The Yoga Letters - Issue 1: Focus for January - Refresh
Starting the new year with a sense of refreshment
Dear friends,
Welcome to this first edition of The Yoga Letters. A place for all things mindfulness and yoga!
I would like to take this opportunity to wish everybody a happy new year, and I hope that you all had the festivities you most needed and wanted, and that you feel ready for 2023. I think I am.
I’d like to begin this first edition by gently asking you a question:
Who would you be if you didn’t believe all of the things that you think about yourself? Who would you be without all of your stories?
The reason I ask this is because I think it’s central to this idea of being refreshed, and one of the best things, I think, about a yoga practice is the feeling that we have dropped all of our stories for a bit.
Before I go on, may I remind us all that we are - if, like me, you’re in the northern hemisphere - still very much within the energy of the Winter Solstice, and we will be until the end of January.
This energy, provided by the position of the sun, is very much still about resting and hibernating. But, with hope being reborn at the solstice, we can begin to look ahead. It’s about reflecting with a sense of purpose. Hence the tradition of resolutions.
But, we’d be wise to take it slowly. Slow and purposeful beats charging ahead mindlessly. So, while the focus for the month is: Refresh, it is to be done so gently.
My own exploration of the above question has revealed some interesting insights. A few of which I’d like to share with you here in the hope that it may help you to look more closely at your own answers.
My yoga journey has been a long and challenging one. At first, a reluctance to look ‘ridiculous’ (as I judged myself back then), mixed with a sense of ‘being far too busy’ to sit still for any great length of time, meant that I tried yoga (in fact I gave it a go a number of times), but I didn’t get it; I simply wasn’t ready.
What made me ready was being introduced, at the right time, to mindfulness and meditation. When I realised that my thoughts were not all that I was, and that, actually, I could choose to focus on the world around me rather than get carried away by my reaction to it all of the time, it was so refreshing! And then, finding yoga and being able to embody myself like I had never done before… Well, it was like an immersion into the coolest of waters.
(If any of you enjoy immersing in water, then you will know how incredibly refreshing it can be. Not just for the body, but for the mind as well. If not even more so.)
Anyway, had I continued to believe those ideas about myself, then there is no way that I would be here, today, writing this. It would have been impossible for me to put one word after the other in praise of practices that encourage stillness. Let alone imagine myself making it the direction in which I wanted my life to go in and sharing it with others.
So, this is what we’re starting with.
We’re going to take a look, to gently reflect upon ourselves with hope, and see what it is - what stories we have about ourselves - that may be holding us back. And I don’t mean holding us back from success, or from taking over the world. I mean holding us back from knowing who we really are.
While researching, I was listening to a Tara Brach talk about this idea: the stories that we tell ourselves and how they impact upon our reality, and, in the talk, Tara asks the question that I just posed to you: “Who would you be without your stories? Who would you be if you didn’t believe you were flawed; that you didn’t belong; or were unlovable? Who would you be?”
This is relevant because in order to refresh ourselves, and, perhaps, make the most of this new year - both as it truly is and how it, potentially, could be - rather than just following the same old script about who we think we are and our identities, we need to let it go.
Interestingly, as I’m always thinking about yoga and writing, I’ve been rereading one of my favourite books, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird1 and in it, Anne mentions similar sentiments to Tara: In that to communicate effectively with others, we first need to know who we are. But, quite often, we don’t. We think we do. But, really, we only know a false self.
We know our stories, but that's about it. And we cling to them. And it’s this that causes problems. It’s this that makes us play out the same old patterns of behaviour. Behaviour that usually leads us to be in the same situations and making the same kinds of decisions, again and again and again. Year on year.
There are many ancient practices and philosophies that essentially teach the same thing: that there’s a true Self underneath all the false selves. Present moment awareness is one way to explore this. Our yoga practice, of course, is another. Engaging in anything mindful will also take us to this place of truth, whether it’s baking, drawing, running - the common denominator is the mindful element; when we are completely absorbed in what we are doing, without a reason to be doing it, when we are simply being.
It’s does not occur when we’re scrolling and labelling and judging and comparing (and competing), and being separate from one another. It’s not when we’re reacting and acting-out the same mindless patterns of behaviour that we have picked up along the way.
