Personal Growth – Yoga as Groundwork for Life’s Challenges

The new super foods for the body and mind are challenges. They are the fine line between remaining safe and stepping outside the comfort of your security zone.

Sometimes what one believes to be security can be an illusion, and only truly comes from within. Yoga teaches us how to deal with challenges, as well as to build up our physical and mental strength. You will get the opportunity to build on your inner strength by attending a yoga instructor training. It is a very effective way to establish new healthy yogic ways of living like a daily yoga self practice, healthy eating and healthy living habits. It is a fantastic way to do the groundwork for your new lifestyle, a lifestyle where you will see challenges as opportunities for personal growth instead of problems, failures and obstacles.

An instructor training for yoga is NOT going to be easy. In fact, Why not go as far as to say that it stands as one of the most challenging programs for personal growth. Also, the most wonderful learning experiences and they are life-changing too.

As you move and grow with your yoga practice and sharing yoga with others, you will find many things that you are not going to be used to. From being fatigued and sore, struggling with your inner critical voice, waking up early, practicing when you do not feel like it, and learning and educating those who may have an entirely different outlook on life than you do. There will be many other varying ways of ‘being. You may at times feel frustrated and uncomfortable when things are outside your comfort zone. You may feel unhappy, or become resentful. However, as time progresses, you will learn that the feelings and thoughts which are rising to the surface are not the real you or have anything to do with where you are or other people. They will merely be imprints formed during your lifetime, the ones buried deep beneath thick layers. The more you breath and move with awareness the more they will disintegrate.

Growth Happens Outside Of The Comfort Zone

Over the years with a consistent yoga practice, the imprints, your subconscious psychosomatic pattens will be broken down. It does not typically occur when you are in your comfort zone. When you are in your daily routine in your home, or within society, it can encourage hate, judgmental thinking, competition, and wall-building to protect yourself. A daily yoga practice will accelerate the process of being able to face things which do not usually come up, and gradually enable you to release them.

The place where we learn and grow are on the outskirts of our zone of comfort. If we consider our difficulties as obstacles instead of opportunities, and never took any risks, we are only asking for more and more suffering. We get stuck in our all-to-familiar patterns, go around and around, never really looking outside our self-imposed confines to see if there is anything else to experience.

Day by day our feeling of balance can fluctuate. It would be the perfect day if we woke up in the morning and knew we had arrived at balance. Sadly, it is not a static thing. There will always be many people and events which are testing our balance in our day-to-day lives, but these give us an opportunity for growth. We should challenge ourselves daily and learn to grow.

We Are Hardwired For Safety

Everyone wants to stay safe, it is innate in all of us, our survival instinct, but that does not mean we have to cling on for our lives!
Richard Bach wrote a book called Illusions, which is a tale about animals which clung on tightly to rocks and twigs at the bottom of a river because their way of life was to hang on and resist against the strong current. They had been taught this from birth, and it was what they all did. One of the creatures got fed up with hanging on…

“Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.”

When challenges present themselves, we need to be courageous, even if it means stepping outside of our comfort zone to try something different and believe that it is a part of the journey

Redefine How You See Yourself

We can doubt our ability to deal with challenges and feel stressed at the fear of the unknown. Sometimes, because we may not have thought things through properly, we can feel defeated. Why is this? It is because our perception of our abilities is limited. There for we must redefine how we look at yourself. We cannot be defined by the exterior world, the past or other people’s opinions.

A challenge, on the face of it, might seem much bigger than we are. For example, a successfully large corporation did not become the huge success it is without facing difficulties and many challenges.

We would never move very far forward or achieve our goals and dreams if we gave up each time a challenge cropped up. Ashtanga Yoga or scenario has been spinning around your head, but suddenly you realize it is not real. Maybe it was your past creeping back into the present, or that old record we play over and over each time we feel we are not in control.

We have a choice, either we continue doing the same thing over and over, which produces the same result, or we can change things and do it differently. Your present can be empowered by using your past. At times, we need to take a step back, and take a good look at ourselves from a distance, and be thankful for this understanding. As our limiting behavior pattern floats up to the surface, we can kick its butt! Find a different way to see things. Sometimes we have to come up with creative ways to deal with  problems. Keep in mind the phrase ‘if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ You will appreciate the thing you are working hard for if you do.

Grow Through Challenges – Inspire Others

Blessings in disguise always come from challenges which we overcome, have you noticed that? Perhaps it give us the chance to become healthier while we release our inner strength? There are always choices.

So, for example, if you had a goal to do your yoga self practice each morning, using language like ‘I can’t promise – I hope – I’m not sure – I am able, and I will do my best,’ and many excuses will float to the top as a protection mechanism. You have placed doubt on your ability, to begin with before you have even started. One part doesn’t believe you can do it; the other is hanging on. Your memories, make an appearance and before you know it, the deal is sealed – you fail! You have just become a self-fulfilled prophecy.

Behavior and attitude are created by you alone, not by the circumstances which you find yourself in. There are always choices. A regular yoga practice will cultivate the mental strength and consciousness needed to  better deal with and learn from life’s hardship and sufferings. You can see the blessing you have been given and use the experience as a chance to motivate and inspire other people who may be going through the same thing.

Whenever you experience growth of a personal nature, others around you are helped by you in some way.
The saying ‘the greater the struggle we have in our lives, the greater the victory’’, and it is why we have challenges in our lives; we learn from it which gives our achievements real value and provides us with the chance to rise and learn. A greater feeling of success and joy will be gained the more we overcome.

Website: http://www.ashtangayoganicaragua.com/