We See Things As We Are

I hope you all had a great summer weekend. I continue to be amazed by the power of our minds to shape our reality. When we observe our thoughts with a bit of objectivity we have options; we can choose how those thoughts can best serve us. It is this remarkable power that we often forget about.

I was finding myself forgetting about this a bit in recent weeks so I decided to do an experiment with myself. Each morning for the last couple of weeks I looked out my window to the backyard and took notice of how it looked and how I felt. As with many things in our everyday life, my backyard does not change much from day to day. However what I noticed was that some mornings it looked light, bright and hopeful out my window and other times it felt heavy with dread and overwhelm. My feelings seemed to have no correlation with what the actual weather was outside and everything to do with what was happening inside my mind. What is happening in our internal dialogue has everything to do with how we see the world.

 The author Anais Nin describes it this way “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  The Buddha explains it as “All that we think, we become.”  

The opportunity exists to practice this idea in small ways; perhaps a little experiment like mine, or in our yoga practice on the mat. On the mat we do lots of the same poses, over and over again, day after day, week after week. There may be differences in our bodies through the natural course of aches and pains but often the biggest barriers or challenges are those in the mind. We can do the same poses on different days and have very different feelings about them. The poses haven’t changed, our perception of them in that moment shapes our reality about them. 

So whether on the mat or off we can hone this skill with the practice of starting to notice when the same things look different and going a little deeper to determine why. It is with that objectivity and understanding that we can begin to shift.