25.6.2008

Your hate becomes your challenge and your challenge becomes your love!

Its amazing how much you discover about yourself, how you view the world just by being aware of your relationships with postures in yoga. I think Anandi has had an amazing journey as she has a knee injury from 2nd week of our training and had to work very hard at making more space, re-learning movement patterns and as we all call her now, becoming an expert on knees, just through her experience.

Today she could get into the pose she had been dreading for so long, with love and patience, breathing smoothly and a big smile on her face. So this was a pose she hated, then found it challenging and now loves!

I think that applies to our relationships in life if we can be aware of it, what irritates us, brings up emotions of hate and challenge. It's like Swami's famous story of the rose. Rose is a rose, just being itself. One person may hate it, one person may love it depending on their previous experiences. It is not the fault of the rose. So let it be the habit of a loved one, the rain, a yoga pose, a task we hate to do…If we can only approach it from a different angle and learn from it, grow with it we may in fact end up loving it.

I have been doing this over and over again this year. If I find someone I dislike I try to get to know them because in that process I discover that it is often my interpretations that has led me astray. That person is just being themselves, they are the rose!