Beinspired is finding its voice

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the duality of this world we live in; with good there is bad, with black there is white, with hate there is love, and all this in the context of that which I most resist or have a strong opinion about, which might cause me to lose my centre because of orientating one way or the other. 

For example, since May I have turned my back on social media and while I have felt much better for it personally, I have recently found myself questioning the impact of me holding onto the perspective that it is ‘bad’ without also considering its inherent goodness too. 

It was not that my experience of social media was not bad per se, I was not vilified or bullied, but it never made me feel very good on the inside and I wasn’t sure it was bringing out the best in me, or in others, or in the wider world per se. I didn’t want to be doing something just because others were doing it and I certainly didn’t want to post for the sake of posting to satisfy an algorithm that has been set up to keep us online. It didn’t make sense to me and made me feel increasingly uncomfortable.

I am very aware that we all of us have a choice about how we utilise our time and while I might rather be writing or practising yoga or outside with the children than stuck inside online with social media, others may have a totally different take on things and it might for them be a lifeline. So while coming off social media has been a very positive experience for me, for others it might be a very negative experience. 

My ponderings have also caused me to watch Social Dilemma and consider more of the effect of social media on the mind and our sense of self. I’m very aware how social media can negatively impact our mental wellbeing, playing into our insecurities and making us feel as if we are missing out or don’t know what’s going on if we’re not on there. This to the extent that we can get hooked without even realising it, so that our mind cannot imagine a life without it such is our dependency on it. 

I’m aware how much the big corporations play into this and make every attempt to ruthlessly profiteer from our dependencies and the need to be someone and fit in to a world that tries to control through organising and boxing us into labels and definitions, organisations in fact, and common ways of being. I am fascinated by all this too – how we try to buy an identity and a sense of self, as if we too can be commodified, often looking outside of ourselves, just look at the yoga ‘industry’…

There’s a sutra in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras which talks about ‘pratipaksa bhavanam’ (Chapter 2, Verse 33), which basically means looking at things from a different point of the view. It’s used in the context of ‘when we find ourselves disturbed/unsure of what to do, not sure of the best way forward, try and look at it from the other perspective’, and I have tried to put this into practice with my resistance to social media.

I have no qualms whatsoever with removing myself from all social media platforms, I have made complete peace with that, but I was beginning to have doubts about Beinspired, not least because I have finally accepted that I am running a business, albeit one with a heart and a genuine orientation towards the community, but because I’ve been feeling increasingly that it needs its own voice. 

Since last May, as lockdown in Guernsey eased, I have stood back a little to feel into things. 2020 has thrown life up in the air and I wasn’t quite sure how it would settle and where I would settle with it. There was a point where I wasn’t even sure I wanted to continue teaching, which surprised me a little as I have always imagined that I would teach until the day I die, but the questioning was there nonetheless.

I even found myself questioning what yoga means to me, and perhaps this was has been the most challenging  aspect of all my questioning, because even this has changed too. It’s been gradual, but picked up a pace this summer the more I practiced with my teacher and began to heal old wounds around eating disorder to the extent that I stopped considering asana (postures) as just another way of controlling my body and feeding into old patterns of self-harm (the ‘push through it/overextending mentality’). 

I began to see the way in which my old way of practising had been feeding into my imbalances and keeping me stuck. My practice had taken me so far, I could practice all these fancy poses but I couldn’t be sure that it was truly changing me, or at least it wasn’t getting at some of my deeply ingrained patterns that I knew needed shifting and releasing. There was nowhere to hide anymore, and actually I didn’t want to hide or use my practice to numb out from feeling and from deepening my experience of yoga. 

While I have always approached yoga as a spiritual practice and tried to share this in my teachings, it has become clearer and clearer to me over the years that it really is a spiritual practice, that not only connects us more fully to the ‘self’, but that calms our mind to the extent that we are even able to recognise, let alone ‘hear’, the self. Thus it becomes a practice to literally freeing us from the limitations and restrictions of the mind, and not just a form of exercising for the sake of exercising. 

