Theme for December 2020
When we set out to meet our goals, there comes a time where it feels as though we’re all out of steam. Let’s say you decide you’re going to get in shape and yet there is a decent amount of time between making that decision and seeing the effects of the work you’re doing. The same is true when we are trying to manifest something into our lives. The universe might be working on things in the background, but we can’t yet see the results. This can be a very frustrating and lonely time. We may start to lose our connection to our resolve. It starts with unparalleled confidence and soon, we are starting to wonder if there is a point to any of the practice.
It is during this time that we must become stronger in our resolve. The real “catch” to manifestation is belief. Belief is not a set of rules that we assume to be true because someone else told us they were. Belief is the unequivocal knowledge that something is true. If there is an ounce of doubt in your mind that your resolve is not meant to be; it will not be. You are the creator of everything in your life. You may not always be conscious of what you are creating, rest assured, it is because of the beliefs we hold in the deep recesses of our minds.
Especially if we are new to the practice, we may not see the results of our work very quickly. It is during this time that doubt starts to creep in. Doubt is a form of fear. Fear that things don’t work out for us as they do for others. Fear that we are not as powerful as we hoped we were. Fear that we don’t deserve the things that we want for our lives. Fear is the tiny crack in our belief, our resolve, that slowly starts to break everything apart. The antidote? Faith.
Faith always felt like a four-letter word to me. I grew up in a rigid religious structure where the idea of faith was a blind following of rules that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I spent a lot of my adulthood healing from the scars of this experience of being told not to question and to believe as I am told to believe. As I started my journey in yoga, the concept of faith started to make a come back and I promise you, I was not ready for it.
The further along I was on my path, I started to understand that discomfort was often a sign of something I needed to examine further. It was my incredible discomfort with the discussion of faith that started me down a road to understand it better. To understand why it was something that unsettled me so. The more I examined it, the more I came to understand that I had been applying the wrong definition to it for many years. In an effort to find its proper application in my life, I came to see it as one of my greatest assets rather than an awkward enemy.
I hated the concept of blind acceptance and because of my past, I had always viewed faith in this way. To me, blind acceptance was equivalent to ignorance. The more I came to understand the role of faith, the more I understood faith was more akin to knowing, at a cellular level, that everything is going to workout in exactly the way that benefits us the most. What gets us through the valley of the void is the faith that the best is on the horizon. Faith is not blind acceptance, it is peaceful acceptance.
During the lull between setting our goals and seeing their manifestation, we find an opportunity to refine and strengthen our faith in ourselves. We are the creators of our lives. Everything that happens, happens for us, not to us. Faith allows us to exchange those two simple prepositions and in doing so, we gain control over our lives through our daily choices as we learn to live more consciously. Faith is the greatest tool to carry with us during our journey. With faith as our companion we can experience the valley of the void as a place of peaceful transition rather than a period of fear. It is only in living a life absent of fear where we can see that we already have everything we have always wanted.
See you on the mat!