If you are like me, when you think of calm and stillness, you may not immediately associate yourself with those terms. However, as a yoga teacher and a yoga teacher trainer, others often associate me with those terms. Calm and stillness are concepts that I feel I am constantly being directed back to and are most likely why I have had a 20+-year love affair with yoga.
Calm is being able to take a breath before blowing up. It’s being able to assess and pause before jumping to a conclusion. It is truly cultivating the ability to respond to what is happening in our lives rather than mindlessly reacting to it. This takes not only awareness, but can also require practice.
To enable calm, we must create stillness. Stillness provides the pause in which to assess. It also creates space- an expansion within- so that we can stretch into the person we want to be.
Many of our lifestyle choices work against stillness. In so many ways, we are training our minds into distractability and our bodies into anxiety. And from this, we feel resistance to stillness because it is out of the cultural norm and the expectation to always be doing, but also because in stillness there is space to see what we have been distracting ourselves from for so long. Busyness becomes a way for us to not feel just how overwhelmed, anxious, not-good-enough we may feel in our lives and in ourselves. Maintainting the busy to avoid that in itself is exhausting and anxiety provoking.
Stillness doesn’t mean a lack of progress. It is a way for us to allow things to settle; to create clarity. Stillness enables us to open up space in which we can become more creative, more authentic, more brave and more of who we want to be. It creates the space for a path toward progress.
I cannot tell you how many times the universe has reminded me that in order to do more, I must actually do less. To achieve this, we may need to cleanse our minds, bodies, and lives of the things that are keeping us in stress response. That may mean lightening up our diets and adding in more nutrient-rich foods; it may mean lightening our workload and saying no more often; it may mean lightening our insane amount of doing and to just come into being for a bit.
As we are moving into warmer weather, now is the perfect time to spring clean your life and add in more stillness which can lead to more calm. Whatever that looks like for you. Take some time this week to nourish yourself with more stillness.
I will be practicing right along with you as I reset my patterns by BEING more. Reach out to find out how you can join a group to have support as you reset and create space as well.
Chat again soon,
k
I love this!!! I look forward to reading your blogs when they come up in my Gmail. I would love to try yoga in a group setting. I am definitely a beginner. Do you teach? And, if so where?
I live in Marion, AR. It is about 10 minutes from Memphis. I would love to find a place to “Be Still and Know”.
Thank you in advance for your response!
Hannah Martin
Hey, Hannah! Right now I only do private yoga therapy, but I highly recommend Delta Groove Yoga in Midtown Memphis. They have amazing instructors and a wide variety of classes.
Love this 💚 my favorite quote from Eckhart Tolle which reads, “When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.” 🙏🏼✨