Here I am in my beehive style bangalow in Goa, India on my break between classes and lectures of a yoga teacher training course I decided to take.
When I signed up for this, I thought I knew what I was doing. I was looking for some meditation time, some yoga practice and more spiritual knowledge I guess. I was looking for a place and time and especially the means I guess to help me center myself, bring me back to my innerself, hoping it would help me in my journey and this constant struggle I've been going through trying to figure out what I want and what is happiness.
I'm just over a week into the course (which lasts 4 weeks) and so far all I found was pain! And a frog in my room...
Jokes apart, I think I might have taken a step way too big for my legs coming here. And even though yoga is all about acceptance - I will not lie, I'm seriously struggling.
For starters I'm physically not fit enough for this, which doesn't help because I get easily exhausted and sore. On top of that the daily meditation, breathing exercises and asana practices are having much more powerful effects on me that I would have ever dreamed of. And more often than I wish, I find myself very emotionally unstable and frustrated.
So as we finished the morning practices and lectures today I came back to my room thinking whether or not this really made sense. When I took off all I was looking for was a chance to step away from the hectic life I was leading, relax and enjoy myself. And I thought this course would help me lead into that direction.
But it does not seem to be doing that at all, especially the relaxing part of it!!!
It is however taking me further down that very slow and painful path of self discovery - and in an unvelievably high speed.
And here is one of my first realizations.
I thought that by just escaping the lifestyle and environment I was living in, I would automatically get rid of most of the things that bothered me.
But it's not that simple.
True that I don't have to care now about what is happening to the FTSE indices and share prices of different companies. Nor does it ruim my day if some world leader made a negative statement about the economic outlook or a rating agency decided to donwgrade the sovereign risk profile of any south European countries.
I don't have to worry about if and how that can potentially impact the market and the company I worked for and have an agreed speech with top management about how to answer that question.
I don't have to care about ANY of these things that I believed were my sources of stress.
Yet, I still feel somehow stressed and tense. Biggest proof of that being that my neck and shoulders continue as stiff as they used to be when I was working in the office.
Now who can explain that?!?!?!
I've spent some time over the past couple of days thinking about it and I still don't have an answer.
Maybe we internalize the stress so much to the extent that it becomes usual to live under such circumstances. And when the "original" sources of stress disappear, we find new ones to replace them so that we can remain in a "comfortable" and well known place.
Or maybe we just have that stressfull characteristic innate to us.
I don't know.
All I know now is that things will not get sorted and better overnight as I had hoped it would.
And that getting out of our comfort zone - no matter how bad and stressfull that comfort zone may be - is extremely difficult.
And in this particular case also quite physically painful too!