Meet me at T-junction and see you on the bright side: Until recently I really thought that making time to be still and quiet was a luxury. It felt that, with a full time job as a yoga teacher, whilst juggling several other projects at the same time, I could not afford that luxury. It turns out that making a little time to study ourselves can be the most rewarding and fascinating business of all.
I am not a great risk taker, but I love experiments, especially those that I can conduct on my own, with my own thought patterns and willpower.
The one that has been particularly life altering is related to the concept of being able to catch the split second between the observation of a situation that has got a potential to be upsetting, and the actual moment of being upset. Within that split second, as an assessment of the situation takes place, and just before a reaction within the mind evolves and feelings and emotions become awakened, ready to come forth, it appears there is actually a T-junction, where a conscious decision ‘to not be upset’ can be taken.
Well, there have been many upsetting situations to experiment with since I embarked upon this mission of ‘checking out that junction’. The revelation: the junction is there! It appears you can make a conscious decision to either indulge in that strong emotion, (my mind-lab chose anger to experiment with, because the results can be explosive), or you can choose not to indulge!
Whenever I chose to ‘opt out’ I felt like a winner, as if I had overcome the conditioning of my own thought patterns, the waves of my own moods.
Whenever I chose to indulge in a strong emotion, however, I knew at the back of my own mind that it was not the only way to be, not the only choice I have to feel. I knew that another way of responding actually exists, and all I need to do is to catch myself at the T-junction and ‘opt out’.
Looking inwards is always challenging, as we open ourselves to internal dialogues, sometimes encountering aspects of our personality that we would rather not see. But I think it is also fascinating to see how through a simple process of observation we can make life-changing discoveries and how suddenly observing a negative emotion from a distance can be a truly interesting, winning experiment.
I would really like to say something cool and witty about leaving this T-junction and driving into the sunset, but I won’t.
Instead, I will say: find the crossroad, sometimes go right, sometimes go left, you may trip, you may laugh. And you may just see yourself on the brighter side.
Marta Swiezynska is the founder of The Yoga Project
This is an aspect that leaves me thinking we have more control when we decide not to allow negativity to take over.