Pulling Out to Deepen In

My beautiful, abundance filled, and totally REAL life has been bittersweet these past weeks.

I've started my teacher training with Beyond Asana which required me to cut down on my teaching schedule. Some days I love being a student, yet some days I want to lead. So it's no surprise that the simple concept of backing away from something in order to get deeper into it has come to the front of my awareness.

When we work on flexibility in our asana practice, it does little good to force our bodies to stretch just to find the most Yoga Journalesque version of the posture. It's likely we will pull a muscle or force ourselves into a precarious alignment. Instead, we take our time. We breathe steadily, following a cycle of coming in and out of the pose, finding deeper refinement and extension with each breath. The beauty of it is that you are never really done with the posture, you never completely arrive, but instead cyclically move through it over and over over. Inhale to extend. Exhale to deepen. Repeat.

It's when we believe we have "completed" a thing that we truly must begin again.

Just like approaching an asana, or even the practice of yoga itself, it best serves us to enter with a beginner's mind. Open to receiving more. Creating space and taking a step back to observe it. When we stop learning, we stop growing.

With all that, it's tough to step back from teaching in order to be taught. It's challenging to melt down my knowledge so I can forge it again as something stronger. It's scary to accept the contradiction of not teaching as a way of becoming a better teacher, and to trust that when I deepen back in I will truly be able to do so deeper and with more awareness.

There you go again: another way yoga itself becomes a microcosm of the every day world. How they are both real and they both require us to practice continuously, hold space for Grace, and trust in ourselves (among soooo many other things!)

Where can you find space in your life to begin again?