The road ahead looks bumpy, the skies in California are still smoky and the uncertainty of many pressing issues are still in the process of unfolding…turbulence ahead on the outside and a reminder that we all have the tools to keep focused and grounded on the inside. More readily accessible when a daily practice supports the everyday stressors. Harder to manage when we’re allowing the drama and roller-coaster world to dictate our spirit. It’s the difference between jumping in your car for a road-trip and hoping there’s enough gas, water to drink, and food to eat versus planning and expecting a long road-trip and having all provisions covered. On both trips, unexpected things may happen, but a more prepared journey will give you a better chance of dealing with them.
We welcome breast cancer awareness month to honor the struggle and recovery that many have experienced. Breast cancer may have been around for thousands of years as noted in an article on mauerfoundation.org, but because of the advent of testing, we’ve learned of this relentless cancer and when detected early, can in many instances, be treated and allow for a long, healthy life. According to breastcancer.org:
“In 2020, an estimated 276,480 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S., along with 48,530 new cases of non-invasive (in situ) breast cancer.
The overall death rate from breast cancer decreased by 1.3% per year from 2013 to 2017. These decreases are thought to be the result of treatment advances and earlier detection through screening.”
Awareness
Acceptance
Action
These are the 3-A’s I’ve learned as tools for transformation. Often, we’ll jump from awareness to action and miss the acceptance part, which is the part that helps us not go endlessly on the repeat cycle. We become aware that our complaining everyday to our partner takes a toll on them so we stop, which is useful! But has our mind made any changes to how it reacts and responds to external stimulus or did we just put a cork in it. Those thoughts and mental tendencies are still moving around and we might do well to understand and accept the nature of the anxiety and shift our relationship to daily stressors.
Apply these to all the various situations from the current pandemics of COVID-19 and racism, to voting rights/planning and improvement to health and well-being, and a plan to move toward our best life is possible in spite of worldly circumstances. Only in the west does it seem that death is still a surprise to us. So much energy and effort is put around death to suppress the inevitable. Yet of course, we also want to understand and learn how we can live our best and healthiest life and that has everything to do with diet and state of mind, to physical exercise and equitable community interaction. Acceptance isn’t a passive act. It’s actually most powerful when by humility, we understand our power to take right-action. When moved from a place of healthy discernment versus knee-jerk defensiveness, we find the voice that creates the best, sustainable change possible without conscious harm to others.
Steve Pyka, Danni Pomplun and I were meeting in Mukunda Yoga last week to ponder what’s next for yoga studios. Our thoughts ranged from an unlikely return to the studios as we once did to having hope that we’ll rebound from this one day soon and enjoy the times that we did pre-COVID-19. How many studios will survive this prolonged closure? How will we find solutions that keep us going? That’s the monthly question and more will be revealed as we each figure out our next steps. Will the old-school style of practicing yoga in small studios, parks, beaches and in our homes be the way we slowly return? What we expect is that live-stream yoga will remain and even continue to evolve and grow, which seems to be the preferred and safest way to practice for now and into the coming months. But when in-person sessions can start again, what a joyful day that will be!
For yoga, meditation, qigong and any wellness teachers, for educators, practitioners, and presenters in the well-being sector, for conscious activists and peacemakers, let Mukunda Yoga be a space where your voice can be broadcast. Whether to build and sustain your business or to extend your message on social media platforms and other marketing, we want to help you keep moving and inspiring change in your communities and our community at large!
We don’t have a way to see how this will turn out, but we can establish a daily practice and affirmation that one way or another, we will. We can envision that we’ll even emerge with a wisdom that otherwise wouldn’t have been found versus feeling lost in our backyards.