step back.

There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, more distant perspective.

 Chose to step back sometimes.

Your story.

All yoga postures are there to help us notice how we are as we act and we can use the practice to change from working/feeling/responding from our own histories to creating new, more helpful patterns, which ultimately gives you choice.

"If we take yoga seriously we will practice it alot. It makes sense, then, that what we practice has a positive effect on the body.

We repeat patterns not to limit us in life, but as the musician practices their scales, we practice basic patterns so we can move freely in life. Working with fundamental patterns in yoga helps to clarify how we move and what habits we have built up.

We need to learn to distribute patterns evenly throughout our bodies. Poorly distributed forces create stresses and strains at joins, which invariably lead to pain of discomfort and increased likelihood of layering protective patterns over causative ones. When we take this approach, yoga becomes an inquiry into the way we engage through our bodies. It helps us to notice when we do unhelpful things, and, once noticed, we can gently set about letting them go." --Peter Blackaby

Working with your own narrative is essential. That is where solutions are. YOUR solutions.
Now take the rest of your life and practice.

choice

"It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at. It’s not where you are, it’s where you’re going. Everybody gets knocked down, how quick are you going to get up? There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Don’t worry, it’s not an incoming train. It’s the sun rising on a new day full of endless possibilities. We all have choices to make; should I turn left, right, go straight ahead or just stand still? The temperature is the same whether you dip your toe or dive in head first. At some point you’re going to have to get your hair wet. Go on, dive in."

Antony Genn

Found here.

"I wish I’d partied a little less. People always say ‘be true to yourself.’ But that’s misleading, because there are two selves. There’s your short term self, and there’s your long term self. And if you’re only true to your short term self, your long term self slowly decays."

-- humans of new york

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero's art was sustained by her involvement in protest of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and, particularly, the women’s movement.
I find her prints endlessly inspiring and (for me) they are all about choice, about being deliberate.

If I had all the time in the world I would want to make my class plans look like her prints. I love the patterns, the fearless repeated movements, the pauses and the open space. She made pictures like music.

Mine

Mine All Mine on Nowness.com

I'm totally up for getting dressed like this in the morning...

“You may as well be who you are.”

— Grace Paley

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

—Stanley Kubrick



(Image:  Gustav Klimt, Lake Attersee isn't this an amazing painting?!)

The Blue House

     It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.
     It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.
     On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.
Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..”  In order to escape his destiny in time.
     The house resembles a child’s drawing.  A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.
     It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life!  And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.
     A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

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-- Thomas Tranströmer, The Blue House.

(translated by Göran Malmqvist)

Sister Ship

"...You'll never know the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."

 -- Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

Images all found here

"Oh I think that’s deadly when you try to tell people how to think. You just want to empower them to take the chance on themselves. That’s what you do when you’re older, or when you reach maturity, you try to give what you can to the next generation."

--Kiki Smith

(Source: allmymetaphors, via loveyourchaos)

“Its All About Choice - The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. Nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining - as well as to their experience of the pain of burns. When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. Yet this seeing, which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye's retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm's reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. (Close your eyes, move round the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. ”

-- John Berger (pg 8, Ways of Seeing)

Yoga is Choice

The direct experience of the a yoga practice keeps it forever in the present. Practiced with intelligence Yoga helps cultivate self trust and self knowledge, which provides choice. 

"The world is shaped by individuals. The more clearly we understand ourselves and our motivations the better chance we have of acting well in the world. Yoga can help us to act with understanding and self awareness. 

A positive force in a world that struggles to accommodate change!"

 (quote from Peter Blackaby and image from here)

"I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence."

-- Adrienne Rich, Splittings

 

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Found here