New Year, New Opportunities

Who hasn’t heard the catchy ad slogan, New Year New You applied to everything from diets and fashion to gym memberships? When it comes to yoga, it is the opposite of what yoga is all about.

Yoga is about acceptance, forgiveness, letting go of attachment to false ideas and inviting you to get out of your own way so you can reconnect to the truest self already in existence. Yoga is about clarity and moving beyond illusions and distractions which hide our truest self from our self. It is not about a new self or changing the fundamental being you are.

Why not replace resolutions to change yourself with intentions this year? Intentions define the actions we take today, while goals and resolutions are future focused. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, “The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.” Intentions invite growth and opportunity for a year full of presence.

Yoga likens humans to an onion. It asks us to peel away the layers until our truest self is revealed. When we are quiet and we reflect, we learn. Each day becomes an opportunity to pause and start again rather than ruminate on the past or predict the future. An opportunity to consciously resist the temptation of falling back into patterns no longer serving us in a positive way. As a human we will still feel frustration, anger, confusion, disappointment, etc. but those feelings start to have a shorter shelf life and no longer control you.

Rod Stryker summarizes it best “The idea that yoga changes you into someone better than the person you already were before is a bit of a misconception. It’s more accurate to say that yoga helps remove obstacles that obscure who you really are, that it helps you come into a fuller expression of your true nature.”

Yoga isn’t, nor has it ever been, about trading yourself in for a new model.