I decided to re-look over my yoga section on my website today, and was trying to figure out how I went from paranoia to flying on a plane. What my current reality is, what my reality before I went to learn yoga was, and what I learned when I was there.
I have always been a supporter of living a life of joy. That we don’t have to struggle to be challenged to grow. And yet, I have experienced a number of struggles along the way.
Yet, I am still bold enough to believe there is a way.
But as a world-society we haven’t gotten there yet to see it functioning on a universal level. It got me thinking about conversations I have had with close friends, with my mom, with myself.
And realizing that we are not experienced with living joy - we get peaks of it, but to live a life of joy always seems far out of reach. It seems it is claimed more as a myth than true fact.
We are programmed to recognize fear though. And are constantly told it is a part of life.
But a lot of us live our life in fear more prominently than that of joy.
And when we are faced with a chance to better our-life, experience joy on a more regular basis, it is a taken-back kind of experience.
Ironically, it seems we are afraid of feeling better because we don’t know it as well as fear.
We are taught to fear our world, and through generations, our ability to feel safe with ourself has gone down, but also has gone up in figuring out how we can get back to it. We start good habits but lose them and wonder why because we felt so good doing them. Why would we stop doing something that felt good and solid for us?
I feel because it is this idea that nothing is ever enough, that feeling great for a long time isn’t possible.
I'm going to jump into a side topic in this, referencing my idea for why I think this is, before looping back to the main topic on fear and how we can work towards recognizing our power.
~ I think it has been drilled into us for generations, this idea that struggle makes you more of a person because of a long history of creating society from the ground up; where it didn’t matter how hard you worked, the reward was almost nothing most times.
See the irony is that, older generations felt those that did hard work were more deserving of the reward of, will say, joy. But at the same time they're hard on people going after their dream because it was hard work.
Life seems to always be a paradigm.
I assume this was the feeling of jealousy. Where most likely they weren’t in the position or mindset to go after such dreams they had. From many reasons, but I think back then it didn’t matter how hard or grueling the work was, it was expected that you struggle, that you hate your work, and that you shouldn’t expect a reward. So much so this idea that nothing is ever enough is born. I feel this just got passed down and this mindset that you will fail (in a struggle way, rather than part of the success progress) is most of the time what we are accustomed to hearing. So much so, we are now taught that people will always doubt but yet anything is possible. We live in a world where everything is possible. And the pain of these generations gets passed on despite our new reality. ~
Referencing back to this idea of why we can’t continue things that are good for us, here is my personal experience.
For instance, during the yoga course I was completing, I finally could move my legs without hip or knee pain - it felt as though I was walking on a new pair. Though I was still dealing with my own challenges during this training, I didn’t feel so rushed to have to know all my answers (probably because I realized I had the answers all along, I was expressing them, but I just had to be patient with the timing of them). I kept it up until I got back to Canada. And then the routine seemed to fall part.
And when I am experiencing my levels of challenge (and I'll express why I refer to it as challenges, compared to before I did yoga, would have been deemed a struggle), I wonder why I can’t just do some yoga more regularly as yoga seemed to be so helpful when doing it consistently.
So months later, and I watch myself seem to have that lingering (ahhhh what do I do). But this time with the knowledge I have, I furthur ask myself questions of why. I always have done this but this time I am more patient with the answer - I'm more honest with the answer - and more so I know what going against the answer feels like so I am more grounded in staying true to myself.
As I realize I am doing activities, with good friends, better food, better head space, whilst dealing with the same challenges I have throughout my entire life
- I realize that we are always challenged - but struggling comes from feeling we are incapable of dealing with or coming through challenges. This is when we struggle.
And in a world where we are thrown a lot of information, we are working to sort through the mess of past beliefs, present issues, realizing we deserve a better future.
This underlying feeling that it will never be enough is in my opinion, the root to why we see challenges as struggles and thus holds us back subconsciously as a society. So I would say this is also a time of working to uncover more of our truths - the truths we have hidden as a society like this one and the truth that there is challenge to opportunity instead of the challenge is a struggle, thus allowing we can live a more prosperous joy life.
I consider us the next bridge in generations because we/and maybe some but not all of our parents grew up in not the really difficult times of early civilization but still a more old day of thinking, but we have also experienced the tech age and the raising awareness of differences.
Schools alone, though still in my opinion need more of an update, are improving now a days with their openness. (Though I feel sometimes it is overly expressed and becomes more of a general campaign than working more at the root of cause - to sensitize our society to issues while at the same time desensitizing them through the constant campaigning of the issues.)
Overall, we have created a greater respect for the students and the dilemmas our generation has had to face.
We are at a time of undoing a lot of our “old generational thinking” as we “embrace the unknown and creating that of new awareness and respect.” We are undoing labels and reframing what and how we want to live our life. We are growing more to open living if you will, where work life balance is a prominent factor, ensuring our employees are getting enough time to enjoy life while also making life at work more enjoyable. I know this is not everywhere, but it is on the rise - and it is what more people are seeking and trying to create.
The thing about creating with already old infrastructure in place is that tradition and that idea of knowing it already, usually outweighs that unknown and trying something new ideas. But there are many levels to change and I would say we are in the progress of level 2-3 because I feel the awareness of wanting our typical 9-5 day, little vacation, and little respect for being more than an employee out the window as we aim for more sustainable and doing what we love kind of life. I would say this established means that we are working on setting the goals of what this looks like (such as the work life balance) and working on bringing this to action. I read somewhere that we are entering a time where we realize our world isn’t falling a part and we are creating and implementing new ways of thinking that will actually help better our world. But this is not an overnight fix, it is a constant awareness and respect.
We are undoing and renewing the old ways of 'struggling is life' to wanting to live something more and realizing the possibility of living in a world that harness and creates the opportunity to do what you love with security, safety, and joy. As I begin to share this known idea of joy I am better learning my belief and faith in it and figuring out my why to the feeling of complete certainty that this is what we have to either get back to or move toward with a renewed sense of worth and compassion from the hardships we have gone through as a world.