It was advertising a talk by a great Swami who owned a Yoga Ashram in Kathmandu.
I felt a strong urge in my heart to go along and I just knew that I had to meet him.
I can’t remember what Swami said, and it did not matter.
I had found what I was looking for.
I joined the Ashram and lived there for 2 years living the Yogic life.
Practicing our daily Asanas (yoga Posutres), Pranayama, Yoga Therapy, chanting, meditating, singing, and really enjoying our special time together.
We were self sufficient and grew all our own vegetables and grains.
We used Yoga cleansing to purify our bodies when needed and used Ayurveda herbs and preparations if we were sick.
I look back on those 2 years with such joy and utter amazement.
How different my life is now, living in Belfast.
And yet, in many ways, my life is not so different.
I am honoured to be able to teach yoga to many hundreds of beautiful students each and every week and I am so lucky to have a job that I love so much.
I have been teaching regular Yoga classes ever since I left the Ashram, over 20 years ago now.
We don’t get to do much singing in our regular classes at the Yoga centre, I just leave that for my home life with my dear wife Jennifer and our young son and daughter.
When I was living the Yoga life at our Ashram in the Himalayan countryside, Yoga was just Yoga, A way of life.
We loved our Swami as a brother and we were honoured to share our time together.
Every month, I lift 3 cards from my Angel Oracle deck; two cards acknowledge my present self and a third card acts as my challenge for the month ahead. This month’s challenge card was Leap of Faith, and it got me thinking alot about how often we cultivate faith in ourselves.
So I asked around. I talked to friends, family and even looked inwards. Pretty quickly I realised just how little self faith we have! It’s as though we have developed a default setting to doubt our capabilities. Take our yoga practice for example; how often do you find yourself doubting that you can achieve a complex asana or even touch your toes? How many times have you heard people claim “I could never go to yoga, I’m not flexible at all.” when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth! And of course it isn’t just on the yoga mat, we doubt ourselves in all other areas of our lives. But why?
Patanjali explains to us in the Yoga Sutra that unless we work on having faith in ourselves, we will be unable to transform. If we can focus on practicing and cultivating selflove, selfrespect, and selffaith, we can experience love and happiness in abundance. Looking closely at the words used; work, transform, practice, cultivate, we are reminded that our lives are a journey towards a destination and that we should experience that journey to the fullest. Faith leads to courage and courage leads to love.
I fully encourage you to pay attention to how many times you doubt yourself in the next few weeks and focus on replacing that doubt with a positive message to yourself. You are enough, just as you are! Take a leap of faith as often as you can; attempt that pose you’ve been avoiding, hold it for just a few seconds longer than you think you can, push yourself that inch further, and most importantly, congratulate yourself when you do. I hope you will find it as liberating as I did.
I recently read a wonderful Japanese saying. It goes;
