Five years ago, I co-created The Practices of Freedom and Well-being Immersion course to give people tools to bring their yoga off their mats and into their lives. It struck me that in my weekly classes I was meeting people who loved yoga classes, who felt a heck of a lot better practising, but who had to rely upon a class to open up that amazing sense of self-esteem and clarity they felt afterwards, because it would fade with the physical ‘yoga glow’ until the next class. They just didn’t have the spiritual self-care integrated into life on an independent and daily basis.
I knew from my own depths of practice that these effects – profound clarity, high self worth, and a vibrant sense of freedom and well-being – could be more steadily established on a daily basis with or without class if you knew how to hack into a few vital sources.
If you know how to hack into the the source of all your bad habits and ways you diminish your vitality and well-being, for example. If, instead of falling asleep behind the wheel, so to speak, you let the stuff you do that tanks your energy become perfectly clear to you. And then you investigate, using the right tools, where those habits come from. And then you don’t only change your behaviour/choices, but you do some work on the source place, so that the underlying tendency to do that vitality-sapping thing gets dissolved.
If you know how to get in touch with the source of your vitality and well-being, regardless of circumstances, then you don’t have to speculate about what to do with yourself, about which people are right for you, about what to eat – in short, if you can hack into the source, you don’t have to spend all that energy worrying, weighing up options, or figuring out how to fit everything in – because the source of the vitality is always there, and once you know it, you don’t have to make such a fuss trying to enhance your life as the BIG enhancer – the source itself –  is always right there.
So, my question has been – what really helps people find the source? The source of the wonky misalignment as well as the source of all the good stuff? In my experience, it’s a synergy of a few things.
One is having a steady, daily meditation practice. Daily meditation is not an easy habit to create, but one that pays the dividends over time. Meditation is the hot-wire hack into source. So, I have crafted a way of teaching meditation that foregrounds the creation of a new daily habit. What helps create the new habit? In short:
– Getting the sitting part right. It’s not always comfortable to just sit there. If you make the right seat, it’s more physically comfortable. You really need that.
– Understanding that meditation is not the cessation of your thoughts. It’s the capacity to listen to something other than your thoughts, even while your thoughts are going on. There’s no need, in meditation, to argue with what’s actually going on. Meditation is way kinder than that.
– Having a supportive community alongside you who are also going through the process of forming a new habit, and being around people who have established the habit who can give you some insight into that process – and some inspiration to keep going!
– Doing stuff like chanting mantras before you meditate to deepen the experience.
– Establishing for yourself some really compelling reasons to meditate. For example, realising how very badly you want to stop doing the things that tank your energy, and start doing the things that put you in touch with the bedrock of high self esteem and feeling loads better.
Another key is having exposure to a worldview that gives you both straight talk about the source of your not-so-great habits and elaborates upon the source of all the freedom and wellbeing you want more of.
The tantric teachings say a lot of amazing things, but here’s a few salient points:
– There is no actual separation between you and anything else. But you are operating under the pretense that there is. This causes you pain and agitation, and it’s also not true, so it causes the kinds of problems that living a lie tend to cause.
– That there is no separation between the source of everything and – everything. Everything is both itself and the source of all things.
– That because your own self and the source are the same, that you have constant access to source and therefore constant access to what you want more of.
And then of course – what really helps to get this whole thing going strong in your own life is to get a reckoning on how this stuff fits in with all your everyday life, like:
– How you eat, what you eat, and what you think you are doing when you are feeding yourself.
– How you connect with other people and how that either does or does not get you in that wellbeing flow
– What kind of rest you really need to be free
– Stuff you can do all the time to make it all laser clear for yourself
Getting into these matters is a fast track to embolden your will to bring fresh new habits into your life. In my day retreat, I take some of the greatest hits from the 108-hour Freedom and Well-being Immersion and offer a day of luscious yoga asana, empowering meditation, soulful eating practice, and Tantric worldview with a side helping of rest practices and other delights.
Join Leila for the Practices of Freedom and Well-being day retreat on Saturday 6th January in Soho. Click here to book and find out more.
