Calm or Chaos… You Choose
As what’s called a “boutique fitness” owner, I get countless emails from marketing and studio growth companies this time of year. All of which are offering up their 10, no-fail ways to attract more students during the big New Years resolution rush. Historically, the month of January is when businesses like ours make the big bucks. In fact, you often need that January influx in order to recover from a slow holiday season. These companies recommend we push the idea of working off “extra holiday weight,” or urging you to “break those bad habits that no longer serve you,” as the new year dawns.
Winter is a mere 11 days old, and the powers that be are trying to convince you that the time is ripe to reinvent yourself.
Well, not me. Spring is the time for unfolding, ripening and growth. But winter? No, she’s quiet. She’s urging you to turn inwards, to settle in and soften. The trees are dormant, the animals are hunkering down and cold winds encourage us to cozy up inside. Mother Nature has no use for the Gregorian calendar, and internally, neither do I.
You won’t catch me urging you to make a list of all the things you think you need to change about yourself as a way to set big resolutions. I’m not going to try to convince you that buying a pass at the studio is the way to start your new year off right. Might it make the studio few extra dollars? Sure. Would it be Yogic? Not in the slightest.
Yoga is not here to tell you you need fixing. Yoga is not about making lists of the things others might consider faults. And Yoga definitely could care less about how many desserts you’ve eaten over the last few weeks.
Yoga urges us to turn inward, just as Mother Nature does this time of year. To me, Yoga is quiet, just like winter.
I was having a conversation with a student the other day about what the “goal” of Yoga is, so to speak, and I found myself finally able to define it in a way that made sense. Well, at least to me.
Yoga is about extending the space between. The space between an occurrence and our reactivity to it. The space between the all consuming negative thoughts that run roughshod in our heads. It’s the quiet spaciousness that you might feel when you come out of savasana; that moment when you turn to your side, cradle your head in your arm and draw your knees up a bit. It’s the softness you feel in your face when you first come up to seated, right after a nurturing practice. Those moments aren’t big and flashy. They are quiet and calm.
Just like winter.
Turning Inward
You’ve heard me talk about the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, as well as the Eight Limbs of Yoga before in my blog posts and beyond. We’ve discussed some of the first two limbs, the yamas and niyamas, as well as the third and fourth, asana & pranayama before, but it’s the fifth limb, pratyahara, that I think really shines in winter.
As you may know, any concept in Yoga can be expounded upon for lifetimes and still never be fully fleshed out. There are countless ways to dissect this subject, but I want to keep things simple and approachable, so that you can easily pull pratyahara into your own practice.
Pratyahara is the practice of pulling away from the external and moving towards the internal. In the eight limbs, it’s the bridge between the more physical and outward aspects of the practice, to the deeper, more challenging inner workings of the mind. It’s where we begin to get quiet.
The word is most often translated as “sense withdrawal,” but I recently read it to mean “the gathering towards,” and I love the softness surrounding that definition. Ultimately this stage of the practice is about withdrawing our senses from external stimulation. A simple example is the moment in time when you smell your favorite treat and what follows after. Can you merely enjoy the scent, and move on, or must you seek out and immediately consume said treat? It’s the recognition of how our senses drive us in our lives.
Stick With Me
Like the Yoga Sutra, the Upanishads are a collection of ancient, yet highly relevant, texts that help us navigate the path of Yoga. The word Upanishad means “to sit nearby” and it refers to sitting by the feet of ones teacher to receive their infinite knowledge. I’ve also heard it said that it refers to how the Upanishads are a body of work that are tacked on to the Vedas, which are the very foundational texts of Yoga. As if the Upanishads are sitting nearby to the Vedas. Another widely expounded upon text is the Bhagavad Gita, which is essentially an excerpt of the Mahabharata, an epic tale of two families at war.
