enlightenment

Regardless if you just do yoga or take a yoga teacher training, enlightenment is such a personal journey and it will mean different things to different people depending on their age, culture, heritage, values and life experiences. 

Enlightenment is a process of personal growth and change. It’s about making changes for your emotional wellbeing from the inside out and not the outside in. This is extremely difficult to do in the age of immediate gratification, distraction and abundance. 

In cities around the world London, Greece,  Bali, Thailand, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, New Zealand, Hawaii, enlightenment is about acknowledging where you have come from, letting go and then practicing new habits and ways to live a happy life, which can only be determined by me and no one else.

YTT: Helped

Doing this blog has helped me learn that I have been grieving for most of my life. 

I have been comparing myself to others, like my parents, sisters and other people my age. I have been keeping a running list of all my shortcomings, failures and everything. “When we grieve, it’s not over what happened, we grieve what didn’t happen”. 

YTT: Victimhood

Searching for ways to deal with my emotional pain I realize now that I took a place at the table of victimhood. There I sat nursing my emotional pain and suffering with alcohol and terrible eating.

I was able to prolong my seat at the table by blaming my parents and the way they raised me. Thinking its  to tell them that I was a child that needed more from them like extra hugs and cuddle, more praise, more encouragement and just more of everything. 

I told them that as a child I suffered from anxiety and wondered why it was never caught.

YTT: Marriage

Marriage was another venue I used to extend my stay at the victim table. I was too busy being the doting wife and taking care of his needs, wants and desires which helped me to never address what I wanted. 

Once this grew tiresome resentment popped up to carry me the rest of the way home. I had thoughts like, ” why can’t he make good money so I don’t have to work? My dad said I was special so doesn’t that mean my husband is supposed to take care of all my financial needs??”

Oh, for shit sakes, what bullshit! I found it “easier to hold someone else or something else responsible for my pain than to take responsibility for ending my own victimhood.” 

On a side note, the reader needs to know that I do intend to apologize to my parents, they did the best they could with the tools that they had at the time and their intentions were never to harm me in any way. I now know that, “We can’t erase the pain, but we are free to accept who we are and what has been done to us, and move on”. 

YTT: Moving On

Enlightenment to me means moving on, knowing that actually I am strong, resilient and resourceful.

Enlightenment means leaning into whatever it is that I create from here on in, “This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. 

Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you’re most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go”. 

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