Trust Yourself

I have been thinking about how important it is for me to trust and believe in myself. Yes, it is important for me to listen to other opinions and take suggestions but ultimately I am the one who has to live with my decisions. Trusting myself is also a big way I build up my self confidence.

My yoga teachers give me ques but they are not commands they are suggestions. Some of these suggestions don't feel appropriate to my body and I trust that I know best. For example, lotus pose (padmasana). If I fold my legs placing each ankle on my hips with my soles of the feet facing up I am pretty confident that I will be doing more harm to my knees then I would be doing good for my hips. So I trust myself to go just far enough that I can work toward the pose safely for me.

In yoga asana classes we get to sequentially move through poses. Training our body to hold the alignment with stability. We learn to trust our self in simpler poses and then over time we find our self doing more complex poses with confidence and ease.

Yoga is an invitation to deepen our relationship with our self. Learning to become receptive, listing, and trusting our self. In my experience when I trust myself, its easier for me to trust others and trust in the universe, even when a situation feels incredibly challenging I try to have faith that it will work our and help me heal. However when I fall into doubting myself pretty soon I am doubting everything and I live from a place of fear.

I used trust as a theme for this morning class at Avenues Yoga working up to handstands. Focus was on alignment for hands and arms, mainly expanding spiral. The picture on the right is my class plan and a picture of Chin mudra, which is the hand posture of index finer nail to the thumb. The index finger represents the individual bowing to the thumb representing supreme consciousness/ higher self. When I catch myself feeling scared or full of doubt I will (if i remember) take this hand posture to remind myself that I can trust my higher power.