Two opposing forces

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I decided to take up yoga together. Each day, as we check in with ourselves, something new comes to light. I’m finding that the body is in complete synchronicity with the mind. The days I encounter resistance in my mind, I find stiffness in my body and other times where I am mentally relaxed, I’m in flow with the movement.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been exploring the idea of finding balance between two opposing forces. While considering it with the mind may prove confusing, experiencing it through the body is so much easier. For example, there are poses where the upper half of your body is reaching upwards and the lower half is grounding into the earth. In bringing awareness to this contradictory dynamic, what I’m realising is that there seems to be a space in between, that links them. If I concentrate on my breath, I can be moving upwards and downwards and being very still at the same time. Just try to do this exercise mentally; be happy and sad and peaceful simultaneously. Right now the brain is searching for software glitches.

You have heard me say this many times; the body will never lie to you, whereas the mind can keep us spinning with its tales. When our awareness is in our mind, we are either going over what happened in the past or worrying about what the future will bring. Rarely is it focused on the present. Our body, however, lives only in the present. Two seemingly opposing forces. Here’s the fascinating part, if we can access that point of stillness within ourself that connects them, we can find the key to synchronising our mind and body while celebrating the integrity of their uniqueness.

This next part is so exciting for me, that my subsequent blog may just be about this topic alone. We often think of stillness as a place of passiveness, a place where nothing happens, but I’m beginning to sense that it is, in fact, the absolute opposite.

Stillness holds within it the ultimate level of dynamism that gave birth to the cosmos. Is it even possible to imagine what it can set forth in us?

Best
Afshan x