What you seek is seeking you – Rumi
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]inter in Michigan can be tough. The days get shorter. Way shorter. When you wake up in the morning it’s dark. When you come home from work in the evening, it’s dark. Even during “daytime” the weather tends to be gloomy. I get excited when it is negative twenty outside but the sun is actually shining. In states like ours it is not uncommon for people to become Vitamin D defecient and even suffer Seasonal Affective Disorder.
For me I have spent my entire life dealing with Michigan winters. With the first snow fall of the year you know it’s going to be a solid 4 months of grey skies. But just because I have done it for thirty plus years, doesn’t mean it makes winter any easier. People often say “you are from the U.P. (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) you must be used to this”. I mean, yes – I’m “used to it” but I don’t like winter anymore than the next guy.
This winter seems to be especially hard. And it hasn’t even been as cold as normal. I am not sure why but I have been in a huge funk. People have been hit hard with the flu earlier in the season. It has been gloomy. Since I changed jobs in June and I now work and live right downtown Detroit I have lost motivation to get in my car after work (after my 12 minute walk home when my amazing husband doesn’t drive or pick me up), sit in 40 minutes of rush hour traffic, arrive at the yoga studio, practice for 60 minutes, then drive the “normal” 25 minutes home. It turns into over a two hour event.
My yoga practice is much like normal life. There are ebbs and flows. Highs and lows. We go through life sometimes either laser focused or lacking motivation. I have hit those lulls several times before but this year it’s the worst. Normally I would practice 5-6 times a week, now on a good week it’s four. Which I know is still probably more than the average person but that’s not MY “normal”. Plus add in the Holidays where you travel, drink and eat a little more and it really throws you off.
Not only have I felt like it’s hard to practice physically but even when I do I am not in it mentally. I have been going to classes and feeling like I have been going through the motions (again – you can relate this to LIFE in general). In yoga we teach the physical postures secondarily after the breath. For some people they just want the physical practice. For me I have shifted now towards a balance of the mental and physical – on a good day that is. Not the past few months….
More than ever right now I feel like I need the mental part of yoga. I need that connection again. I am seeking the therapy yoga has always been to me. The ability to have a little more clarity in life. That ability to slow down and take a self assessment of your life. So when I signed up for teacher training in January I went seeking that. And since it was in Aruba, probably sun and Vitamin D too.
Once I arrived to teacher training, I quickly realized there would not be a lot of meditation included. Instead we woke up early and started our days on the water and in the yoga room learning all the aspects to our teacher training. We practiced teaching each other. We took classes. But we didn’t really meditate. I don’t know why I thought we would. I think I was holding on to hope that it would be included since that is what I had lost in my own practice.
After the weekend of training I started thinking about the quote “what you seek is seeking you”. I went to this teacher training for many reasons. One of the main reasons I chose to go through teacher training was to get back to the root of my practice. I wanted to meditate more. My goal was seeking out that mental clarity that I lost. But what I found was none of that.
After this trip what I learned is that the very things we set out and seek for are really seeking us. We need to stop looking outside and sometimes look within. I have the tools to meditate. I can carve out 20 minutes of my day and sit in stillness. Knowledge is not an issue. That happens in life a lot. We know the things we need to do to be successful, to be happy, to move forward with our lives. Yet we wait. We wait for other people to lead us down that path, or to do these things for us, or for things to fall into our laps. Sometimes it’s easier that way. We don’t have to take the risk of making the change and doing it ourselves.
What are you seeking in life? If you really sit down and think about what it is you are looking for, is this the thing that is actually seeking you? It doesn’t have to be in your yoga practice. This can relate to anything in your life. Sometimes spending the 5 minutes to ask yourself these questions can help give you the greatest realization. Break out of your winter blues doing something good for yourself! Seek and you shall find……
