You will learn on the mat that open doesn’t mean sedated or passive. Open is an active, powerful condition, because it is fearless. And you will learn that open is more satisfying, safe, and easy than fearful and contracted. To clarify, fearless doesn’t mean impulsive or prone to taking dangerous risks. It doesn’t mean acting brazenly. To the contrary, it means you act with full awareness, because fear doesn’t confuse and distract you. Fear limits your vision and ability to make choices that promote your self-interests. Fear renders you incapable of being your authentic, powerful, kind and courageous self, having your best life.
On the mat, you will practice relaxing, releasing, and softening. But to fully flow in a pose, to fully experience it, you must also actively engage. This combination of relaxing and engaging supports the pose, making it more satisfying, strong, and flexible. You will continually scan the body, making minor adjustments—releasing and engaging, releasing and engaging, as the pose unfolds. It feels like a private, sacred dance you do internally. As you practice poses, the body remembers how to move more safely, comfortably, and easily off the mat.
As your body remembers how to function and support itself, your mind and your internal experience will remember the same. You will apply this process of releasing and engaging to the moments of your life.
If you aren’t in the moment, you aren’t in your life. This is the only moment that matters.
Root yourself in the moment and try to connect with it as fully as possible. Observe where you are, what you are doing, who/what is around you. Observe what exactly is happening, including your mental and emotional distractions. Look at your experience of this moment under the microscope of your awareness. When you are mindful and present to the actual moment, you will find that it's entirely different than your perception of it. Most of the time, everything in the moment is quite tolerable, even pleasant. You are safe and comfortable.
When your body, mind, and/or experience feels tangled up or contracted, you can approach that moment and “yoga” the heck out of it. Release fear and resistance, or whatever is closed. Engage courage, or whatever is needed to open. Practice open, just for the moment. There is no other.
You will discover that sometimes you simply can’t connect to the moment, and maybe you don’t even want to. You are closed and there ain’t no way you’re going to open. It feels like you must cling to the story for dear life. You are enslaved to your confusion. To plan your liberation, you must study your enslavement. The light of your attention will heal you: to open, you must examine what closes. Examine what has set you off, in all its hideous detail. Pick it apart, and eventually there will be nothing left. Writing/Righting it out is a helpful tool for this.
There is no way to avoid challenges and conflicts in life. They are reality. But you can empower yourself to manage them competently through the practice of open.
In the event of challenges and conflicts, being open supports you to act assertively and competently, rather than reacting helplessly and unproductively--like a pinball bouncing off the bumpers. Open provides the ability to analyze the challenges without fear. It means you have the fortitude to approach a person or situation with confidence, kindness, and courage, to improve it or to improve your understanding of it. And you have the free will to release the issue fully, if that is the best course of action. Being resistant, angry, hurt, jealous, aggravated, or closed in any way is not beneficial or productive for your life experience.
As you practice each moment, you remember that being free and open is a satisfying, meaningful, and pleasant approach to life. You discover the burden of being enslaved and closed. You experience life as a fully developed, liberated human adult, in the only moment that matters.
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