Life is not a game of dodgeball

We all have within us the ‘artful dodger’. We’re smart that way. In fact, the smarter we are, the dodgier we get. We find myriad ways to avoid the uncomfortable, messy and painful elements of life, both big and small.

Dodging doesn’t help. Yoga does. The things we resist in life…and in practice…are exactly the things that help us the most.

The natural human response to pain is fear, avoidance and denial, yet yoga uses pain as a method of awakening. By learning to accept pain within the safe space of yoga you learn to create a pause between the stimulus of pain and the response in your body and mind that wants to run away. In that powerful pause you are able to choose your course of action instead of being driven by reactionary patterns from the past. The store of accumulated reactionary patterns amount to what is called in Sanskrit the samskaras and these set ways of being, reacting and running create the negative karma that adversely affects our lives. If you are truly to use the yoga practice to whittle away at the store of negative karma and behavioral patterns then to practice as often as possible is a mandatory minimum requirement. -K. McGregor

In my younger days, I had a challenging corporate job that required me to cold call potential clients in a foreign language. I was (more or less successfully) selling high-end financial software to big banks in Europe. The bigger the potential deal and the more senior the client, the less inclined I was to make the call. So I started making a to-do list. I put the least-agreeable, highest-risk task at the top of the list every day. It worked, and it wasn’t actually that bad.

That vegetable you don’t like? The lima beans? Eat them first. -C. Fluck

Just for today, try it. See what happens.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. -K. Gibran