We learn a lot of uncomfortable lessons on the mat. They usually come by surprise. The way we react to these lessons is key for personal growth. Yoga is all about observing ourselves in action. Karma yoga. When something challenging in the form of asana presents itself how do you react? Do you become aggressive? Lethargic? Scared? Sad? Do you feel inspired to learn to move through it? Do you get overwhelmed? Do you get anxiety? Do you feel like you’ll never move past it? Just observe yourself.

Yoga as is asana is like the battleground where we learn to fight for faith and trust in ourselves. We learn to slay the demonds inside that keep us in a limited mindset, that hold us back from growing because it’s comfortable.

There are key challenges threaded into the different series of Ashtanga yoga that helps us learn to leap into believing in the extraordinary power of our spirit. Things like

Lifting our own body weigh up, holding ourselves upright on one foot as we fold on ourselves, wrapping your legs around our other limbs, putting our legs behind us, balancing on our heads, bending backwards from standing, balancing all our weight on the hands… the list is endless.

Essentially yoga is creating a complex external situation to allow us to see for ourself how we deal with the challenge. to see how we deal with emotions like fear, anxiety, excitement, anger…as we become more aware of this process we begin to realize how equipped or not we are to confront life. Then we have a place from which to begin the work. As we practice daily we see the evolution into the manifesting things we thought impossible and we gain insight into our own strengths. Eventually this begins to seep deep into our consciousness so that when faced with destabilizing situations, we can reach into our ‘resource of inner strength’ and tackle the situation as we would an asana. One breath, one movement at a time, creating conscious action.

every day is an opportunity to observe how we deal with life it comes up. obstacles become opportunities to grow stronger, more flexible, more sturdy, an opportunity to observe how asana is helping is to yoga: to cease separation, duality.l, to unite our emotional, intellectual and physical bodies.

through steady devoted practice we build a library of refined emotional intelligence that is rooted in stability and that will inform our actions when life arouses emotions that have the potential to through us off our center. We will know in our own personal experience how it feels, how it grabs, how we were able to move past it and how we survived. This gives us the power of faith and trust in the higher self.

When you feel challenged use this in an opportunity to observe yourself see how you react and don’t change anything don’t judge it,  just notice how you face a challenging situation.

When you can control your reaction to a situation you can change the outcome maybe, you can change your relationship to it and your reaction to it.