When I was in the corporate world I both loved and strongly disliked Performance Appraisals. I enjoy the feedback knowing that I exceeded expectations but at the same time it would make it harder for next time. The point came where the
pressure just went up and up. We do that in our life. We start giving ourselves a grade on everything when the reality is that it is all just pass/fail. We are passing if we learn to balance positive expectations with acceptance.“Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.” (Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth) This acceptance for sure brings about inner peace, joy and love. Otherwise we are in that state of fighting what life is offering and that is failing at life.
Yoga has without a doubt made me more patient. It helps me move from that state of having too heave of expectations and grading everything to allowing and accepting. Don’t get me wrong sometimes it’s still
hard not to grade myself at life on any given day but for sure I’m better at seeing the whole thing as simply pass/fail. What’s changed? Well I don’t want to feel that TUG-O-WAR with myself or with anyone else. Impatience doesn’t feel good and yoga teaches the antidote to impatience is, yes you can guess, patience. Patience feels good. It feels like a return to center no matter the chaos or what other people do or don’t do. It feels like compassion, peacefulness and a constant return to balance. When I am patient I feel like I can attempt anything without attachment to the result. When Patient our minds stop playing the old games of pushing, pulling, creating anxiety, distrust, stress or simple heavy expectations.
It is a simply formula: Over Expectations = Impatience Accepting = Patience
Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth writes “To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.” Try it for a week or even a day where you try living in a way where you relieve the heavy expectations of yourself and others and live with less resistance to this isness of now. Instead follow the guidance of the Yoga Sutras which advise “enjoyment is the sweetness of noticing your life right now: smell, taste, feeling, sensation.” This type of enjoyment allows us to receive what life is offering regardless of whether it looks like what we expected.
In this pass/fail of life “You can’t run after contentment it has to find you, all you can do is try to create the space for it.” (Judith Lasater) We are through yoga really meeting ourselves with no further resistance or pre-qualifications. It is like what Derek Walcott writes about in his poem: So join me feast on your life!
Love yourself, love your day, love your life! Silvia
“The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the others welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”
