This time of year, although it happens, well, every year, can feel like such a shock. We may go from feeling confident, beaming, god(desse)s full of pro-active planning, to mice that want to crawl into a hole wearing a soft onesie and eat carbohydrates. Our minds can sink into a bit of gloom.

There are many ways (and many reasons) of experiencing a broken head. And I don’t necessarily mean seriously broken and in need of professional help, but the day-to-day experiences of ‘my mind wont slow down’, ‘why can’t I decide anything’, ‘I feel a bit down’ or ‘I’m not sure why I put the soap in the fridge but I did’.

We are often reminded of what we put into our bodies, what we should be doing for ourselves physically and are encouraged to eat more/less, move faster/slower, inhale more/less interesting substances. We may completely ignore the wealth of often contradictory advice, but it’s very much there. Our bodies may not be top of our list, but our mental health seems to be even further down.

How many of us spend any time actively doing something to benefit the state of our mind? Just like our physical body, our mind goes through different stages of health. For reasons to do with our personal life, hormones, our environment, or just this change of seasons, our mental health can shift, and we may have a vague sense that our minds are not as healthy as they could be. Our to-do lists probably don’t have a ‘look after my head’.

So we take for granted – or do nothing for – our mental wellbeing. But anyone who has experienced a mental breakdown or depression knows that when your mind isn’t functioning the way you’d like it to, your world turns upside down. Everything else is affected. It can feel impossible to get back to anything that nears ‘normal’. Work, family, friends and previous passions can’t be catered for.

Just as with our physical body, we shouldn’t wait until something ‘goes wrong’ with our mind before looking after it. In our society, the focus on health care is still overwhelmingly curative rather than preventative.

So what to do?

The reading that I’ve started for my course as a yoga therapist for mental health care has encouraged what I’ve been hopeful about, and what I’ve started to experience for myself in my yoga and meditation practice.

Through committing to a regular session of focusing, meditation, conscious awareness, mindfulness – whatever you want to call it, you can greatly improve the functioning of many aspects of your mind, from your memory, realisation of your habits, acceptance, your moods, as well as gaining more insight into your emotional states.

 One such super book ‘Yoga for Depression’ by Amy Weintraub discusses the science behind how this might happen:

A study at the University of Wisconsin showed that the location of our current brain activity determines our moods. Mindfulness meditation has the potential to change the location of brain activity. People who are depressed show greater use of the right prefrontal cortex, and those who are considered happy use the left prefrontal cortex. A study by Dr Davidson with Jon Kabat-Zinn, showed that stressed workers showed more activity in the right, but after mindfulness training, brain scans showed more activity on the left.

So with focusing techniques we can actually shift the working part of our brains to feel more engaged, less anxious, more positive and more balanced.

Relaxing and focusing may seem like contradictory elements. However, it is only through a relaxed state, that we become much more aware, experiencing more mental clarity. I see this as an optimum mental and physical state for the many levels of functioning we’re all trying to take on.

When we enter a relaxed state of mind and body, the different brain waves mean that there is less of a boundary between the subconscious and conscious minds. It can help to make us aware of patterns, habits or even memories, that then help us to move forward with more insight.

Try now: talk yourself through relaxing your body, especially your shoulders, your jaw . . . notice your breath . . . try to lengthen your breath by putting a count to it . . . feel your system slow down . . . every time you breathe out say quietly ‘let go’ . . . make the time to do this for 15 minutes and see how you feel.

Everything is temporary, and we have the potential to change.

We expect a lot from our minds, and they are indeed very very clever.

How are you going to look after yours today?

It may have been the stye in my eye that stopped me from falling back to sleep at 5 this morning. Or it might have been the disconcerting dream that an asteroid was about to smash into the earth . . . they are of similar importance at the moment.

In my dream, I was walking through central Norwich, when a few burning lumps of flying stuff shot past me and landed on the road. “Oh” I thought “that’s not right, I’m sure that doesn’t normally happen . . . umm, . . . I’ll just ignore that for now,” and carried on walking.

