Day 13 conclusions:

  • Evoking love gave me the courage and compassion to ask difficult questions and listen to the answers.
  • Evoking love relieves feelings of loneliness and dispenses much needed self-care.

Why

As a yoga and meditation teacher and yoga therapist, I have often wanted to find a tool that would enable my students and clients to get to their underlying motives. As a Human being I have wanted this tool for myself.

If an individual has high expectations of how they should be or want to be, accompanied with the matching level of self-judgement, they may not be able to see their own motives for fear of not liking what they see. I have read and heard a plethora of quotes inviting us to accept who we are in the moment but very few tools to enable us to actually to do the business. Well, today I have found one that does.

I have been skirting around two very uncomfortable questions all day, avoiding them and/or feeling a silent guilt (assuming the worst and assuming that was something to feel guilty about). Finally the thought occurred to me in a moment of wisdom, ‘evoke love and ask’, so I did.

“Do I feel sorry for myself and want other people to feel sorry for me?”

“Do I want people to think I’m heroic in dealing with my life, the way I do?”

They are subtly different slices of the same pie and for me, very uncomfortable slices. The thing is I couldn’t directly ask them before and I definitely could not have written about them, because I was afraid of the answers but in the background mood of love and compassion there is no judgement only love. If the answer is uncomfortable, love and compassion allow a nurturing to occur and an enquiry that may result in a different resolution.

For me tonight the answers are both “no”, although in the past, they would have been “yes”, in part. When I was less empowered than I am now, eliciting sympathy was a strategy as was eliciting admiration but they are both double edged swords that kept me in a disempowered relationship with life. However this was not my totality and I felt very judgemental of myself, and quite split.

The background mood of Love and compassion that has been created by my practice gave me the compassion and therefor the courage to see this aspect of myself and feel the difference between then and now.

Now I want to move forward together with the people in my life, share my vulnerabilities and fears so that I can directly ask for help rather than elicit sympathy and admiration. I realise I don’t need sympathy or admiration but sometimes I need help because I am not an island or perfect (or wrong for not being perfect), and that’s what living in relationship with the world is about. Not to mention dispelling feelings of loneliness while dispending a healthy dose of self-care.