A YOGI CHA BLOG

When there is no turning back

For many years I was living a very “norm” kind of living. Doing what most people do, liking what most people like.

It wasn’t really doing me much good, I often felt heavy both physically, mentally and emotionally but I took it as “just being what life is”.

Some ten years ago, I started transforming and layer by layer, I shredded off what wasn’t serving me.

I don’t think I really saw it then, the details of what wasn’t serving me. But I started with following the guidelines of yoga.

What happened of course was that I left my old ways and the people too behind. It became rather lonely. In the beginning, I would fall in and out with my old self now and then. It was a little bit as if I was “being naughty” and “allowing” myself to just do the normal thing again.

For a while, I knew what was good for me and I chose it but the old ways would still seem like an easy getaway sometimes.

When I really wanted to focus on my new way of living, I would have to distance myself from the rest so that I could avoid the temptation of falling back into it.

It didn’t necessarily feel like it but I did see it somewhat as “work”. Because there was an effort to be made. There was sacrifice.

Which I didn’t mind since I had already benefitted from the results of yogic power. No, not the siddhis, not levitation. The slowly coming over you power that yoga brings of Sattva.

And then it happened that life offered me a possibility. There was a peekaboo moment of “the norm” and I wanted to try it on. It had then been some 7 years of stepping away from that and why not “just be normal” again for a while. To not be “working” on being a yogi.

But you know what?

It didn’t work anymore.

And so, there is no turning back to the norm because it just doesn’t fit.

I can no longer hear the strange things couples say to each other and have that be “just how men are” or “typically women”. I can no longer sit in a sports pub with 3 giant screens showing football and eat greasy burgers with fries. Because what I observe is the people absorbed by the screens and it seems they take what is happening on them as dead serious reality, happening in their presence. I observe people gobble far too much fat and sugar, looking at each other saying “it’s so good here isn’t it”. I observe frustration, people doing things they don’t really want to and then blaming someone else for making them do it.

All I can do is to think to myself “how can they not feel heavy from all that saturated fat?” “How can they not toss and turn in their beds with all that sugar and alcohol running through their veins?”.

They must be really dense to not notice the impact these particules have on their organism.

Because I promise you, they do. If you don’t notice the effect of the noise, the alcohol, the fat and the sugar it’s not because it doesn’t do things to you. It’s because you are just that heavy in your organism that you can’t feel the transformation that is happening.

I just am not that person anymore. I don’t take pleasure in it and when I see the reactions of the people with me with their “you’re different” kind of look, I can only thing “you just don’t see it”.

Waking up and take a walk in nature during sunrise, I observe just as detailed what happens. The animals moving around, squirrels running up and down the trees. Butterflies actually walking on my porch.

All I can think then is that I must have experienced the increase of Sattva in my being. The lightness of being. The most subtle of the qualities.

And that is what yoga promises you.