Dear Yogis,
Spring represents to many a new beginning, a new start, a new growing season. Where there was once constriction, emptiness and withdrawal in comes a new birth of something beautiful.
Through the inner experience we can accidentally spend a lot of time with thoughts that inevitably lead to a feeling of constriction. An inner winter.
Thoughts like I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough energy, I don’t have enough talent. I am too this or I am too that. The list goes on.
I can spend years telling you how perfectly wonderful I think you are inside and out but if I mention one negative thing that can often become the thought that consumes the attention for hours, days, months, years.
This has to do with our reticular activating system. (RAS). A part of our brain that acts like a filter to bring our attention to what is important (life or death, survival things). Our subconscious takes in 40 million bits of information per second but our conscious mind can only handle 40 per second. So the RAS gets us to focus the conscious mind on what is important out of all that stimulus. If not for RAS we would barely be able to function as we succumb to overstimulation.
For example I moved to a house by the train and it makes noise as it passes by. The longer I lived there my mind paid less attention to it. I eventually could sleep through the night. But once I had a baby in the other room the tiniest noise from her would wake me up from the deepest sleep. My RAS decided that information (baby but not train) was so important that my attention had to be fixated on it to get me up and going.
Because of the way we learned to survive from womb through childhood our RAS was programmed to become reactive to certain stimulus (like our survival depended on it.) Think about how every death, tragic event, and negative drama keeps us fixated on the news channels or tv shows for hours.
Have you ever been in traffic where everyone slows down just to check out something bad that may have happened on the side of the road? And you get there and can’t stop from slowing down to look too as annoyed as you were that everyone else was stopping in front of you? It is in case we need to know it for our survival. All primates do this even migrating gorillas!
Our RAS got shaped as we learned how to survive in the context of our family unit, our school unit, and our social unit by observing signals that could be a threat. (Negative comments, insults, danger could all mean there was something threatening our survival within the unit or within our bodies.)
From this behavior it can save us or limit us terribly if we don’t learn to reshape the RAS as we grow and our lives change. The things that protected you as a child may not serve you today in the same way. The ways you survived in relationship earlier may be hindering your relationships now.
We can get stuck in self limiting holding patterns that shrink us due to the stories we tell ourselves. (That were often pre-programmed by something else.)
These selective (self-perpetuating) moments picked out by the RAS, cause us to overlook the 40 million other stimulus hitting our senses every second. This may give you a skewed view of who you are and what you are capable of. What the yogis call infinite, expansive, beautiful, tapped in, and abundant.
Keith Angrisani taught in our teacher training once about the eyes. How we have limited cones in our eyes to help us see colors and if there was a gigantic elephant standing in front of you that was a color you didn’t have cones for, it would be completely invisible to you. You would be blind to it.
Yoga helps us to work with the mind in a way that we enumerate more expansive ways of looking at the self, the body, the mind, and the universe. It is almost like giving yourself new cones to see what was right in front of you, that your RAS wouldn’t let you see. The opportunity, the solution, the exit, the new partner, the career pivot, the new way of behaving and most importantly the incredible consciousness that you are. Yoga changes your life for the better and it is a continual practice meant for your whole life.
So in times like these it’s SO important to get to your yoga mat and meditation practice daily so we are continually reshaping this mind/body vehicle we are living in. This will inevitably lead us to a space where we can thrive. Embodied in our true authentic being-ness.
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I wish you so much peace, contentedness and many blessings.
In love,
Amanda and the good folks at Revolution Yoga
Originally shared in our April 2022 newsletter.