Kotsu Kotsu

Recently I heard that a colleague had had bad year. Her boyfriend broke up with her, she lost her job, and on the day in question, her sweet, loving dog bit her in the face. Now, while all these are things no one wants to have happen, I was interested that she grouped them together to define the year as a bad one. We construct entire landscapes of self image and judgment, based on some pretty insubstantial evidence! Finding some quiet time to be mindful of inner thoughts can really help illuminate this. It's astounding how many of our simple thoughts or even feelings in the body are accompanied by a judgment or an emotion. Wow. My brain just seems hard-wired to calculate, measure, and compare me to others, and to make predictions about the future based on my calculations and comparisons. That would be fine if the predictions were useful, but, frankly, most of them are not. By the time I'm consciously aware of these thoughts, they seem inevitable or given, for example: ...

I've been thinking a lot about transitions lately.  I see a lot of people in yoga class who, when prompted to forward fold, or lift a leg into three-legged dog , zoom along in overdrive. I wonder, where are they trying to get to by going so fast? It's a fact that we all spend most of our mental "lives" in either the future (worrying, planning, anticipating, fearful), or in the past (regretting, reminiscing, rewriting).  We fall into the habit of thinking that we are in "transition" between one "important" thing and another: on the way to work, getting from downward dog to low lunge, getting "through" warmups. In fact our lives are one long transition from the two most important moments, birth and death. Are you really in such a hurry to get there ? But rather than beating ourselves up about our these habits, it's worth just looking at how we handle all the transitions in our lives. Do you tend to want to stay where we are, res...