Your life can be both messy and beautiful.
Observations on moving, breathing and being are just that. At least mine are.
This is where I think out loud.
I get to decide how I move, breathe and be.
Since 2020, I’ve been writing about things that surface when we slow down long enough to notice—perfectionism, self-love, balance, sadness, choice, uncertainty, beginnings. These aren’t prescriptions. They’re invitations to sit with what’s here and to get curious about what it might be pointing towards.
Some of them were written in the thick of a season of major change. Some were written from the other side. All of them are honest.
I took a long pause. I’m back now. New reflections are coming—and the only ones are still here because the themes don’t expire.
On what we think
Our thoughts play a huge role with respect to our perspective on events and life in general. Both cognitive therapy and yoga philosophy discuss the impact thoughts have on our behaviour, acknowledging that they generally precede action. This means that often times, we’re more influenced emotionally by our reaction to something than from that “thing” itself.
Said another way, we often act based on our emotional reaction to something rather than the actual thing. Kind of unhelpful, right?
So…why might we interpret events in unhelpful ways?
A reflection on turning impediments into fortune
I’ve heard that vinyl records have enjoyed a resurgence of late. If you remember them at all, you might recall that they have grooves. Vinyls tend to work until these grooves become scratched or broken such that the result is an endless loop across the same recorded section…over and over again.
We as humans have similar grooves, too. And we also tend to work until these grooves result in repeated patterns of behavior, difficult to resist, that no longer serve us yet which we relive…over and over again…keeping us “stuck” or frozen in the past.
In yoga, we know these grooves to be samskaras…
A reflection on penning our own life's story
Stories are often created from ignoring the truth of a person, behavior, situation, culture, system and the like. Within our own lives, we allow ourselves to become actors, learning to play our roles quite well within these stories, both understanding and dancing around the often multi-layered, underlying subtext never to be spoken. We proudly wear our costumes and masks. We diligently show up for rehearsal. Occasionally we dare to improvise, exposing contextual moments of truth, often unknown to most, including ourselves. But eventually, as good actors do, we circle back to the story’s original intent so as to arrive at curtain call as expected.
Pause. Re-read if need be.
Life itself is made up of a compilation of these stories…