But then there were people everywhere. Everyone was screaming and looking up and running. As I looked up, a huge shadow was creeping over the sky. Then I saw the huge red ball heading for us. (Not a ladybird, no – a ball of fire). I ran too. I needed to be near someone I loved, as it all ended.

Then I realised there was no way I was going to make it anywhere in the matter of seconds left. My eyes met with a woman who was running. For a moment we stopped and looked at each other. (hold on in there dudes . . . and try not to take it too seriously . . .) I considered staying with her – somehow connecting with her in the last seconds of the planet. Then decided against it.

I was alone. Completely alone. But somehow connected to everything that had ever existed. And it felt fine. I felt fine. It was almost a relief. All I could do was stand and breathe. There was nothing else to do.

Nice dream, thanks for that. And . . .

The world won’t last forever. This body won’t last forever. We employ delaying tactics with the things we want to do or change. We postpone our dreams. We fill our time with doing stuff. Stuff that doesn’t matter. Mind space that has the potential for more powerful, real stuff gets squished by what the material world tells us is important and real.

Eckhart Tolle (author of The Power of Now) posted on facebook today “When your life situation is all you know about yourself then you miss life. You may be very good at dealing with your life situation, but you miss life. You never really get anywhere. Life is now, not in the doing.”

We work so hard for the wrong things. It’s all there – there inside. We’re constantly distracting ourselves from something we already have. We are already connected. The simplest way to notice this is to follow your breathing – try it now. We inhale, we exhale. It’s simple. It’s beautiful.

‘Stand and deliver’ just came into my head. Crikey, it’s oddly relevant! Do take a peep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

Thank you Ms Asteroid for bringing perspective back to the stye in my eye.

I forgot that nothing else matters. Nothing except this place. This quiet place inside me – a part of me. And it’s always there. I just forgot!

But I have found it again. And now it is familiar.

When I find it I don’t have to rush. I don’t have to judge. There is no failing. There isn’t even you and me. It goes beyond that. There is everything. Everything is here.

It is a soft place. It is open. I am free.

Metallica also know that nothing else matters. They sing it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcbAibPA2yY&feature=related

The theme in classes this week was aparigraha, meaning minimalism, or lack of greed.

To be minimal, we need to simplify.

And that’s it.

Simplify your day.

Contentment

This blog is dedicated to my Guru VishvaJi – just being near to him teaches so much about contentment.

We’re taught from ‘the beginning’ that there is something more, something better. We live our lives in search of something else, something other than who and what we already are. Our constant drive for more takes us away from something that is rooted in every one of us – contentment.

The inspiration from ancient yogic texts proves to be timeless. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (200 CE), it is stated “as the result of contentment, one gains supreme happiness”. Yes please.

Within yoga poses, it is common for us to push ourselves, desiring further, stronger, better. All of these happen in the mind. The body doesn’t think, it feels. When we resist or fight, we become less flexible, both physically and mentally. In our exploration of ‘contentment’ last week in yoga sessions, our attitudes towards our physical yoga practice soon made apparent our attitudes ‘off the mat’.

In an attempt to move away from ‘more’ and ‘better’ or just ‘different’, we draw towards a state of accepting things as they are; a present-moment awareness. Contentment is resting. Resting in how it is. And often how it is, is beautiful. In ‘how it is’ there are colours and shades and nuances. We can experience sensations and choices. Yoga encourages us to move from thoughts and in to experience and sensations.

This isn’t about melancholic acceptance, or reluctance to move forward. It’s seeing things as they are. When we can see how things really are, in the present moment, we have the power to act.

The power comes in recognising what we can and can’t change. When we are content we feel more positive. When we are positive we’re more likely to see the possibilities, the potential. It opens up the now. As we haven’t been fighting, we can change things with a positive attitude, knowing that we are making clear decisions from a grounded place, not a place of resistance, confusion or denial.