Side Note: If I had to pick a favorite traditional Yogic text, it would be the Upanishads, and more specifically Eknath Easwaran’s translation, which just lights me up inside. I’ve set the goal to read each Upanishad 108 times, and while I have a long way to go, I love making a little hatch mark on the starting page of each one as I slowly make my way.
Second side note: All yogic texts written in Sanskrit require translation, and more importantly, commentary, in order to fully understand their meaning. These texts were written long before a time when paper was readily available, and as such, were written in short form meant to be orally passed from teacher to student. A teacher might spend hours, days, even decades, explaining the meaning behind three Sanskrit words that had been artfully strung together a millennia ago. So it’s important to know that the particular translation you might choose to explore may give an entirely different example than the ones I’ve read. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is Yoga is up for interpretation. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
Both the Bhagavad Gita and the Katha Upanishad give one of the most well known explanations of the concept of pratyahara, that of the charioteer, the reins and the horses. You, my friend, are the charioteer, your mind, the reins, and your senses (led by your ego), the horses. Remember, you are not your mind, it is but an aspect of your being. You are the witness of it all. Ultimately as the one holding the reins, you are in charge of where you end up on this journey. But unfortunately most of us don’t know how to control the reins, and so we end up on a wild ride at the mercy of the beasts that are our senses. They gallop around in search of greener pastures and good grazing and we get tossed about in the back, as if there’s nothing we can do about it.
But There Is…
We must learn to manage our senses in order to bring them into submission. And while submission might seem like an aggressive word, it really is what must happen in order to enjoy a more peaceful path through life. Do you want to sit there screaming at the top of your lungs as you attempt to wrangle the reins, or do you want to sit back and enjoy the ride? The Universe is totally neutral, she has no opinion on whether you choose chaos or calm, she’ll support you either way. But the important thing to remember is, you get to choose. Chaos or calm. What will it be?
In my opinion, flashy new years resolutions represent chaos, while honoring the inward nature of winter represents calm. Yes, you can make lists of how you could be better, and lay out a plan of action to improve. Ultimately all of those things would be driven by feeding your senses and your ego. We may not see it like that, because our culture will tell us they are the right thing to do. Maybe they are, I cannot decide that for anyone. But what I most often see happening, is that we are driven, not necessarily to feel better, but to be better, and we judge that based on what the world around us defines as better.
Perhaps you could sit with yourself and acknowledge the vast, mystical being that you are? Instead of focusing on change, could you spend time reflecting on all that went right in 2024. All the growth that naturally happened, simply because your inner being quietly led you from one junction to the next. I feel confident in saying that most, if not all, of your biggest moments, the ones that actually matter in the scheme of your life, happened naturally, without major effort. It was the small nudges that led you to the quiet changes that brought you to the moment where you realized that something had fundamentally shifted for you.
For me, it’s the quiet moment where I realize I didn’t react in the same way I used to. That time when I was more comfortable, even just for a few extra breaths, admitting that I was wrong. Or the moment when I could comfortably say that I wouldn’t apologize when I’d done nothing wrong, because I no longer needed to acquiesce in order to ensure someone else still loved me. Those are the moments that matter. Did I get annoyed at countless stop signs when I thought someone else went when it was my turn? You bet. But right now, as I ease myself into 2025, I’m not thinking about how I could improve myself, or how many new memberships I need to keep the studio afloat. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. What I’m thinking about is how much more space I allowed myself this past year. And how maybe, just maybe, I can encourage you to do the same.
Let this be a time of softening. A time of turning inward to know yourself better. That doesn’t mean analyzing your faults, it means acknowledging your triumphs. Move away from the flashy messaging that delights your senses and encourages your ego to keep improving, and along with it, keep consuming. There will be sales to entice you, and gym memberships discounted and designed to draw you in their doors.
But this year, my wish for you, is that the only doors you let yourself be drawn in, are the ones that lead you to your higher self. They aren’t right in front of you dazzling you with shiny promises, they are inside, quietly waiting for the moment that you decide to enter.
My friend, let this be the time, let this be the year, that you head inside.