Take Time to Retreat Back to the Self
Life is full. The more we take on the more the harder it gets to step off the speed treadmill. These days it’s hard to find a time and space where we are not caught in the fast lane of life.
Even if we have a Yoga practice. It takes more discipline… we get interrupted, calls, texts, kids, family – when do you really get time to slow down enough to experience deep stillness?
We begin to resist the longer class – how many times have you reduced practice time from an hour to half hour. When there’s no one holding space for you to slow down `making sure you do it and fit it in’, what happens?
We’re prone to distraction. Restlessness. The kind of flitting from one thing to the next. Our practice may reflect that restlessness.
Ayurveda Gives Us The Tools
The Ayurveda tradition (the sister science that umbrellas Yoga and Ayurveda) would call distraction and restlesness a ‘Vata imbalance’. An exaggerated mix of the space and air elements.
When we get amped up into an accelerated space, we don’t realise how it effects our internal systems, fluids, physiology, electro chemical signals and even brain chemistry. But it does!
Slow Down To Speed Up
In the yoga tradition progress isn’t made by speed, its necessary to slow down enough so our bio rhythms really yoke to the more balanced and natural movements of the earth, the change of the seasons, the flowing of the tides, the sunrise and sunset.
But to us that feels risky. In our ‘separate’ sense of self we feel if we don’t keep up the pace with everyone else in that fast lane, we are going to fall behind. That’s something that’s fed from the top down by the way – through our telecoms, social media, social networks.
But that speed gets caught in the body, effects everything from our digestion to our memory, to our sleep to something as basic as our capacity to sit.
The mind just continues to whirr along, and it takes discipline and true strength of mind and willpower to stay with even a simple sitting practice. When so much is going, being still triggers fear.
That fear makes us grasp at our bodies. Sadly the culture of speed is so seductive, it makes us grasp even more! It becomes energy that is embedded in our diaphragm, solar plexus, gut, jaw. And that is why retreat is so important.
Ayurvedic Retreats Are A Great Start
On retreats you get to drop into the great mystery that is outside of our own grasping tendency. When we stop, is precisely the moment when it starts to feel beautiful again to be alive.
If we could all ask for anything it would be a sensible thing to ask for time. So catch yourself and slow down, you don’t have to rush through every single thing.
Yoga teaches us that our power comes from stepping off, instead of keep going round and round, because then we open to something outside of the spin. This is where potential hangs out – space for something new to blossom and grow.
Slowing down is also of course the primary way to heal, but that’s super hard to see when you are going at speed.
We Have Retreats To Slow You Down
Join us on a retreat to learn more and see how slowing down is in fact the superpower you have been looking for.
We have a mini day retreat next Saturday or go for it full on and join us for four days on retreat at the Waterfalls of St Nectan’s Glen, Cornwall.
It’s time to feel how beautiful it can be to be alive again
