Are You Beating Yourself Up?

Remember, you don’t need to beat yourself or the world into shape. You can relax and enjoy your way through what could be considered labour in a playful way. This is the great, humble, funny discipline (skill) of living gracefully. The Yoga — to playfully engage with the world as you find it, and as it finds you, and to interact fully with your immediate circumstances. You’ll find you can be with life rather than against it; within life rather than floating above or hiding beneath it. What helps me is to trade the story of the battle for that of the play — to realise that the warrior can laugh and rest because he knows battle and has tried battling enough to know when there is no battle. In this way, we donut need to pacify life; merely to remember it is a play — Lila — and especially when we find ourselves trudging begrudgingly, hurting ourselves and others in the process. Oh, the melodrama of seriousness! How deadly this story becomes when it seeps into our character! Keep your inner room spacious, bright, warm and dry! Enjoy being you. Enjoy what you enjoy. When you try to walk the higher path, you create a path towards the lower. When you think you are lowly, you pedestal other people and things more than you should (which is not at all). But when you see that you belong to this world and it loves you, and that’s why you’re here at all, then you can see through the empty, baseless ideas of how things “should” be, and relish in the radiance of this — here — as it is — knowing there’s nothing to fix about any of it. Simply a play, to dance with. For those who may doubt the dance and cling to their battle narrative, that’s fine too. Nothing needs to change. For there is space for others to play their play. Don’t battle the world and it won’t battle you. Don’t meddle with yourself and you won’t be meddled with. This is peace.