Mindfulness Experienced

I've been taking a Mindfulness Coaching Certification program recently. It's been blowing my mind at how much I'm learning! But my true lesson in mindfulness came today when I taught my first Beginner's Yoga class. My student had never done yoga before! I found that although I had plans for what I was going to do in the class, what really mattered to my quality of teaching was being in the moment and being able to flex and bend according to what my student needed.

This meant first being able to observe where my student was. Then I could ask questions, "How are you feeling in this pose?" "Is this too challenging?" or "How tired are you?" What I found was that, even though I had many ideas of how things would go in my head, what was truly essential was not what was in my head but what was going on in the room in front of me. I had to pay attention and flex according to the moment. We an always plan ahead. But what really counts is how we respond in the moment.

This finding surprised me, because it is very different from the messages that I received and internalized growing up in our Western culture, and especially what I learned in my 17 years being molded by our education system. The approach I learned says: "Always be prepared, Know every answer, Don't leave room for uncertainty, and Solve every puzzle and problem through thinking." Everything is focused on our mind, and we are never asked to get into the body or heart. We don't learn to listen to our body, our heart, our emotions, or our intuition in addition to our mind. We are taught our minds are our key to freedom, success, and a good life. I am finding that this isn't so.

The mind has the ability to do powerful things, but not when left to its own devices. It needs to align with our heart an body in order to truly do us good and help us experience serenity, peace, love, connection, and joy. Why do I say this? Because it is the mind's job to take us out of the present. Thinking is, in itself, a separation from reality and the present moment.

Our minds can, at times, help us to prepare or the future. But when we get so fixed on preventing something "bad" from happening, or creating expectations about how we think things should go, we take ourselves out of the present. In this situation I needed to create plans of which poses to teach, and what theme to focus on, but I also spent time trying to plan for any possibility of something going wrong. I didn't just have a fleeting thought, but also even went as far as imagining things that could go wrong, and brainstormed how I could prevent them from occurring. But all of this worrying took me out of the moment and caused me to lose presence with myself. I also wasn't being the best teacher that I can be because I wasn't paying attention to the current moment.

Through this experience, I learned that I don't have to have my control! I can be present. I can be me. I hope you learn the same. Namaste.