A spiritual practice was never about becoming something
Becoming Something Else
Something I wish I knew when I first started yoga was that you can be messy and human and real and raw and vulnerable and imperfect – and you can still practice. You don’t have to be a perfect or fully realised, purified, untainted person. You can come to it as you are.
Seems obvious to me now, but wasn’t when I first started yoga.
When I first started to practice I felt I needed to be perfect – somehow neat and tidy. So I really went for that spiritual practice where I tried to mold into something other than my humanness.
That need didn’t come from nowhere. If you can imagine your mind like a house – built one brick at a time, long before you had words for any of it, in accordance with the rules of a collective that has been out of balance for a long time. Self-doubt gets mixed into the mortar early. You see it eating away at buildings like rust.
And underneath all of it, running like a current through everything, there’s rush. The need to be perfect – now. The feeling that if I stopped moving for even a moment, something would be missed, something would be lost or would slip further away.
The Momentum of Becoming
This state of rush has become a normality. A mindset that if we move faster we can achieve more. A pressure “to become, achieve, get there”. We can get so obsessed with “getting there” that we forget where “there” really is, or what it actually means to us.
Like a snowball rolling down a hill collecting more snow, rolling faster – the density we collect from moving fast has a way of propelling us even faster. We start moving at a speed where the vast, layered, complex mosaic of our experiences becomes a blur we pass through on the way to somewhere else.
But is it possible to do all the things on your list while moving more slowly – at a pace where you can remain aware of everything around and within you?
I think it is. I actually think it’s the only way.
The Shift in Pace
Slowing down has been one of the most delicious and transformative parts of my personal practice. And paradoxically, the potion that has accelerated my growth at a consistent rate.
It’s because when we move more slowly we amplify our presence upon the task at hand. So more of our energy is infused into growing whatever we are focusing on. This has the effect of lightening our load. Anxiety drops, and little, beautiful simplicities are noticed and appreciated.⠀
The idea of slowing down can sometimes even cause panic. I know that feeling. When you’ve been running on the momentum of becoming for so long, stillness can feel like falling. Like the rush was the only thing holding it all together.
But ultimately when we slow down we stretch time. We create the conditions for something that rushing will never produce – the experience of actually being here. In the body. In this moment. In this life, rather than the one we’re sprinting toward.
Every Part Belongs
But truly the beauty is that, all the things we wished we would have known, all of those things, if we had actually known them we wouldn’t have gotten to the places of deeper understanding and growth where we are today. ⠀
I just keep coming back to: a spiritual practice is not about somehow becoming something. It’s all about experiencing the rich, complex dynamics of where you are now. Letting every experience grow you wiser.
It’s a process that’s messy, perplexing, and beautiful.
The mat was never waiting for a neat and tidy version of you. It never needed you to mold yourself into something other than your humanness. Every sticky, perplexing, beautiful thread of the journey – the self-doubt, the rush, the falling, the wobbling- all of it was always woven into the mosaic.
Loving you always!
Meghan