Convincing yourself
Convincing yourself: not a strategy
A fallen tree intersects one of my hiking trails. Truthfully, it brings out the child in me. As adulting is taxing, I welcome the opportunity to use it as a balance beam. And it's been teaching me a lot lately, as I straddle many lines in my life: mother and child, mother and father, teacher and student, friend and teacher. Balance is everything, so I may have the health and attitude necessary to thrive as the waves of life, fortunately, overtake me, then recede. After all these years of tadasana vinyasa, it should be easy to traverse this trunk, right? Wrong.
Our unconscious programming overrides our intellectual knowledge, every time. Why? How? There’s a massive accumulation of moments in our past, even though we experience life in our present. Our mind is like a hard drive. As we don’t see everything stored on our computer, we don’t remember everything we experienced. On our computers, we create neat, little, labeled folders where we store like items. I love those. Sometimes I happen upon folders so old that I can’t exactly place them at this point, although the dates of the files help, and when I open the file, my memory returns.
Our own internal structure may not be that organized, although we do have a gross to subtle system called the mind that does this for us. Constantly filing in the hard drive. Rarely seeing as is, mostly perceiving an occluded version through those invisible memories. In the torrent of life’s experiences and associated emotions, we blur and lose track. We have to, because life keeps happening throughout our highs, lows and neutrals, and we simply can’t keep up.
Why am I sometimes falling off of this tree trunk when I traverse it, and sometimes not? And what seems to be the common theme in my successful crossings? It comes down to who I am when I cross over. Am I the ego-driven, long-time Yoga teacher? I fall off every time. Am I the little Danielle who fell on the neighbor’s driveway while wearing my new wooden clogs at 8 years old? Stumble. Am I the subtle-body-aware 50 year old who can sense my physical imbalances while also judging and intellectualizing them? Whoops. Am I the me, right now, who doesn’t care how awkward I may look walking on a log while everyone else stays on the trail? Getting closer. With my arms to the side like an airplane? I’m warm now. Breathing through my instability? Warmer. Having fun in the forest, not outcome-focused just putting one foot in front of the other, doing a funny kind of dance to stay on the log, part of the amazing natural ecosystem for the sake of, being? I made it across.
Be the child on the log. The subtle mind that holds our original impressions drives our overall memory and habits. When we go there, we don’t have to convince ourselves we can. We become. The identifications fall away, and we innovate beyond the confines of who we think we should be. Don’t convince yourself. BE yourself.