A YOGI CHA BLOG

I WAS BORN THIS WAY

I WAS BORN THIS WAY

As I was out running this morning, I was listening to lady Gaga singing “i was born this way” and it got me thinking of a client of mine. We have had a few sessions together, digging into some discomfort in his life and the link to childhood events.

As we dig into some stuff that we are struggling to live with, we can easily come to a feeling of despair. Thoughts like “why did this have to happen to me?” Or simply, “why can’t I just live a rather easy going light existence, why did I have to become so traumatised by things that happened in the past?”

Two things are important to remember in these moments:

Number one is that YOU ARE the sum of everything you have ever been through. This means that you are who you are today because of what you have experienced, good and bad, light and heavy. The first step towards feeling better is acceptance of this truth.

We can easily come to the idea that everyone else just have these very light lives, that the sun is always shining on them, that the grass is greener on the other side….

When the real truth is of course, that we all have things we struggle with. Your body is full of energy and every event has its CHARGE. So the things that marked us, they created a charge, and it’s electrified. As long as we don’t want to acknowledge it, as long as we can go on without it in our conscious mind, it will still have that charge and it will manifest one way or another. If you look around you, it’s visible everywhere. Obesity, drug addiction, alcoholism or much more socially acceptable ones: addicted to anything that makes you feel good (surf, yoga, rock climbing, ultimate fighting, social media, being acutely sensitive to fashion trends or just coffee….). It is all ways to channel that extra energy. It’s the reason we find it so hard to sit still and do nothing. It makes us feel uncomfortable and we want to move, adjust, scratch… because we have that urge to channel energy out of us. There is nothing bad with this per se, it’s so enjoyable to feel the drive internally for movement. To get it all out there in the run, on that wave and then feel the release afterwards. The clarity.

But when that extra charge has become destructive, like in addiction to a toxin, obesity or pushed down so hard that we have no more energy and we develop a disease or depression, that’s when it’s not useful to us.

You kind of have to hit rock bottom to begin the journey inwards. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. That’s how we reason so as long as you don’t have to face the uncomfortable things, you will not do it.

The joy that hitting rock bottom brings comes later, when you start to realise how much it has actually enriched your life.

Number two of the things to remember is: “life isn’t what happens to you but how you relate to it”.

Understand that a lot of the things that marked us in childhood, marked us so much because we were not capable of dealing with it differently. So it can even that the things didn’t seem very harmful from the outside but we experienced it by living a trauma. So sometimes we wouldn’t even be so interested in the actual facts, we’re interested in the emotional state it put us into and that never left. Because it was crystallised inside and stayed. So that when a similar situation comes up in adult life, we live it so strongly. It’s not the thing that happens, it’s the memory in the organism that blossoms up again. So the way to deal with that would be: learn to sit with the feeling. What is it telling you? Can you sit and let it rush up, take as much space as it needs?

Can you then begin to dissect: what are the thoughts that brought this feeling state up?

Always come back to the present when it becomes strong enough that you starting to want to run away from it again. Coming back into the here and now. The adult you, in good health, living the life you are happy with, being strong and independent. The fear comes on because the feeling is from the child who experienced it for the first time so it bring us straight back there. Life isn’t really chronological.

Bring this with you from what I’ve said today:

We all have gone through this and that and it has made us who we are today. When things come to the surface and we feel like it’s hopeless or that we must be the only one with this, remember that it’s actually fear speaking to you. Instead look at what this has pushed you to understand, to develop to expand into… The beauty lies in the cracks. In the way we develop our personality as a survival strategy around the experiences we have had. That is what life is really.

Become curious in investigation who you are. What are the feelings telling you? Can you begin to link what thoughts got that feeling to emerge? What does that mean? And if that is true, what would that imply? What is the idea, the belief that lies behind it?

Like my teacher Swamiji Abishek said “blues will come and go, being on the spiritual path doesn’t take that away. It simply changes how we deal with it.”

The first step is alway acceptance. Because it looses the resistance and it’s only when we let go of the resistance we have that we can go with the flow. That we can open, allow for things to come in. Allow ourselves to receive. This is why “Self love” is the shortcut to finding peace with oneself. But we shouldn’t call it a shortcut, because we have no idea how to get there. The map that was given to us when we came here, is full of obstacles and not a straight line towards it. But that is how we learn. That is what life really is. 

When I decided to put together the online course “The Self Image Project”, it was my inquiry inwards that inspired it. It eases up so much when we understand that we’re not alone with our feelings. That actually, it’s how our mind functions that brings us there! That once we begin to seek to understand why we do what we do, we create a SENSE OF SELF that is what loving oneself is all about.

Join the Self Image Project on my website: www.yogicha.com/self-image-register/