Awareness: Looking For The Good

One of the many blessing of a yoga practice is just that, practice. We get to roll our our mats or meditation cushions and practice for life. One quality we can cultivate is awareness. I have been thinking about awareness a lot this week (and wrote a few blogs about it). I remember when I first started cultivating awareness on my mat I started to notice everything I was doing "bad" or "wrong". My hips lowered to fast in chataranga, my mind couldn't stop thinking, I kept collapsing in my back... Then I would leave my mat and my awareness was still turned on for looking for the bad around me, in my relationships. and in myself.

To me this is a cop-out in awareness training. Our society is almost trained to look for the bad, just take a look at the newspaper. It is a lot easier to say 5 things your don't like about yourself, your relationship, your job... then it is to say 5 good things. But it doesn't have to be like that. We can train our awareness to look for the good, just like we can strength an muscle. A great place to do that is on the yoga mat. As I practice now I work on bringing my attention to all the things that feel so sweet, My hands feel strong, i feel such a great opening in my side body, my breath is flowing smoothly, my muscles energy in my legs are helps me feel stable...I can see the ripple effect that this practice has on my life. Now I notice the good things in nature, in my relationships, and in myself.

Looking for the good is one of the teachings that informs Anusara Yoga. Adam has been teaching us in teacher training, to always be looking for the good in our students and to learn how to articulate what they are doing good before offering a refinement.

Last night I taught a class at They Yoga Center with this theme idea. It was a great, 12 students! Studio owners Lydnesy and Sheldon took my class which gave me a few butterflies in my stomach but I was so happy they came to support me. They gave me some great feed back as well.