New Year...

Oddly enough this year I'm not seeing too many end of the year posts or lists, by this time I've usually been saturated by them on Facebook and other social media and tv shows and such, but maybe since I'm in India I'm not seeing so much of that.

To me its not the end of the year, its just another day transforming into yet another day.

Here in Mysore it is the end of the month which means many of my friends are leaving to go home and many will be coming for January, already some have arrived. That transition seems odd but then in a week you forget about it and are used to the new schedule and the new energy around town. This year there is also someone here who just arrived from home who doesn't speak to me for reasons I don't know but I reached out before she arrived to open the avenue of communication and got a response, so we'll see. Hopefully that can be a healing that happens here as well. But other than that, it doesn't seem like the end of anything.

In yoga, especially maybe in the Ashtanga method, we are trained to really bring awareness, strong and deep awareness, to our practice. Which eventually then translates over into our lives. Once you start living with such awareness each moment can be a moment to let things go, to reapply your focus in a direction that is more helpful and to move forward in a direction that better serves you.

Here in Mysore especially it can be this way because the pressures of home are not here. You don't have to go to work, you can and some do, but its still not like having to drive in traffic and live under a heavy schedule like there. You don't have to teach and hold space for others, so your focus is almost solely on yourself. You have more of community because we're all here doing this strong practice and are having emotions come up, changes abound from within and we are constantly questioning the status quo and making changes to support the new findings we are gleaning as we work deeper and deeper each day. Many bring their family so may have kids or spouses to deal with just as at home, but again the pressures from daily life there don't seem to bring the same amount of pressure here as they do there. All in all, life here supports the deep inner work we're here to do, even if we are starting with the gross body, much more is going on than just learning new shapes to move yourself into.

So thinking of tomorrow being New Years Day doesn't really seem to have much effect. We still have to wake up well before dawn to get to the shala for our practice, so no late night activity, or not much anyway, happens for most of us. But the idea symbolically can be a good one. I just choose to not wait until a new year to make resolutions, but each day as I discover something that is no longer working for me, or something that could work better or something that will work for now while I wait for more guidance as to what direction to go, I make sankalpas. A sankalpa is an intention. An intention in which to move your life spiritually. To me spirit and energy form the grossness of matter, so your intention can begin that process with more integrity than without it.

Not to say this always happens, sometimes the same mistake is made for a while before I realize the old adage you can't expect new results from doing the same action is actually true. But as I age and my practice matures, mostly especially when I'm in Mysore and have the extra time to give to my awareness for the full day, it becomes a bit easier and eventually hopefully will come more and more naturally to catch the thing that needs to be changed much sooner than otherwise would have happened.

So my sankalpa for this time frame is to keep moving forward in life, bringing more and more awareness to each and every word I say, action I take and to each thought that pops up. Even more importantly my larger intention is to not be as judgmental to myself when I don't catch things or behaviors that are less than desirable but to use that as a reinforcement to bring more awareness there the next time, until it becomes habitual. Also my hope is that being less judgmental with myself will lead me to being less judgmental of others. Each of us is on our own path and has to learn how to navigate things in our own way, and that way may not be super desirable to me, but to them it may be the best choice they can make at that time and so will be the best thing for them.

I've grown up being judgmental about everything, I'm not going to get into where that came from but just from this moment forward work on not judging others and when I do in my mind, not judge myself for doing so, just hoping to be less so the next time.

This is for today, tomorrow I may need to work on something else, and the day after something else. But to be present with the changes and aware when my focus needs to shift is my bigger intention.

Maybe easier to say go with the flow? I need to learn to go with the flow more. Water is the most powerful force on the planet, it nurtured whole environments but can also destroy them. It flows down the stream, it may get stuck in an eddy from time to time but then it moves on past that. When there is a rock it can find the tiniest hole to make its way through, or it finds a path around the rock eventually wearing parts of the rock away to make a new route. But it always finds its way to flow downstream.

So maybe I should just say I want to be more and more like water...