To Keep You In The Present Moment

You can also use your run as a meditation and to practice mindfulness. Being dehydrated can prevent you from having a good run. Your energy gets bogged down and you slow down as a result. It’s also a great way to keep you in the present moment. Simply take in as much detail as you can, focus on your breath, connect with your surroundings, listen to sounds, and feel your entire body working in unison with the environment. Nidra means sleep. It’s a meditation you can do lying down, like Savasana. You release tension and go into a state of relaxed present awareness. It is one of my favorite things to do the night before I go for a run. When in doubt, remember who you are. For Halloween when I was in the second grade, I dressed up as a ballerina. I was twirling around on the grass when my teacher told me to stop it because I was too ungraceful.

Lamb To The Slaughter

Anytime I heard the word grace after that, I knew that whatever it was, I didn’t have it. It took some unlearning to discover what grace truly meant. When we buy into others’ beliefs about what we can and can’t do, we prevent ourselves from healing, growing, and living our best life. The same goes for when we try to apply our ideals onto what we think someone else should be doing. Focusing on what someone else believes about us creates blind spots that keep us from seeing our true oneness and grace. It causes us to suffer. We need to have compassion for others and ourselves so we can let grace in. Compassion means you are aware of the suffering of others. It means being aware of your internal pain and having a desire to understand it. Grace differs from resilience in that resilience is something we acquire and grace is something we let in. It grows into a skill set that improves and strengthens over a long period of time. The more resilient you are, the easier it is to be gracious.

There's Nothing Like A Social Disease

Grace, on the other hand, is the ability to feel loved just as we are, so we can love others just as they are. Before I got kicked out of catechism class, I was taught that there are two types of grace. One was Sanctifying grace, and the other was Actual grace. Actual grace is spontaneous. Both can provide inspiration, insight, or the confidence to act. In essence, Grace is to be radically loved. It was much easier to practice compassion toward others than to have compassion for myself. I became very good at helping others hold their pain and suffering, but I neglected my own. I became good at helping other people solve their problems while not being honest about my own. Determine whether they nourish or deplete you and know when it’s time to move on. It’s difficult to break up with friends or family who aren’t on the same healing path. Relationships that no longer serve you, however, don’t always have to end on bad terms or a breakup.

Too Far Gone

Some of your people may be inspired by your growth and decide to do some internal work themselves. Other times, you need to put space between yourself and those you’ve outgrown. We are either nourishing ourselves with prana or depleting ourselves of prana. Relationships that serve your highest good make you feel supported, empowered, and inspired. These are prana filling. They’re like adding water to a glass. Relationships that leave you tired, uninspired, and a little bit used are prana depleting, like water getting siphoned out of a glass. We’ve all experienced relationships ending, and we often find ways to avoid doing the hard things that need to be done. We’ll ghost people or pretend to be busy so that we don’t have to engage. We do what we need to do to survive energetically. We must be mindful of our energy because anything can become a source of depletion. What’s medicine for one is poison for another. Some relationships both nourish and deplete your prana, and that is especially difficult when it happens in a romantic relationship. He was concerned about our livelihood and I was concerned about our fundamental communication issues and the fact that he had no spiritual practice. All concerns from both parties were equally important. We were on two completely different paths. Instead of giving our relationship space and acknowledging our pain, I became reactive and closed myself off. People are afraid that receiving grace and compassion when we make mistakes will stop us from improving and growing. That is rarely the case. We can be radically honest with ourselves and still be in a state of power. Just be honest with yourself, today. I resented that I was on the spiritual path and Torry wasn’t. I believed if he was on the spiritual path, he wouldn’t be so worried about us potentially losing our home. This only caused him more stress. I sent invites to his calendar for yoga classes, workshops, and resources for therapy. But all he could see was that I was not happy. The kind where you talk in circles, repeating the same things because neither of you is listening. You can’t force anyone to be spiritual, just like you can’t force anyone to, say, like a particular ice cream flavor. If you want to change someone’s mind, you can either be an ambassador or a recruit. Their authentic approval creates a natural curiosity within you and maybe you try this new flavor. Recruits are militant, like my probation officer, a Korean war vet. A recruit will lecture you about how every single flavor of ice cream you’ve tried in your life was wrong. This flavor is the one you’ve been missing, and your life will forever be incomplete without it. I was a recruit, and just for the record, recruits won’t listen to whatever you have to say. That’s not the case.