A sixth sense. Trusting your gut. Reading a room. Feeling the vibes. Red flags when someone's behaviours don't sit right with you. We've all had these feelings. Dogs have it in bucket loads. Intuition is something we have in varying degrees.
I remember one of my teachers Dave Charlton talking about this 20 years ago when I was training to be a yoga teacher. I felt at the time a bit intimidated that he knew so much about us students from the way we moved.
Over time I feel as a yogi, as I've got older and through some difficult experiences, my intuition has grown. How people practice, where they position mats and how people move their bodies in class can all speak a lot about a persons character. Maybe a bit about what's going on for them too.
Even how you breathe is an expression of yourself.
This blog is a follow on from last week, where I spoke about being a Yoga Warrior and your personal boundaries both on and off the mat. How The Bhagavad Gita says yoga is 'the journey of the self, through the self to the self'. How we learn to develop our own protective field.
It's a huge journey of self discovery, which I'm ever more aware of. In the end it's all down to us. We all have to become our own yoga teacher.
This is a really great piece from Yoga Journal about the difference between instinct and intuition.
Courtney Denelle writes, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Remember who you are and immediately you will know what to do."
Within the Gita, our instincts are regarded as a collective hard drive of unresolved emotional memories that anchor us to traumas from past events and anxieties about the future (BG 18:16-26).
Unlike instinct, intuition has no future and no past. It lives fully in this very instant. It’s plugged into a vast network that is leaps and bounds beyond emotionally reactive responses, and because of this, is truly trustworthy in laying the bricks along the path of our dharma. Listening to the voice of our intuition is coming home to a place we never left.
Here's the rest of the piece. https://yogainternational.com/article/view/instinct-vs.-intuition-whats-the-difference/
Back to Warrior 2 Pose which sets us up to be connected to the past, look forward to the future but remain present to the moment. YET it teaches we need to have that inner strength and warrior vigour to go forward with our Dharma (duty). That applies when your get on your yoga mat even with very familiar yoga poses.
But there are also important lessons to learn off the mat too, in how we respond to injury, illness or in fact any other 'obstacle' that life throws in our direction. Especially in challenging times.
At the end of the day its down to us.
Namaste.
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