“Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile.”
Elizabeth Gilbert (From Ketut Liyer, the Balinese healer)
Do you believe in horoscopes?
I’m not sure myself, but I do know that I’m the very definition of a Gemini. Meaning: my mood swings are giving me whiplash!
I like to keep things in their place: nice and neat. My life is very organised and when I don’t have all the strings tied up the way I want to, I find I am a wee bit lost.
Then there’s this other part of me that likes to play: just let things be as they may and see what happens.
I struggled with these polar-opposites of being very strict with myself and being a total freedom lover for quite some time, because I felt like I didn’t know who I was. I was really confused.
Then I started doing yoga a few years ago.
With yoga, it’s all about balance: finding places to lift and places to ground down. This goes for both the physical, but also for the mental and spiritual.
Some people take yoga just as a great workout, and it is, of course. For many of us it’s also a way of life. Yoga has given me an opportunity to find freedom within the form. The hour a day I spend on the mat, gives me an hour I spent on myself: I feel better physically, but also strong mentally. The more yoga I do, the more balance I find. I can do more, but I do it not because I have had to count out the repetitions, but because I choose to listen to the metronome of my breath. I do the poses, but I take the liberty to play around within them. I try to take it all into my day-to-day.
I’m still a complete control freak. I love being organised. I like to keep things in their place.
But I also like to splash in puddles in my pink salamander wellies, love to laugh and make huge messes all around.
It’s who I am. And it’s more than okay.