I believe. Say it, out loud. Let it sit inside and reverberate through you. Do you BELIEVE it?
I believe.
Seems so simple, right? Believing comes from extracting fear and worry, which requires observation and practice. And in order to get to the other side, in order to get to the place where you believe, you have to go through the fear and the worry, the negative emotions that drown out your ability to believe. As Jim Morrison sang you have to, “break on through to the other side.”
The breaking through process can be a challenging one. I’ve found that when I go through old habits and fears come to the forefront and it’s quite easy to latch onto those, to let them run amok on my mind and send my heart into a panic. It’s dangerously comfortable to attach to my habitual ways of being and to need validation that everything is going to be okay.
It’s comfortable to go to a place where I let my mind play tricks on me, entertaining paranoid delusions, destroying the beauty that only moments before glimmered in my view.
I never realized how strong the world BELIEVE actually is. It’s in our believing that we create our own magical, joyful world. I see now that I’ve enjoyed the cynicism in painfully over-analyzing a situation. I’m still guilty of, at times, falling into this habit. But, no amount of analyzing has ever made me feel safe, which is primary to believing.
Yoga and meditation practice have nearly eliminated this habit, and help me feel safe, grounded and trusting. Through our practice we extract and go through. And as we are going through we have our mats to come home to where we can kick, stretch, and breathe– where we can let go. Our asana practice helps us to wrangle our wild horse of a mind into submission so that we are able to be still, be quiet, and to trust.
As we move from one asana to the next we are able to extract the fear and the worry, the stagnant energy that holds us back and we are able to go through it without attaching to it. Through the sweating, the stretching, the contracting of muscles, the silent meditations, we release, we let go, we become meditative and we learn to believe. And when we believe, we know we are safe. When we believe, we know we are loved. When we believe, we are home.