Hey everyone, I hope things are well on your end, wherever you are. It seems as though this Coronavirus thing is really creating some havoc back on the mainland and around the globe. Canceling flights to and from Europe and even the great March Madness!! How will we ever live!! Its times like these that I remember how little control we all actually have. It also reminds me that it doesn’t matter where you are living on this earth, how much money you have, what your job is. Coronavirus does not care about the labels we place on ourselves. Everything is fleeting, and we never know what is going to happen at any moment. No, this doesn’t have to be scary either. This is what makes life exciting! Everything is always changing right before our eyes, and having a view of it that is non-attached can help us all to live it in a more peaceful, happy way.
Most of us create little stories or mind-movies within our heads. We play out scenarios or our future lives and how they will be. We picture ourselves happy (most of the time) with maybe our dream job, the perfect partner, maybe a few kids thrown in the mix (or none if thats how you want to roll). We spend our present moments carefully planning and checking things off our lists so that our futures may turn out exactly how we view them in our minds. But most of the time, reality is not what we think it is going to be! I know that I am not alone in this. Did I think that I would be typing away in a coffee shop in a small town called Pahoa on a Thursday morning in Hawaii? Hell no! I thought I would be living out west, in some graduate program for creative writers. That was my plan anyway. But plans never turn out how we think they will. Life never turns out how we think we want it to. But it turns out how it is supposed to. Take that sentence in, let it marinate in your membrane for a minute or two. Everything turns out how it should. Though sometimes we don’t always see it this way.
We get so caught up in what we think we need and want, who we think we should be with, what job we think we should have, where we should be living, that we forget we are exactly where we are supposed to be, doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing in the present moment. To me, everything happens for a reason. There are no coincidences. The universe pushes us exactly where we need to go. Sometimes it gives us lessons that may seem unfair or unbearable. We may ask, “why is this happening to me?” A good way to think about these hardships is rephrasing the questions to, “what is this teaching me?”. This goes back to one of the Niyamas of yoga called Tapas which means to put yourself in the heat or the fire, so that you may burn away anything that keeps you from becoming your best self. At the time it really sucks to be in the heat, it is uncomfortable and maybe a bit scary, but change is scary for most of us. That is why a lot of people don’t want to change.
You may look around and think that your life is in chaos, or destruction. You may feel confused when you see the ashes of your life lay around you; everything that you were working towards, everything that you thought you knew suddenly changes. But I promise that you will make it to the other side a much stronger and more humble, wise soul.
Even though our external world is out of our control, such as the way others act towards us, or circumstances that occur, we can control our internal reactions. Practicing non-attachment is a great way to do this. Simply letting things you can’t control (which is everything outside of you) flow out of you. When someone cancels plans, instead of getting upset with them, just letting the negative energy you are feeling inside flow out of you and on its way. Imagine life is like a river, and if you don’t flow with it, what happens? You try to fight the current, climb your way upstream and you become exhausted and stressed by having to flight the natural direction of the way the river is going. The more we try to fight what is happening to us, the more we will suffer. The more we acknowledge what is happening to us and make peace with it, the faster it will be to get over it.
The more that we can view our lives with a non-attached view, the more we can enjoy the rhythm of life. The more we can let go of the tension we feel within, we begin to relax and join the ever-changing dance of what it means to be alive in this human experience. We spend so much time worrying about things that will never happen, things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of it all. When we do this we miss out of the simple pleasures that are always happening within and around us.
I also want to say that this doens’t mean you can just sit back and wait for it all to come to you. Because that is not how it all works either (if only). Knowing when to take action and when to just let it be is also part of life; again it is a balance:) What you put out into the world you get back from the world.
Remember to breathe through it all. You are exactly where you are meant to be, doing exactly what you are meant to be doing.
Mahalo beauties,
Rylee
