~Pema Chodron
One of my yoga teachers, Johanna Aldrich, inspired me to inspect what I “thought” I was.
“This is what I am, this is what I am not, this is what I do, this is what I don’t do, this is what I like, that is what I don’t like.” All the stories and behavior patterns gathered in 40+ years that I had created to define myself.
Of course, I had reasons and whys behind all of these things I “thought” I was. I had tried a few of those things and long ago made my decisions but in some cases had never even tried. Some of the reasons were real and some were imagined.
But what are these things really but just stories?
They’re the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again in order to feel comfortable or hide from difficult realities. I avoided many things with my stories so I wouldn’t have to experience failure and disappointment—just wanting to feel loved, good enough, part of something.
It’s interesting to me how the mind wants to have everything figured out. It provides us some sort of comfort. This can also be seen in victims of trauma and violence in a much more heightened way, but all of us have used our stories to try to gain ease of mind.
So I spent 2012 intentionally doing the opposite of what I would normally do. I tried for the first time and also re-tried many things with a beginner’s mind. I: (more…)