Can you accept all aspects of yourself?

Do you allow yourself to see, feel and embrace your light and your darkness?  Asks Ria Dyaljot

Yogis say this is the way to freedom.

✨“When will you learn, O mind,
to sleep in perfect comfort
between the captivating lovers,
holiness and defilement?
Only when you can keep
these two consorts peaceful
beneath a single roof
will you truly encounter
the brilliance of the Goddess.”✨

-Ramakrishna

Yoga teaches us that all phenomena appear as polarities (pairs of opposite) in the manifested world. There can be no pleasure without pain, no attraction without aversion, no love without hate, no gain without loss… We all might have experienced some of these opposite feelings in our life, maybe even at the same time or towards the same person.

Yoga shows us that what appears as opposites in our life are actually intrinsically connected as the mountain and the valley, light and shadow, day and night, back and front. There is no one without the other. They appear as opposites but they are actually part of a single and inseparable whole.

THEN, WHAT IS THE WAY TO FREEDOM?

How to free our life from this up and downs? How do we connect with our centre, inner peace and deepest identity?

We need to bring all aspects of opposites into our consciousness.

It’s not about denying, judging and escaping from some parts of ourselves but to welcome and embrace them all.

I think we know how much energy it takes to continually push away the denied aspects of ourselves. Not just that, most of the times this technique does not serve us.

Life will continually present to us whatever aspect of ourselves we keep denying and pushing away. Life will continually show us those parts of our nature until we are able to accept them. This is actually what karma is; karma is what we keep splitting off from our awareness and what life has to show us again and again. The more energy we use to suppress something, the more powerfully it will come back in our life.

This is actually what the first rule of Newton states:

“For every action, there is and equal and opposite re-action.”

I love to acknowledge how beautiful it is that science and spirituality are not against but can support each other.

WHAT TO DO WITH OUR UP AND DOWNS?

Yoga teaches us the path of no-reaction.

As Stephen Cope wisely says, the paradox at the root of the “problem” is that although embodiment is central to our nature as human beings, most of us remain largely at war with the embodied state.

We hardly accept our bodies and the sensations of life, of love and hate, of happiness and sadness, of pleasure and pain. We tend to choose one side of the polarity and escape from the other. Typically, we look for happiness and escape from sadness, or vice-versa. We cannot just feel what we label as the bad side of ourselves. We cannot just feel our sensations, we try to act on them in order to eliminate them. We control and avoid our feelings, our sensations and consequently our human nature.

I’m happy to share with you some tips that can help you (as they are helping me) on this yogic journey of self acceptance.

SIMPLE YOGIC TIPS:
* Embrace all aspects of yourself and observe what happens.
* Feel the sensations in your body, choose not to escape but stay with them. Acknowledge them, stay aware and feel.
* Make of it your daily meditation practice. You can do it at anytime. Life experiences will become your “yogic laboratory”.
* When you sit in meditation be aware not to choose against any experience, but choose for all of it.
* Witness how you change as you do this practice. You will become more you.