The Stuff We’re Made of…
You’ve heard it before… but I’ll say it again:
It’s all energy!
Okay, I can already hear the voice in your head saying ‘urgh, another Yoga teacher talking about something woowoo and mystical, I’m out’. But WAIT! This stuff can be seriously interesting and I’d love to get you thinking about your existence. Would it help your skepticism if I brought Albert Einstein into the conversation?
Okay, here you go. Words from arguably the greatest scientist to have lived… “everything is energy, and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy, this is physics”
BOOM!
And funnily enough, Yoga says exactly the same thing. Put very simply, Yoga is somewhat of a *‘handbook’ that gifts us a deeper understanding of this world and how we can live a more aligned life that is filled with a deep connection to Truth that guides us through the highs and lows- isn’t that ‘handy’ ;)?
*(acknowledging that really the word ‘handbook’ doesn’t begin to touch the scope of what Yoga is)
So, what is the Truth of our world/ reality then and how does this relate to energy? Well, it was actually early Indian Philosophers, waaay before Mr. Einstein, who recognised that all matter was truly energy, it’s just the vibration of what appears as matter has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses.
Whats really fascinating to me, is when you really get this- like not in an intellectual kind of way, but in an experiential way, where the sensitivity of your awareness to this energy, or prana, is so heightened- your life starts to shift.
How? Why? According to Yoga, our baseline frequency or energy is JOYFUL, EXPANSIVE, PEACEFUL. I mean just look at kids, whether you like ‘em or not, they are the embodiment of this state! However, as we age, move through life’s challenges and are shaped by the society we find ourselves in, we forget. We rarely hook into this natural frequency because the power of our habituated ways of thinking and being are stronger than our power to remember.
Enter Yoga… Through the practice of awareness, we shine light on all the ways we are showing up in our life that are not in alignment with that baseline frequency of ours, not in alignment with Truth. Perhaps we start to see that we hold onto the energy of strong emotions like anger or jealousy, or we repeatedly replay the stories in our minds that once facilitated the experience of a big emotion.
Science has shown us that the energy of an emotion takes only 90 seconds to move through the body. But rarely do we feel it and flush it out. We LOVE to hold onto it, even though it causes us pain. Replaying the situation over to family, friends, in our heads etc gives us some kind of validation and confirmation that yes, in fact, our life is so hard. We remove the role of personal responsibility and rather we be ‘right’ in the stories we’ve created about how we see the world and our place in it.
But, if emotion is just energy moving through us, then really it’s our replaying of thoughts about things that upsets us, it’s not the actual thing itself.
Read that again.
So, if we start to change our thoughts, we start to change our frequency and we realise that we DO have a say in our life. And Yoga is really this process of taking radical responsibility for the state of affairs we find ourselves in (yikes, that’s not easy!), and moving towards that which we desire.
It starts with the simple practice of awareness.
We begin to take back our power. We drop the expectations we place on others to make us feel a certain way. We stop outsourcing our happiness.
We become more connected and anchored to that innermost part of us that sees things truly for what they are.
We raise our vibration from the inside, and the outside world begins to reflect that.
Life starts to shift.
