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Category: Growth

Relajrse

Relajrse

I remember the location and the student that said it. I can still picture his face under his ball cap with his feet outstretched before him, sitting in the front, two rows in from the wall on my left.

I was their Rookie English Teacher at the University.  A native Canadian in the middle of the Mexican mountains, still adjusting to mexican ways and a foreign country.  I had my knickers in a knot about something.  I don’t remember what now but this wayward student who was half my age pegged the truth with a bullseye in that moment.  Relajrse – as my brain riffled through my sparse but growing Spanish vocabulary the meaning hit me as I found the transition.  Relax – one word yet it shot through me like an arrow as my brain captured the translation, grasped the meaning and let it take hold. Relax – I could relax in this moment and not take this issue, which I’ve long since forgotten – so seriously.  The issue that had my knickers in a not that day was probably irrelevant a week later – but the lesson of that one word uttered through the classroom – took hold and has stayed with me for several years now.

Life will move forward and that which needs to happen will happen. In this moment I can say what I can say and do what I can do and I can relax as there is nothing more that can be done. Somethings are just out of control and beyond my sphere of influence.

Ahhh yes – Relarjse.

Start Again

Start Again

“Start again, start again” the words reverberate through the speakers filling the quiet meditation hall. That is the way with meditation.  We connect with breath briefly before the mind wanders off on yet another tangent.

Each time we sit the opportunity exists to start again, to start fresh.  Whether it has been a split second or a few moments or if we are lucky a longer time frame before our focus wandered, we return to breath and start again. With tender awareness we accept that the mind will wander and with gentleness and compassion for self we start again.

I recall having a conversation with someone who was  in addiction recovery where I taught yoga. He had ‘lapsed’ – we talked about it and how he now knew what another one of his triggers was and he was in an opportunity to Start Again.  Our paths crossed about a year later. After another stint in a different recovery centre he was approaching one year of sobriety.   This time more successful than the previous.

New Years  Resolutions and many of the tasks on our to do lists or our goals and best intentions can be sidetracked in a myriad of ways.  All that there is to do is Start Again.