Of course yoga does involve movement as we practice asana (postures), and this – in theory - to ensure that the body is healthy enough to enable us to live to a ripe old age where we might have more chance to sit comfortably and realise the self. Of course the postures offer many benefits and the attentive practising of them with an awareness of the breath, can, without doubt, help to still our mind and enable us to access deeper parts of ourselves in the body, but of course we have to be in the body to begin with, not lost in the thinking mind.

Being in the body enables us to notice where we are stuck and holding onto emotional pain which hasn’t been processed. This will often create physical discomfort as much as it will mental and emotional, and also spiritual suffering. With a regular practice we might begin to notice restrictive thought and behaviour patterns that both create and compound our own suffering an keep us tied in the past and limit us in some way, keeping us stuck.

It felt at times like feeling my way through a dark wood, seeking some evidence of a path which might lead me back to the light and to a greater understanding of what it means and how best to be with it in this lifetime! Of course there was a bigger picture, there is always a bigger picture, but I couldn’t see it, because on some level I was in the metamorphic stage and wasn’t actually sure whether I would truly end up finding my butterfly at the end, despite the many signs the universe tried to give me but that I struggled to see because I was so caught up in the uncomfortableness and muckiness of it in that moment!

The clarity eventually arrived, the bigger picture became clearer, there are always steps to take on the path to realising our dreams and of course appreciating and loving more of the self, but sometimes those steps make no sense in the moment, until we are later able to look back and go, ‘ah ha, so that was what that was all about!’. And while I may have had the idea, the notion then, that I always wanted Beinspired to be about more than just me, it’s taken it’s time to unfold to the extent that I’d stopped even imagining it.

But seeds that are planted, albeit some time ago, and that are tendered will, one day, potentially grow, and what they grow into, well who knows; look at Jack and his magic beans! So the seeds are growing in their own way and at their own pace, and perhaps it’s too early, I don’t know, but Beinspired is just starting to have a little bit more of its own voice, one that talks of serving the community and raising consciousness through teaching and sharing yoga and Reiki and through charitable projects and giving back to the island and to the land. 

Which brings me back to social media, because if there is one ‘good’ thing that social media offers, is the opportunity to bring together community, to share community based projects and events, which might help to bring together like minded people for the greater good of humanity and our evolution on this beautiful planet we call home. This left me in a quandary.

So I’ve tried to put into practice what I can (with my current level of understanding of the philosophy) of Chapter 2, verse 33 of the Yoga Sutras and ‘when we find ourselves disturbed/unsure of what to do, not sure of the best way forward, try and look at it from the other perspective’, which has found me considering the ‘goodness’ of social media and the benefits it offers. 

This has helped me to get myself out of the way a little and to be reminded that there is always another way of seeing things, to the extent that we might consider what might happen if we don’t do it, compared to what might happen if we do, do it. If we are stuck in an attitude of fear or resentment, for example, then we are asked to positively cultivate the opposite, to see this from a different perspective.

I’ve found this process extremely helpful to help me let go of my fixed idea about something, so that I might see both sides of the argument. Ultimately we all have a choice, that is the important thing, and over time our spiritual practice may help us to become increasingly conscious of the choices and impact of the decisions that we make – so we might ask ourselves, are we feeding something with good energy or bad energy and what might be the implications of this? It reminds me of mirrors, what we put out is reflected back at us. 

At Beinspired we have always intended and hoped to encourage a sense of community where people can discover, embrace and share their own uniqueness without fear of prejudice and have fun as they experience the healing and transformative nature of yoga and Reiki for themselves and never more so than now. If social media can help us to spread more love, joy and compassion out into the world then so be it, who am I to stand in the way of it! 

The way I now see it, Beinspired not being on Facebook will not stop others spending their time online, but it will mean that they cannot find out about us and that would be a shame. For Beinspired to have a voice it needs people who are willing to listen so I’m grateful to all of you who are already following us and thank you for hanging in there. We’re keen to let Beinspired speak for itself and look forward to connecting again soon.

 Plus, we’ve opened the blog up to comments in our quest to build more of our community and because sometimes we all have something that needs to be said, so please feel that you can leave your comments below, just appreciate that we’d like to keep the energy high and respectful too.