Photo by Rima Kruciene on Unsplash
Today, i went to the first yoga class I had been to in awhile, and my mind immediately started analyzing the experiences I was having to bring back to my yoga class. Oh, I liked that move! I haven’t done that with them before. Could they do that one? Rather than having the experience for myself, I was making meaning of the experience to bring it back to my students. I had to continually redirect myself back into my body, and my experience. One of the dangers of teaching yoga and mindfulness is the temptation to process every experience we have as teaching material.
I had a mindfulness teacher once share that when he was in meditation, he was always tempted to scribble down insights he had while practicing. He wanted to keep a notebook at his side so he could remember all of his brilliant ideas. With time, he told us, he learned to just be with the experience and trust that anything important would stay with him.
If we start turning all of our experiences with mindfulness and yoga into fodder for our classes (or blogs), we endanger our ability to be fully present for those moments. We skip right to the analytical mind, rather than an embodied presence (I am all too familiar with this tendency.) I invite you to engage in your contemplative practice without needing it to be anything more than what it is. It does not have to be profound of insightful. And it can be just for you.