How has the year begun for you? In hope or with despair? In equal measure perhaps?
- It’s fine to have both. To me they are Yin and Yang.
- It takes being in despair to remember there is still hope.
What do you think a little red robin and a frozen bird bath have in common? This crystalline ice pattern is in the bird bath and the little red robin you’ll see have everything to do with yoga and mindfulness.
Let me try to unpack this.
Back to the exhaustive subject of the impact of covid which put so much into perspective for me. I don’t know whether I was headed that way anyway but naturally it’s not possible to know.
I know C impacted lives for many and countless livelihoods were forced to change. But I also see how many jobs actually continued to thrive and some people ended up making only minor adaptations to their way of life. Yoga wasn’t one of these jobs.
What would teaching yoga look like for you today if covid hadn’t happened do you think?
Teaching life changed completely for me. I no longer wanted to continue with international travel. This was by choice. I loathed the idea now. So my work bubble shrank into a one room studio office. Could I still reach out across the world in a different way? I began to truly value that I could still connect with students in any way. And still teach at all, quite frankly. I also began to feel how smaller meant bigger. The value of connection became priceless to me.
I don’t mean bigger as in more students, I mean less. And I don’t mean that I didn’t value being with people in the flesh any the less. It’s just that it wasn’t feasible any more. Studios closed. Travel felt ominous to me. And after reframing how to best form connections online, my brain sometimes got confused as to whom I had actually met in ‘real life’ and who I had met via a screen. The connections felt just as strong.
Having a strong Meditation and Mindfulness practice helped me navigate these new waters. Similarly, having read hundreds of accounts of how adopting a more mindful way of understanding yoga as a practice led to a healthier and more stable mindset, I needed no further evidence of ‘this works’. I have to keep remembering this in my own moments of despair. It works. It works. It works. You read your bodies cues better and faster and you do something about it!
Being faced with the possibility of my work imploding too, remembering the teachings which all stem from the ancient Buddhist teachings of Mindfulness became all the more sacred to me. It wasn’t just about being able to put food on the table (as if that wasn’t a strong enough driver already) it was about the fear of everything I had strived for grinding to a complete halt. With fewer students, cost of living crisis, return to new work place norms and so forth, the more and more I appreciated that I was still hanging in there. Impermanence, Compassion, Patience, Kindness, Empathy, Gratitude …. the way the dharma is threaded together helps to reframe difficulties.
I see and feel connections very differently now up close on a screen with one or a few people. It was impossibly hard to connect across a room full of people. We scan the room as teachers and we try to impart what we are trying to convey. We have to mostly be as palatable as possible to the majority so that our message is understood.
When you look at this picture taken on my walk, can you see that the boy and the dog are really connecting?
As my perspective altered after C, I began to appreciate ordinary moments so differently. Noticing small things moved me. To take the time to have real presence and be in contact with another. That moment. That pause that we so often skip.
As I continued on my walk this particular morning with this boy (my son) and my dog, I remarked how I hadn’t seen the little robin I used to see so much of last winter. I thought it mustn’t be alive anymore. (I don’t know a lot about robins except that they like insects and worms and definitely not breadcrumbs as I once thought I might bring.) As if summoned by some sort of magic, the robin appeared just in front of me, a little to the left of the path. It didn’t fly there. It just appeared! I cannot make this up.
Is it possible that when we focus on something we then see it? I’ve always wondered. But this little happening made my day. I was thrilled to see the robin. It even stood there proudly and let me snap away at it with my excited pup 🐶 bouncing around my feet. Talk about visualisation!
So I’m convinced now that the robin knows me or at least remembers me from one winter ago.
Mindfulness isn’t just about smelling the roses. I believe perception widens and acuity is heightened. We notice more. We take the time to appreciate what we see. The little things become the big things. Like marvelling at the perfectly organised way water freezes into crystalline lattices in this bird bath.
What does it mean to notice differently and how does that help us with real daily life issues and crises?
It’s a paradox because if we didn’t have ‘mindful brains’ we wouldn’t have noticed (or cared) about the robin or the frozen water.
Brains that have been trained through mindful practices behave differently. There are plenty of neuroscience studies these days to support this. The more convincing testament to this however, comes from practitioners themselves I think. Being in physical stillness is one way to deliberately focus our attention to the minutiae of changes that occur in the body. Body scans, meditations, yin yoga are perfect (and enjoyable) platforms to practice the tenets of mindfulness in stillness.
It’s hard to sum up the power of mindfulness and how it has the capacity to change the way you view and feel about difficulties as well as beauty.
Pain is one such difficulty which most of us live with. Being able to appreciate even the smallest respite from pain is something we might not have taken on board previously. We’d all like to be completely free of pain but understanding this from a different perspective can be extremely helpful in living with pain.
You’ll only know the difference when you’ve experienced this for yourself.
One benefit that isn’t often highlighted is that change cannot be undone. Neither can it be measured. Once you understand it you’ll only grow from there.
This March I’m looking forward to connecting with a new group of teachers in our third Level 4 Mentorship program completing 220 hours of Yin Yoga and Mindfulness Teacher Training.
Will you join me in this final phase of combining all that you’ve learned to reframing how it is you will continue to teach long term?
The early bird ends January 31st.
More details here:-
https://www.sarahlo.co.uk/class/yin-yoga-mindfulness-meditation-teacher-training-level-4/
Levels 1, 2 and 3 are now available on demand for those still wanting to complete their study.
I’m so looking forward to continuing this part of your journey with me.
Sarah
❄️ 🐦 🛁
Levels 1, 2 & 3 Yin Yoga & Mindfulness Meditation
Certified Yoga Alliance courses.
Fully self paced with 6 months access.
Level 1: Yin Yoga and Mindfulness (60 hours)
Level 2: Chinese Medicine & Fascia (60 hours)
Level 3: Myofascial Release & Somatics (50 hours)
Level 4 Mentorship (50 hours) – Starts March 2025
Early Bird Special until Jan 31st