Author: ratnadyer

If you want to gain more confidence, start by being more patient and kind with yourself.
Confidence is not about always getting things right. It’s a willingness and knowing that you’re going to be ok and worthy along with any mistakes.

Include awareness of your presence doing the listening and the seeing and sensing. Your consciousness is here prior.

A lot of mindfulness practices are designed in such a way as to reflect to us our attachments and aversions; what we try to hold onto and what we try to avoid.
The notion is, that when we are driven, consciously or unconsciously by our grasping or aversion, we are constantly at the mercy of external circumstances. Trying to get things and experiences that make us feel good or avoid ones that don’t.

With inner freedom, our happiness comes from a deeper place; the seat of our self, rather than what we might gain or lose around it.

When we listen and follow more of our integrity, our inner knowing, higher conscience and sense of rightness and truth, there is little choice.
When we surrender within this, we generate a clarity of inner guidance and direction.
We can free ourselves from mental conflict and can open more to the space and joy beyond mind.

When we can recognise each other and connect on the level deeper than thoughts and ideas, there we find sameness within the differences.

We all have the same human heart. We all have needs, fears, challenges and desires.
At the core we are not different. We are consciousness in form. We are heart. We are awareness. Before all opinions even exist.

Sometimes we don’t like our experience. And that’s ok. We don’t have to. We don’t have to impose something that in that moment is not true to our experience.

But we can move from there toward opening and releasing; have a grumble or a cry to help our emotional energy be expressed in a healthy way and to move itself through. This is when gratitude might become more available to us again.

If we just condemn ourselves further for being too negative or ungrateful, we just dig the state deeper. We entrench ourselves in our funk. We give it power by opposing it.

If we feel crappy, we feel crappy. It’s already there, so allow it, be honest about it, then move it with expression and compassion and then in a bit of time we can recognise ourselves in the space beyond it.

We can also add another layer.. by recognising our relationship with our experiences and seeing that we can have gratitude in that we have space and are free and safe enough to feel however we are feeling in any moment of time, good or bad.

We have to let the breath out before we can receive a breath in again.

Letting go is accepting what is there, leaning into it with trust in the moment and then moving beyond it.

To let go of something first requires acceptance and allowing of it in the moment.
We can’t let go of something before it’s been fully seen.

After ten years of practicing the same primary series sequence of Ashtanga yoga, I find I am learning and connecting with more than I ever knew was there or was possible.
The asanas (postures) are the same every time. The movements and breath and gaze is the same structure and count every time, and yet my experience when I am present and awake, is new every time.
Going deep into one practice, is the pathway home.

There is ultimately more fulfilment and variation found through going deep with presence and connectedness into one practice or expertise, than there is in skipping around on the surface finding new stuff all the time.

Commitment is such a gift and can bring such joy.

Don’t think of letting go as an end point to be achieved. Letting go is approached better as a moment by moment intention with attending inwardly to the relationship we are having with our feelings and experiences.

Peace and wisdom aren’t about knowing the answers, they are in BEING the answer.