I was on a scooter today to some place in Bali and I teared up, because I realised I hadn't prayed in the last couple of days. And like I have mentioned before in this series of blog posts, praying for me is a bunch of thank you's and a lot of gratitude for my current position in life. And I teared up because I was going through a tough time thinking about decisions and having to make all these decisions myself. I mean I of course have friends and family that I can call upon for help and advice but the sheer burden of having to make these decisions in the first place feels so heavy. So I would think to myself, "what is happening", "why am I going through this", "what is this meant to teach me". Those have been the top few questions I ask to myself when I was going through stuff in my twenties. The difference in the last few days was that I had stopped saying " thank you" and stopped being grateful and only focusing on all these things I had to decide and all the things that were not working out. So on that scooter ride, I said thank you and sorry that I was so caught up in my own small miseries that I had forgotten to be grateful.
For a long time, yoga for me was a matter of fitness. Everyone in Singapore was so fit and that was inspiration enough for me to start doing something to be fit (and lose some weight). Only after I broke up with my boyfriend did yoga start being so much more. One day in class, I broke down in balasana, when my forehead was touching the mat and no one could see me, my tears rolled down my cheek. And in that moment, in fact after that moment, when we had to get up and keep moving and listen to the teacher's instructions and continue to flow in a vinyasa class, something changed in me and yoga stopped being an exercise and was a way to heal and a way to grow and a way to flow. Which is why I love Vinyasa. Not because it is fast paced or dance-y or is so nice to watch blah blah, but simply because that day it was a vinyasa class that sparked something in me and changed me forever. So in spite of all the bad name that Vinyasa gets these days for not being authentic yoga, it will always remain close to my heart and even today when I need to do some release work or some celebration, I choose to flow in vinyasa - breath in, breath out.
After this realisation of yoga being so much more than just pretty pants and bright coloured bras and hipster lifestyles, I started reading and learning more about it. And I discovered the magic of gratitude. My parents have always taught my brother and I to be grateful for all that we have had in our lives, the food on our table, the people we love, the clothes on our backs, the books in our school bags, the schools we've attended, the friends we've made, the experiences we've had, the languages we speak and the family we can always lean on and our healthy bodies and minds. But the kind of gratitude yoga taught me to practice was vastly different from the above categories and yet the same in many ways also - I know that is a stupid sentence to have typed out, but allow me to explain. All the previous types of things/people I was taught to be grateful for was all the physical aspects of my life, and also the good aspects - the things you need to be grateful for all the day, everyday, every second of your lives. The kind of gratitude yoga and my practice taught me was the for all the things that did not go well in your life, the lessons that tough experiences taught you and for all the times and all the people who broke you heart, and the many friends who left you and went away.
These are the more difficult things to be grateful for because they don't immediately scream - omg this is amazing. My last post was about patterns and recognizing those patterns when you look back and see how one event lead to the other. When you grow older, and you have a lot more to look back at, you realise that life actually does in some way add up. And then you see how even the tough times you had, in fact especially the tough times you've had, have made you you. My heart today is so much more beautiful and capable of loving someone so much more precisely because it has been broken so many times. Through those cracks, light has only gone in and not seeped out. And I'm grateful for it. This kind of gratitude comes with age, but it also doesn't, sadly come to everyone. I am thankful to yoga for it.
But this is all the BIG stuff you are grateful for in life. The big milestones, the obvious things that stand out in your story and the stuff you will definitely mention in your biography if you were to ever write one. But what about the small things. This trick is also something yoga taught me. I am not an ambitious person. I've never been one. It is more important for me to have fun and be stable and love what I am doing. Which is the approach I also bring to my personal yoga practice. I love my practice and I have never attached any kind of importance to achieving the MAD asanas that look so good on Instagram. Don't get me wrong, I would love to get to those poses one day and I have immense amounts of respect towards people who are able to do them, but I guess I have never challenged myself enough with them, never spent ten thousand hours trying to get a mayurasana for example - it is a different kind of ambition and a different kind of discipline, one that I lack. So when even the smallest things happened to me in my practice and in class or if a teacher assisted me to go deeper into a particular asana, I would be ecstatic, and then I understood why it gave so many people so much joy to try and achieve these poses. That is when I think I started keeping a "one thing you are grateful for every day" diary on my Google Keep app- I love Keep and recommend it to EVERYONE. And so I recorded the most stupidest achievements in yoga on Keep "Today i was able to lift my leg up in a side plank" or "today, i could balance one knee on my arm for bakasana" or "I touched my forehead to my shin in paschimottanasana". Ok I'll stop showing off now. But really, those are really small achievements. Especially when you see the whole class flying around and jumping in and out of poses ~ here you are lifting one toe up :). After I started recording these kinds of achievements, I also started recording the more mundane stuff. Stuff like "today i really wanted jackfruit for breakfast and the cafe had it" or "the radio played the song I was humming all morning" or "I got a very chatty and fun cab driver" or "my bus came right as I reached the bus stop". You know the things that happen to us all day everyday and they surprise us when they happen and then we so very quickly forget about them. But they truly are the ones that add up and make our days beautiful. And our beautiful days add up to a beautiful life. Even today, when i read some of these notes from Keep, they bring a smile on my face.
I stopped doing it for some reason. They say if you do something for 60 days straight you get into a habit of doing it, wonder why I fell out of this habit. I really need to re-start writing about the small and big things i am grateful for. Time to start "One thing i am grateful for everyday" 2.0 on Keep again. The twenties taught me that - to be grateful for all the things that happen to you and all the things that don't happen to you. This definitely will fall into the category of the stuff I learnt or started in my twenties that i will continue to do in my thirties. Invariably when I am grateful, I have more to be grateful for. Gratitude is the light that has guided me in some of my darkest days of my life in the last couple of years. There were some strands of hope and gratitude that I held onto when I i felt like I was slipping very soon and very deep into an abyss of darkness and emptiness. In those moments I recall having small streaks of joy and the feeling of gratitude for those small fairy lights that guided me home. Without them I might as well have slipped deeper and maybe never emerged. I will, one of these days, in an upcoming post, write about those very dark days and how I overcame them. But today I will end with this quote from The Alchemist (here's a bunch of them in case you need some motivation in life, but you REALLY should read the entire book for more such gorgeousness)
"When each day is the same as the next, it is because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises"
~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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