Connecting to Ourselves
It was the very first time I attended a yoga class that I realised how disconnected I was from my mind and body. As the teacher began to call out random Sanskrit words that referred to postures (it seemed), I distinctly remember the feeling of looking like a clown. Actually, I felt more like a baby giraffe trying my best to stand up while others looked at me with judging eyes, most likely thinking, ‘Who is this awkward dude and what is he doing here?’ I was about two minutes into this negative spiral when I heard my teacher call out the words:
‘Where are you, right now?’
Where was I? Well, I was plummeting into a rabbit hole of thoughts that revolved around me being a complete and utter misfit masquerading as a yogi while feeling sure that everyone in the room was laughing at me. Have you ever had moments like this? Lost in a vortex of stories and fantasies?
I realised at that moment that I wasn’t sure when I had last felt connected to my body. I spent so much of my time in my head. Catastrophizing, analysing, fantasising. No one in that yoga room was laughing at me. In all likelihood, no one was paying much attention to me at all. Chances were, they were all thinking the same thoughts about themselves – or thinking about something else entirely.
A 2005 National Science Foundation article reported that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 95 per cent are the exact same thoughts as the day before. And 80 per cent of those thoughts are negative.
If I was not there, connected to the present moment, my body and myself, where was I? I was lost in my own thoughts, worrying about what the people around me were thinking, feeling or doing. I have a feeling some of you can relate to this.
We tend to spend a lot of our time caught between past experience and future fears. We might be on a first date, and either worrying about making a good impression or anticipating that the whole thing will go badly, or it might be our first day at a new job, when we feel like we’re going to be ‘found out’ as being incompetent. Whatever the situation is, odds are we are disconnected from our bodies, which are always firmly in the present moment. Instead, we are caught up in our minds, oscillating between future projections and past regrets. New situations are often accompanied by a soundtrack of negative thoughts. This constant soundtrack trains our minds to register negative stimuli more often and also to dwell on these moments, in turn making them seem bigger and more uncomfortable. It’s why we tend to recall our pain more vividly than our happiest moments, and why we cling to negative feedback more tightly than to compliments. We feel what our brains perceive as negative much more deeply than we do praise or happiness.
Our own critical minds are often at work every time we look in a mirror. What we see staring back at us is a face or a person that needs improvement, whether that ‘improvement’ means fewer wrinkles or less fat and more muscles. Society has created a version of beauty that many of us, including myself, struggle to feel included in.
We so rarely look at our reflection in the mirror and see ourselves just as we are: beautiful and, more importantly, loveable.
These thoughts are so automatic and frequent that we may not even realise we are thinking them.
What would it be like to love what we see in the mirror – and the mind and heart that goes with it?
What if we saw the beauty in our wrinkles, the stories in our stretch marks and the love in our eyes? What if I was to tell you that it is possible to fall in love with yourself every morning? We’ve been conditioned to believe we should always be on the path to continuous improvement – so why not use this as a model for our own self-acceptance?
It IS possible to shift our focus from our weaknesses to our goodness. While we might be always growing and learning, we’re fundamentally whole and complete, right now.
-Excerpted from my book, Still Together. Click here to purchase a copy.