Unfiltered 2
Hey reader.
Alright …I am a week late. My sincere apologies. 23 year old Dana would have probably spent the next paragraph making countless excuses and going out her way to prove WHY in fact she wasn’t present enough to write a blog post. However, rather than providing useless explanations, I’ll just give you one. I am human. And so are YOU. Hell yeah, look at us: Giving our humanity some grace. 27 year old Dana, on the other hand, has a new lens to share, and let me tell you, it’s my greatest lesson of 2021. And 2021 just started. Holy shit, it’s 2021. IS THIS THING ON?!
Excuses form defense walls that can cause harmful interactions in our interpersonal relationships. They are more often than not (well let’s be real, almost always) projections of our insecurities and how we view ourselves. For example, in this instance, the initial thought for me would sound something like, “man, here I go again lacking consistency and procrastinating like I always do.” From there, my thoughts would spiral, I would cling to them, and then as a result, I would conclude with some kind of a statement about myself such as “I’m a let down.” That place of “let down-ness” would lead me to get down on my knees and grovel in order to convince people that I am not letting them down, when really, 98% of the time, people aren’t really thinking that of me in the slightest. In fact, nobody is really thinking about me at all, they are most likely thinking about themselves. And hell, we each have our own Cirque du Soleil to dance with these days.
This pattern of thought→ statement→ action, my friends, is a product of none other than attachment. When we attach to our thoughts and the vicious cycles that reside in our minds, we end up believing some false reality about ourselves that then seeps into the ways that we connect to the world around us. We can spend hours attaching to what we are lacking, what we are eating, who we are dating, why we are single (I mean name another issue, I could also spend another paragraph writing about that) etc. Bullshit bullshit BULLSHIT, RIGHT?! This cycle keeps us stuck in the narrative of our past (as thoughts are conditioned from our experiences, upbringings and triggers) rather than rewriting our present Every. Single. Moment. of. Every. Single. Day. So where does this lead us both on our mats and outside of our practice? To the 8 limbs of yoga, specifically, to the Yama or “social restraint” Aparigraha (non-grasping, non-harming, non-attaching).
In my class, I ask all of us to take what’s available to us (body, mind and soul) and do our VERY best to leave the rest alone; leave ourselves alone. However, we get on our mats, we become still, and the noise in our head gets louder than a Travis Scott concert. (Short tangent, I went to his show in Eugene thinking it was a rap concert. Alas, it was trap, and trap music is like the heavy metal of the Hip-Hop world. Point being, it was LOUD AF). We get on our mats, and we immediately turn to what’s wrong. My friend Holly, a fellow teacher at Yoyoyogi, once said in class “what’s wrong is almost always available.” Ring a bell? We place a hyper awareness on what’s not functioning, and we attach to lack. Consequently, our entire practice feels like a huge let down because we have convinced ourselves that we are a huge let down. We arrive at the mat with all the baggage we carry in our day to day lives to begin with, so if shit hits the fan before class, we are convinced that shit is gonna hit the fan in our practice as well. This logic equally applies to when things are going very well for us. For example: we have a typically strong practice, strong personal life, strong career, and as a result we EXPECT our practice to reflect that. We attach to the idea of perfection. However, when reality collides with our quest to be perfect, we also feel like a let down. Attachment in either regard is basically the ultimate catch-22.
Aparigraha reminds us to have cognitive dissonance. It reminds us to live in flux. We can be the party starter, AND sometimes turn people off and turn inward. We can be a boss ass CEO, AND still go harder than most people we know on vacation. We can be gentle in our overall nature, AND have Khaleesi fire breathing dragon moments from time to time. NEWSFLASH: none of us were designed single faceted. We are multi-faceted, complex human beings. To confine ourselves to a single way of being is harmful. We can feel trapped in who we are by convincing ourselves that we HAVE to be what people validate us to be all the time. My business coach and mentor Rachael Brooke said, “When things are going well, we let it get to our head, when things are going poorly we let it get to our heart.” So I ask all of us: can we practice observing when we let things get to our head and our heart? How can we live more dynamically with who we are and what we have to offer? Letting go might be a bit drastic, so maybe let’s loosen the grip a little bit, aight?! Attach less, ATTRACT more.
Until next time,
Dana A. Spitz
