Antidote to competitiveness..

Disclaimer: sports can be enjoyed with or without wine..

I hope we’re all excited about the England football game today.. ((-: I could pretend to be an avid fan but I don’t think I’d fool anyone. But I mention it for a reason, which I’ll get back to.

I wanted to give a bit more detail on my recent kind of rename, ‘Antidote yoga’. It just came to me recently, at some random point, on some random day, that yoga really is the antidote to EVERYTHING. And I say this from the perspective of someone who of course has ups and downs with it and has plenty of days where I think, ‘yoga? I just can’t be arsed’! But when I have those times, it’s rarely if ever, the practice of yoga that I actually hate, but probably something else that has bothered me or put me on edge. And of course it’s those occasions when I need it most.

In so many situations, confronted with people displaying all manner of human emotions - anger, sadness, frustration, envy etc, I find myself thinking ‘Man, you could really do with some yoga!’ I’m thinking it now about the drivers blaring their horns on the road outside..

And when I had that lightbulb ‘antidote’ moment recently, without even needing to think about it, and within about 5 minutes, I’d written over 20 ideas that yoga can be a solution to. And I’m still adding to the list.

So for today, in honour of the England team (and Germany of course), I’d like to raise the idea of yoga being the antidote to competitiveness..

 I don’t mean there should never be any competition in life, and actually I’m not much of a fan of the ‘Don’t worry darling, it’s only about taking part’ school of thought.

But I mean in a much broader sense, a more ‘hippyish’ one if you like.  

Yoga, (and here I go again, by this I DON’T mean doing handstands or contorting yourself into a pretzel shape), connects us to our inner, deeper self. The physical poses are simply a sustained position from which to WITNESS THE MIND. The practice is meant to give us the ability to understand ourselves and the motivations for our actions, (not to make us more flexible or stronger - which can be seen as a coincidental side effect). 

And the more we observe the mind and work our way to being able to switch it off, or at least pause it from circulating all the crap that society, background etc has us thinking, the more we start to acknowledge, ‘well hey, if I’m feeling this, if my body/mind are like this, if I have this deep, inner state of awareness, then just maybe every other human is the same…?’

We can win the race, the promotion etc, but we can be humble, kind and compassionate about it. We can ‘lose’ or ‘fail’ but be gracious. We have a powerful capacity to be able to congratulate someone’s successes while also sympathising with another person’s difficulties or sadness. I was sorry for France losing their game yesterday, but it didn’t stop me also being pleased for Switzerland. 

We can see someone next to us in a yoga class doing what we think is a more ‘advanced’ version of the posture, and we can breathe deeply and remember that there’s no such thing, and that there’s no need to strive desperately to create a shape that is simply beyond our genetic, structural capacities! 

Here’s a few more classic human examples:

“She’s better than me because she has thinner thighs”

“He has so many instagram followers; I’m obviously not as good as him.”

“She has more money and a nice house, she must be happier than me.”

Ridiculous right?

With regular continued practice, yoga helps us to see that what we often think we’re competing with is actually just our mind telling us utter nonsense. ((-;

So on that note, I’m off to non-competitively cheer on England!