Expansion is actually a let go

The first session of our Yoga Teacher Training asked us to question our Bhakti; our drive, the pulling force…or our reason for committing to the 2 year course at The Yoga Sanctuary. After a having a month to spend time exploring into the feelings of our own individual Bhaktis, we got to reflect deeper into how it is our devotional desires move through us.

Bhakti is essentially our wish for something more… or our wish to expand in this life. There may be people and ideas out there that tell us that becoming ‘desireless’ is the goal – but that’s not how it is. Then we’d just be limp, stagnant, unmoving. And totally against the nature of life.

“To understand Bhakti, is to understand desire, to understand desire is to understand life”.

What our Bhakti means is being totally okay where we are – whether we are happy like this, or just choosing to accept it. But also simultaneously, opening to more, to expansion of ourselves. As Steve, (our teacher) jokes, “Put a person who claims he has no desires in a box and throw away the key. After a few hours you are bound to hear a knock from within. Then he wants something doesn’t he?”

We can be completely content in our boxes for a while…but inevitably, we will get the call from life to move on our path and to evolve. And we can either pick up the call or ignore it for a while, but eventually it will have to be answered by us. Like this it continues, we outgrow our boxes and move into newer versions throughout the whole of our journey. This doesn’t have to always mean drastic changes in our lives – more simply, just newer versions of ourselves – like snakes moving into new skins.

These are the cycles, the ‘Bhakti’ cycles, the natural rises and falls of growth that we will all go through. Sometimes we’ll go happily with them, and sometimes we will fight them for a while, but either way we’re moving. Its nature for us to want more, and Bhakti is about fine-tuning what it is that we want more of, aiming for that which nourishes, uplifts and grows us. But of course, it’s also totally okay if our desires are not currently always re-directing us to the uplifting. As long as we can still stay focused on what it is that IS.

My own Bhakti, was really to continue on stripping back the stuff that’s in my own way. And I’m starting to really appreciate how expansion, or growth is not about more. Wanting more, is also actually not about more. Which I think is really a beautiful paradox.

Expansion of ourselves is actually a let go – we’re growing by removing stuff…by taking bits off rather than adding things on to ourselves. I guess we live in a culture where ‘more is more’, but actually working on a higher level of efficiency is really not about doing more. In fact, I feel a little bit like things are shrinking – sizing down, like a life-size Russian doll…and the parts no longer needed are just falling away. Things become smaller, simpler, and easier.

And simplicity (I’m learning), is a really profound and relieving thing. It can be easy to think of having more and doing more equates to better. But there is something really…cleansing about things being simpler, more straightforward. A few months ago I would get a little overwhelmed thinking about teaching and seeing all the cool, different variations of poses in classes, leaving me wondering about how I’d ever teach, or what I really should be doing in my own practice, and if it’s “enough”. But something in my heart is making me trust in the basics, in the foundations – because I know it works.

There isn’t any need for me to do anything fancy…and I feel it. But sometimes, I think things need to get a little bit complex before we can see and appreciate the simplicities. Before we can start to do away with the unnecessary scattering of energy and start to let it focus softly on the smaller things – like relearning, rediscovering the same pose, again, every day.

And the strangest thing? The outside seems to start to reflect the same. Things are becoming more minimal, more refined. And it truly feels so good

Love

Adéle x