Explore, envision, enliven.
Baby steps towards personal peace.
This month’s sutra is all about how to save ourselves from future suffering.
Sutra 2.16
Future suffering can and should be avoided.
Great, suffering can and should be avoided. I’m all for that, but how?
One way to prevent suffering is through the introspection work, svadyaya, of yoga: A process of growth and moving towards our Self and integrity. During this process we watch sensations, behaviors, and patterns, and inevitably discover many ways in which we create our own suffering.
First and foremost, one of the surest and easiest ways to create suffering is to look at all of our ‘shortcomings’ and feel helpless and worthless. To avoid future suffering, we notice how we want to behave and then we consciously rewire ourselves to reduce our self-inflicted pain.
Baby steps to personal peace.
Explore
Oh, we humans, we can create our own suffering in so many ways!
This can be from the environment we cultivate (see sutra 1.24), the foods we eat, our patterns, behaviors, and desires. Watch for things that make us suffer, parts of life that make us feel bad or sad or low energy. Sometimes these are obvious lows like eating, drinking, or resting too much or little, but sometimes they are more subtle.
Commonly behaviors and actions that lead to suffering also keep us from our heart’s desires. We may long for community, but dread social interactions. We may stay so busy all the time that nothing we ever dream of actually manifests. We may want to be so in control that we strip life of all its play, fun, and spontaneity. We may constantly help others but feel taken advantage of.
Look at ways that we self-inflict suffering.
Envision
Think of as many different ways as possible that we can rewire our behavior and begin to slowly nudge ourselves in the direction of vitality and our deepest desires. This may be letting go of perfection, switching “all-or-nothing” thinking or practicing one task at a time and mindfulness, showing ourselves to the world and being vulnerable, or tapping into our intuition and rebellious side. There are a million possible ways to move in a new direction.
Enliven
This is the action step. Choose small steps, teeny tiny steps that are achievable. Eat one meal consciously, purposefully mismatch one dark blue and one black sock for one afternoon, take one day off of social media, look three people in the eye, smile and say hello at the next social event or public place you enter, decide on your opinion before you get together with friends so you already know what you want to eat for dinner.
The important part is to choose something doable for us to begin the new behavioral wiring. Its new, its uncomfortable, it’s like learning a new instrument or any new task. This is the process. It is okay for it to be a challenge, even an incremental change. Then we practice it, over and over again; we enliven it with our action steps. If we are learning a to play a song, we play the same thing over and over again. If we are learning to drive, we keep driving. Eventually the new song or task or behavior becomes comfortable and the new normal. We no longer have to think about how to play the song, how to drive, or how to spare ourselves self-sabotaging behaviors. Old patterns are left behind and new behaviors and beliefs form that prevent future pain from manifesting.
We have avoided some future suffering! We can save ourselves.
Open to the possibilities!
We can save ourselves from suffering.
Explore, envision, and enliven the most peaceful expression of ourselves.