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Kino's Yogi Assignment Blog

Integrating Practice with Life

by Kino MacGregor

It’s easy to seem peaceful in the quiet cave of your own mind. It’s much harder to face the test of integrating your learning with your life. No matter how peacefully you might leave your daily meditation or yoga practice, there is nothing like a seemingly callous or thoughtless comment from a friend to trigger the stickiest habitual patterns.

Know that in moments when your emotions seem larger that you, there is the real meat of personal transformation. If you practice regularly you will see that no emotion, no thought pattern, no physical condition has power over you. If you run or fight, you create more of the suffering that you desperately want to escape. What you work with in each yoga practice or meditation is the strength it takes to maintain your equanimity in the face of the vicissitudes of life.

It is easy to write and read about these things and harder yet to live them. You might find yourself having days of constant connection and then days of reactivity where you are embroiled in the messiness of interpersonal relations. You mind find yourself sometimes reaching a state where your presence is a gift to those around you and then moments later acting out a juvenile pattern. It’s all part of a greater process.

If you feel drawn to the deep inner work of yoga, begin it now. Who you are matters to everyone in your life, to your loved ones, to the people at the coffee shops, at the airports, and in the traffic jams.

Your realization matters on so many levels. There is a world of deep connection and joy available to you right now. It starts with your experience and never ends. It is infinite. Just like you. Just like our connections.