Awakening to your soul one step at a time
Last week I was provided with a very daunting task! I was supposed to clean my bathroom tiles!! This is the moment when one regrets of being the first to choose the largest bathrooms in the house for oneself. While cleaning the bathroom tile seems to be one of the common tasks, this time it was not. Over years, the salt has deposited itself in layers over the floor so much that I had forgotten what the original tile looked like. So, this time I had in my hand a strong tile cleaner and a brush and I do have to put it in a lot of effort.
This is the first time I entered my bathroom, looked at how big it was and thought that It was totally unnecessary. In a smaller bathroom, I would have as much had a nice bath and kept myself clean. I started cleaning the first tile and it’s a no-brainer… I could not have cleaned the entire bathroom in a single day. Luckily the tiles were small squares and yes, I can do basic math. So, I split the bathroom tiles in groups of two and committed myself to cleaning two tiles a day.
Today I am halfway done but there is a steady progress in small steps. One more thing that had happened slowly in these days is, I managed to do my first headstand in Yoga with the support of the wall. I am obviously happy about it. Rewind a few days back, that was the first ever time I did keep my heels down on the floor in a downward dog pose.
I was introduced to Yoga about two years back. I wasn’t very regular at that time. So, for a beginner almost every Asana is a struggle. I was in a hurry to achieve the posture. I would think that a posture is simple and that I could do it if I willed it. There was indeed so much struggle and the occasional mood swings which would say “probably, yoga is not my cup of tea”. It was just like the fox which said that the grapes were sour once he could not reach them.
Today, I have an understanding that Yoga is a relationship that I have with myself. The physical practice is the study time, If you compare it with a book reading habit. Here the book is my body and I read it. With every Asana, I read a page. Moving to the next Asana is like flipping to the next page. Sometimes, we never totally understand what is written in a page, but we still read through it. When we read a few pages, we get the essence of the book. Then we can always go back to the pages we did not understand. Sometimes even without going back to those pages, we do understand what we once did not.
The physical practice is the study time, If you compare it with a book reading habit. Here the book is my body and I read it. With every asana, I read a page. Moving to the next Asana is like flipping to the next page.
The work happens in the background and is still not evident. Even today, when I open the bathroom, I still look first at the tiles that are yet to be cleaned. Probably If I observe, I can still look at the tiles that I have cleaned (two per day). Yes, we all have a lot of cleaning to do and our bathrooms are the biggest. We need not clean them all in a day, in a month or in a fixed time frame. We can start cleaning 2 tiles per day. One day, there will be no more tile to clean!
Happy Yoga folks!!