Look at the way children are, before they learn all of the ways that they are expected to behave in society, and before they pick up any destructive coping mechanisms, and you will see it. In many ways, feeling refreshed is a little like reconnecting to the innocent child within. There’s something so free and playful about it. It’s about this idea of the true you underneath all of the protective barriers and stories.
And, as Tara describes in her talk, there’s a complete freedom when we realise this. It’s as if our ‘soul is dancing.’
In fact, I loved dancing as a child. I still do now. Forgetting myself for a moment and dancing around the kitchen has got to be one of the best things that I do.
So, how can we use yoga to access this freedom? How can we refresh ourselves and reveal the truth of who we are?
By its very nature, yoga is a powerful tool for realising that our thoughts are just thoughts, and, for some (and there’s no judgement here, for I’ve been there too), depending on how ready or open we are, removing the lens of perceived certainty (with which we look at the world, loaded with our stories) can leave us feeling extremely vulnerable and out of control, and it can be too much.
But, perhaps when we are ready and more willing, we can take away the lens (with its colourful stories about ourselves and others), and discover how refreshing it is to finally see things more clearly.
I feel it’s worth reminding ourselves here that the meaning of the word yoga is, essentially, to unite; it’s about bringing together the body and the mind through a focus on the breath.
Remember, it’s not about how flexible you are (or aren’t), or how fancy and expensive your leggings are. Also, having a yoga practice is not about moral superiority or being better, or more ‘woke’ than anybody else. It is simply about your connection to yourself (and, possibly, to the divine, if you believe it to be so).
It’s about a sense of connection to your own mind, body, and spirit, through your own breath. It is yours and yours alone. Entirely incomparable to anybody else’s experience.
For anyone who has been to one of my classes, or read my work on Om Yoga Magazine, you will (hopefully) know that I very much favour a gentle, mindful yoga practice. That’s not to say that a more rigorously physical practice doesn’t have its place, it most certainly does, but it’s just where I am at these days.
It’s important to know this because there are as many types of yoga, and ways of approaching the practice, as there are people, and I am standing here with mine.
Hopefully, this resonates and you are in the right place.
So, to get us started, here is a short guided breathing practice that I have pre-recorded.
It is a very simple three-part breath. It can be done anywhere and at anytime, and it is particularly powerful when I need a short practice to become more mindful. Such as when my thoughts are getting a little too hectic, distracting me from what matters.
So, in that sense, it can be wonderfully refreshing, for mind, body and spirit, and it allows us to start tuning in to our bodies, bringing more clarity to the mind.
Over the next week or so, please listen to this as often as you need to, but try to begin creating your own version or way of doing this, away from this recording.
Make it so that you can do this wherever and whenever you need to. Maybe practice this in the morning when you first wake up, and again last thing before sleeping, and as often as you can in-between, and I absolutely recommend it before you meditate on the questions at the start of this piece. It can also be powerful to keep a journal of your thoughts and feelings, as they arise, and noting how you felt before and after.
Walks out in nature are particularly beneficial for our wellbeing at this time of year. So maybe try a mindful walk, and while out walking, observe the incredible feeling of full, flowing breaths, and again, write down how you feel afterwards.
Breathe your way through the winter ahead, and you will be more effortlessly refreshed.
So, just to be clear, the start of our journey together over the next couple of weeks is about beginning to feel in to the felt sense of ourselves in our bodies, through our breath, and gently reflecting on our stories with hope and light.
I like to picture the light that is now growing a little more each day, and I hold that image in my heart throughout the winter. Also, I like to keep up the fairy lights during January as a reminder of the light that is ever increasing at this time of year. So, when you put away the Christmas decorations, perhaps consider holding onto a few fairy lights.
I will leave you, for now, to begin the process of gently deciphering the stories of the mind and reconnecting to your body through your breath, and I will be back in a fortnight with the second newsletter for January.
Please remember to be kind to yourselves. We’re not here to judge or condemn ourselves for anything. We are simply beginning to observe the qualities of our minds, and to start tuning in to our bodies via our breath.
This is yoga. Simple and beautiful yoga, and completely your own.
So, until then, peace, love and so much kindness,
Louisa x
To those of you who are paid members, please enjoy using the printable Refresh journal prompts. Later in the month, I will send over an exclusive guided meditation, created especially to bring a sense of refreshment, and I shall also be publishing an additional short piece specifically about Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in relation to this idea of new year refreshment.
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Lamott, A. Bird by Bird. (Anchor Books) 1994.