My expectations of the New Year aren’t about the New Year but rather about me.
The New Year is neutral, a pile of days linked together, and many hours in which we live our lives.
What we do within those hours is how our year will unfold, or more importantly how we will emerge on the other end.
I went back on my blog and read some of my entries in January 2010, the beginning of my first 60-day Yoga challenge.
It was incredible to read about the beginnings of my year doing yoga.
Below is a section I quoted from Bikram’s book, and it shows the reality of what we are up against when we strive to make changes in our lives, what we are battling is gaining control over the mind.
“Without control of mind, you can do nothing. You have something, but you don’t know how to use it. The greatest challenge we face as human beings is controlling and properly using our own minds.
The mind is the communications system between the physical body and the Soul or Spirit; its primary responsibilities are to control the body and supply the Spirit with immediate and exact information. When the mind instead gives distracted and wrong information, the Spirit cannot govern properly – in fact, it cannot assume control at all. The ego-driven mind has had to rule for itself, and now it does not want to give up its ultimate authority over your life. This is a bitter, perverse fact about human beings, but it is the truth.
Without proper training, the mind will continue to give you the wrong information and divert your focus from your Spiritual goals. The way it does that so successfully is with fear and desire – its primary weapons. Like a drug dealer, the mind gets addicted to these two opposite but conjoined emotions, and when we are constantly reacting to our attractions and aversions to people, things and situations, we can’t see what really is and reopen the channels of our true Self, the Spirit. That’s why I say that the mind has become our worst enemy.
To overcome this will not be easy. The weak mind is ever growing, constantly feeding on your fears and negative habits. And as my Guru taught me, the natural human attraction to something negative is NINE TIMES more powerful than our gravitational pull to toward the positive- another inconvenient fact.”
Bikram
So if you are endeavoring to make changes in your life this upcoming year, please take note, that what you will be going against is a very powerful pull, 9 times stronger than your thought of change.
Say your desire is to stop eating sweets; you will have the power to eat sweets 9 times stronger.
And if your desire is to exercise or do yoga each day, you will be fighting a powerful pull 9 times stronger to stay in bed, lay on the couch, and do nothing.
What I am most impressed with as I look back upon my year of doing yoga (332 out of the 365) is the sheer effort was exerted in getting to the mat.
Even though the actual 90 minutes of yoga is rough, it is nothing compared to the struggle to begin.
The real battle is not in the actual doing; it is in the seconds or minutes prior to the event.
The fight ensues in the actual debate about whether you are going to abstain or succumb.
To do or not to do is the where the war is fought.
It isn’t about the sweets, the beer or the exercise; it is about the seconds of power right before, the space before doing or not doing.
It is on that edge of time, that second where your life is determined, who has control?
