Dear Friend,
I’m no saint. My mind still moves from feeling expansive and unattached to feeling constricted and very attached. The joy and the pain, the happiness and the sorrow. It’s an ebb and flow for me too.
What I’ve found is that the more I make my practice a priority, the less extreme the ups and downs become. Movement, nature, stillness, meditation, and mantra. When I’m regularly picking up these yogic tools, joy is more available to me, and I spend less time ‘in the dark’. The darkness still comes, but it’s manageable, and it passes.
A teaching I come back to often:
“Yoga is our natural state.”
The yogis say yoga is always here. It’s a state of being, a steadiness of mind. We don’t need to become something new. We just have to unbecome all the other things that are keeping us from our Truth. We soften some of the gripping in the body, the mind, and the heart.
We aren’t broken, and there’s nothing to fix. We show up, keep an open mind, put in a little effort, and participate in our own evolution.
Consider this:
We stumble and we fall, and we get back up. We rise and we shine.
This is what we do. Over time, the falls get softer, and we start to cruise along that middle path the Buddha talked about.
Make your own effort, have your own experience, and then you decide. Give yourself enough time to ask: is this adding value to my life? Do things feel a little brighter?