I spent my drive out to Colorado in the fall listening to the podcast You’re Wrong About. If you haven’t listened, the idea is this: in each episode the hosts reconsider a zeitgeist moment from the past with the 20/20 vision that only comes from hindsight. So, like, they’ve explored the McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case, Tom Cruise on Oprah’s Couch, The Chicks vs. The Iraq War, etc. It’s enjoyable in the same way that healthy junk food is.
What so often comes out of these reconsiderations is that our memory is just wrong or incomplete, but even more than that is how narrow our perspectives were in the past.
This leads me to an idea from yoga that I’ve shared in class this month: Ksema (sounds like: shame-uh). Ksema means to review. We review poses, review yoga teachings, review experiences in our life. And when we do, we see things from a new vantage point because we’ve changed.
In my own practice, I’ve found that each time I return to my philosophy studies or even the same practice from one of my teachers, I hear something I never heard before. This past month, while practicing Extended Side Angle Pose (Utthita Parsvakonasana), I had that experience of hearing a cue I’d heard many times before but this time it landed and I felt a stretch in my body I had never quite experienced before.
This is the magic of yoga and life. There is a constant revealing if we are open to it.
After being in lockdown for the last few years, it feels like not much in my life has changed and also like everything has changed. I’ve changed. You’ve changed. We emerge as changed people in a changed world. As we step into familiar patterns, we see it from this new vantage point.
In those areas in your life where you feel like you’re repeating a pattern, how have you changed?
Recent Comments