Dear Yogis,
I wanted to share some thoughts with you this sweaty month of August. Along with the humid, thick heat in the air arises hot emotions within ourselves. The yogis laid out a simple path for dealing with them as they arise.
Love is the opposite of fear. Love neutralizes excessive fear. Most people think of love and hatred as opposites but hatred is always a byproduct of fear. Fear is the root from which hate grows.
So when someone is experiencing too much fear or hatred the prescription is surround it with more love, neutralize it with greater amounts of love. Love changes the pH of fear. They are alkaline/ acid emotions that even show up in the body that way.
People with high acidity in the stomach have issues that spill out into other tissues with symptoms in the GI tract, weakness in the muscles, and redness, rashes and acne on the skin. Ayurveda teaches they are always experiencing deeply tumultuous emotions whose root is fear as well. Anger, anxiety, hatred, and aggression. Those with a more alkaline pH in the stomach experience emotions of love, stability and ease.
A lot of people don’t realize that emotions are something else your body has to digest. Yoga helps us to do this through the physical practice but also in how it reframes the workings of the mind for us. You can be doing absolutely everything right for your health but if you don’t deal with your mind it will destroy all of your efforts.
The yogis are trying to help us accomplish this fearless state, embodying and resonating as unconditional love. (Embodying a state of love without external conditions.) Love with condition means: when this is x,y,z then I’ll experience love. That approach is not an enduring state. It fluctuates based on what’s going on outside.
The yogis teach conditional love is not real love, only attachment, which inevitably causes more suffering.
Real love is who we are and it is beyond conditions. Our work is to break down the barriers to experiencing what is already there within us. Something that is permanent and internal. It’s the path to transcending the material universe.
So, if you don’t have enough love in your life I encourage you to ask yourself, what are you afraid of? Those tend to be the blocks that have to be conquered. The ones that are holding us back from experiencing this deeper truth to who we are.
And those fears are what hold us back from inner fulfillment. So address all the places and ways we are letting fear clog our channels. Are we afraid to fully love our bodies? To fully love ourselves? To fully love the people we accept into our lives? Or are we keeping people around that make it impossible to do that?
Are we loving our jobs and work in the world or do we keep ourselves stuck in a holding pattern? Are we loving the environment we are existing in? Are we facilitating a life that allows us to experience the love that we are? Or what is it that we fear that is holding us back from manifesting that?
Every day we are presented with an incredibly simple choice. Today will I think, speak and act from a place of love or a place of fear. That ongoing examination, bravery, and readjustment is pivotal to success on the spiritual path.
I wish you so much peace, contentedness and love!
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In love,
Amanda and the good folks at Revolution Yoga
Originally shared in our August 2022 newsletter.