Letting go
At my yoga class this morning, there was a woman who walked in over half an hour late, set up her matt, and proceeded to be much more vocal than the rest of us for the next hour. I found myself getting increasingly annoyed, pretty much because I’d decided in my head that when you show up that late, you relinquish your right to distract me with you banter. Of course, this is an incredibly non-yoga mind set to have. I’m sitting here judging this woman instead of concentrating on my practice, which then set me to wondering (again, not focusing on my practice) where the line is between trying to let go of your judgment and accepting what life throws at you, and being a passive doormat because your irritation level won’t let you deal with a situation rationally. I really wanted somebody to tell this woman (gently, of course) to shut the hell up, but I certainly didn’t feel like being that person, and really, it was only irritating me because she showed up so late. All this is to say that I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to let ourselves get distracted from our own health and happiness by the most trivial shit. It’s hard to let go of the little twitterings in our brain that believe we can force the world to be different if we just get irritated enough (Which never seems to work for me, unless you count becoming totally distracted and wasting my time fretting over the trivial as working). The ability to let go of those irritations feels like what I imagine wisdom to be, and I wonder if I’ll ever get there or if it’s simply something you continuously need to work on.
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September 25th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Oooh, there are a couple people at my yoga studio who are prone to the same thing (one of them asks questions incessantly, and the other blurts out random “facts” and bits of information.) I find this irritating, too, as yoga is my meditation time. I also struggle with letting go of my irritation; it serves no good and only further distracts me from my practice. I try to breathe through it, and release my feelings of irritation on the exhalation. I do wish, though, that people would take more notice of the flow of the class; some moments are more appropriate than others for speaking up. Honestly, I think that this is something the instructor should address (privately) with these students. One other yoga pet peeve: instructors who can’t keep their own mouths shut during shivasana. Sometimes I want to remind them that during shivasana, silence is divine… (instead I remind myself to still my own mind…)