Contentment goes hand in hand with gratitude. The recognition of what we already have. Shifting our perspective is key to gratitue, as one of my lovely students pointed out “it takes removing yourself from yourself almost to see, to look at it from another perspective . . . which always takes me back to cup half full or half empty. Reflection always equals half full because reflection usually leads to perspective no? And perspective then leads to a sense of acceptance and understanding of where you are at, and once we have this then we can feel that contentment.”

We don’t have to be happy to be content. Contentment can even be found in sadness. It’s often our reactions to how we feel that cause us the suffering – not the actual feelings themselves. Denying sadness, rejecting it, or fighting it can cause more tension and hurt than the sadness itself. I think of this now as contentment within sadness.

It goes beyond like and dislike too. A little thumb up says I approve of something. Then I can change my mind if I stop liking it. What a relief to not feel the need to decide if I do, or don’t like something. It just is as it is. It’s stupendously freeing not to enter realms of like and dislike. Don’t confuse it with not being involved – this is the most ‘involved’ way of living. When not wrapped up in the workings of attachment and aversion we open ourselves up to life.

We can cultivate contentment, just as we can cultivate any attitude in life. For me, contentment is about softening, both physically and mentally. Putting in less effort. It’s not about trying hard, which seems to be my default mode. Contentment makes me relax the multitude of mini-tensions that I hold physically and mentally. Maybe you don’t have to make things better. Maybe there is no better. Maybe this is it.

You are not reliant on anything outside of yourself to be content. There is no past or future with contentment. Everything is temporary. This is the perfect moment.

PS this blog has taken me the longest to write, as it’s taken me ages to be content with the content. Sigh. Of course, please feel free to add your thumb up of ‘like’ to this post.

I’ve been thinking this week, in my first week back of teaching yoga after a 3 month break, of what it means to be me, and what it means to be you, and how we meet each other. I met some of you this week with a handshake and others with a hug, but that aside, how do we connect?

How often do we dare to be ourselves? How often do we know what we feel or think? And how we can we communicate that to other people? As a yoga teacher, I have to present myself, as I am in that moment. If I’m not honest or real, I’m not being fair to myself, or to you. And you have to be true to you. Hopefully we meet in the middle.

Sometimes it’s scary biscuits to speak your truth.

On being confronted yesterday by a lady who offered me salvation through the Bible, I wanted to tell her about yoga, how I didn’t need salvation, how I don’t think anybody needs salvation, and that I’m not searching for ‘something else’. I have ‘something else’ and that is me. Trust in me. And trust in a higher energy that I don’t understand or pretend to understand. I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t want to cause a scene, or disrupt this otherwise polite conversation. I was accepting of her approaching me, telling me about her truth, but couldn’t, on this occasion, find it in me to tell her my truth.

Maybe I didn’t need to.

I have been known in situations like this before, to get a bit angry, possibly rude or sarcastic. I feel that someone has imposed their opinions on me and that I deserve to speak too. But by telling her my truth, what would have changed? She wasn’t there to hear my truth, just as although I respected hers, it was hers, not mine.

I want to be able to express my opinion without being rude. To be gentle and gracious and powerful all at the same time. I think this is so important. I am allowed to think whatever I like, but I don’t want to blast it on anyone.

Don’t shout your truth. Be your truth. Whatever that is, in any given moment. If we all had the space to work out what our truth is, we might not feel the need to suggest that others find theirs – that coincidentally you think should be exactly the same as yours. As Gandhi said “Be the change you wish to see in the world”.

Your truth can change. In each moment we need to be honest. Our greatest commitment should be to ourselves. Then when I am being me, and you are being you and our circles meet, some pretty cool things can happen. Then we have possibilities. Neither of us is fighting our way because we don’t need to. Then we have the potential to learn, to challenge ourselves, to shift when a shift is needed.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henri Bergson

And more importantly in the words of Madonna and her truth, “True blue baby I love you”.