The chaos of life

Everyday life is overwhelming at times. I do not measure up, I get lost in my own chaos and lose direction, focus and drive. Life can be so stunning and confusing that the easiest thing would be to lie down. Give up. Slowly disappear without anyone noticing.

Practising yoga does us good on many levels. We get a new experience of body and mind, and perhaps our awareness wakes up a little more? The art, the power and the finesse of yoga is to open ourselves to the inner presence of life that exists in every moment. A gift of grace, an inner witness, independent of everything I think and feel. To stop chasing results and instead hold the pure and simple, the clarity of being present here and now. If we manage that, it becomes easier to hold all our blunders and suffering, imbalances and distractions, and to turn our focus to the inner awareness that centres and integrates. Because that is yoga: the awareness that lives in us and is not all the rest, not the tangle of thoughts and feelings that spins out of control every single day.

So in difficult moments, take a pause, take a few extra breaths and feel what you really hold. Let it find a solid anchor in this building of a body we carry around.

In glimpses, we experience yoga in everyday life. But to understand it better we must practise developing pure presence here and now, both in the yoga we do and in everyday life. What stops us is our fixed interpretations of reality, of who we think we are: the restless patterns of the mind. The paradox is that we must see, feel and understand these in order to gradually change them and open ourselves to the innermost steadiness that simply is. That is yoga in practice.