Are we over-weeding? How yoga can help.

 It's spring at the moment and the weeds are growing, fast. They are called weeds because they grow fast, and spread easily. The garden is a wild and busy place if left to itself.
 
Spring is a great time to take stock, to decide what we want to keep, what we want to cultivate, and what we want to minimise and have less of. If we don’t decide to pull out anything, before long we have a wonderfully wild but overgrown garden. 
 
This if of course a great metaphor for our life, and for our body-mind. We cultivate the good stuff, what we want to encourage and want more of, and discourage the rest.
 
This takes an objective mindset and clarity, and our yoga practice helps us come to this place. We come to our mat and use our moving and breathing practices to quieten our mind, revitalise our energy, and come back to balance. And from here, with clarity, we can observe and notice our usual habits.
 
In our practice habits might show up as postural tendencies, pushing and striving to ‘achieve’ a posture or breath length, judging ourselves harshly, observing breathing patterns, noticing recurring mental thought-loops and patterns, and so on.
 
Then we might go to the weeds and start digging. We react to what we notice and perhaps want to change it. We look for ways to be different from how we have noticed ourselves to be. We catch ourself and try to change the course. 
 
But are we over-weeding...?
 
There is a lot of talk about ’self improvement’ and working on things to make them better / more efficient / less problematic. Within this framing it is easy to treat our yoga practice like this. But with it we might lose sight of all that is already whole and right about ourselves. We might tend to the weeds but forget to enjoy the flowers, shrubs and trees. In part our yoga practice is about noticing the whole. Noticing the inherent harmony that is so self-evident and at the very foundation of ourselves, that it is easy to overlook. 
 
There is a beauty in every single breath that we take - no matter whether it is shallow or deep, quick or slow. There is a whole body harmony that just works without us having to do anything. We come to our mat and notice our breath, move the body to it, and can rediscover an ease and balance. 
 
When I look at my little apple tree and enjoy its blossoms, I don’t look at the gnarly bits, or the imperfections. I enjoy the beauty of the whole tree and find that the imperfections are actually what makes it this particular expression of a tree, and that it doesn’t look exactly like any other tree.
 
Like trees, we can cultivate seeing ourselves as uniquely different from anyone else, yet already perfectly whole and beautiful.
 
When we look at a little baby, rather than look for its imperfections, we take in the whole beautiful miracle of them, and marvel that they are possible at all.
 
Stepping back and enjoying this inherent beauty in yourself and all around you is well worth doing (BUT strangely hard to do - which is why yoga helps us).
 
We don’t take this stance to get better or to improve anything, but to remember that we are already bloody amazing.