Please return your seat to its upright soulful position

After about a half a year of introspection mixed with a shift in intention after going through yoga teacher training, I recently decided to unplug and get away from my environment for a few days to just “sit with myself.”  As a nation of stimulus addicts, we’re often unaware of how promiscuous we are with our senses in an effort to avoid being with ourselves.   Televisions, computers, smartphones, iPads, DVRs have invaded our consciousness within the last decade with such vigor that it has become quite unsettling.

These technological means we use to ‘distract’ ourselves have created a cycle of addiction like caffeine, and we no longer know how to just ‘be.’  We aren’t comfortable in our own company alone.  In fact, when we do have everything turned off, we fill the void with an incessant inner monologue that can very quickly spin us up into a state of fear.

So, I got away from the electromagnetic storm of the city, and found myself in a remote town in the north Georgia mountains  with no telephone, no television, no stereo.  Just quiet and me.  

I’ll have to admit that while I’m not a huge TV watcher or gamer, it was a bit unsettling at first to feel so disconnected. That didn’t last long.  Within several hours, I felt the edgy vibration of over-stimulation begin to subside, and I began to enjoy a new vibration of being.

I sat in a vast expanse of grass and just looked, listened, and felt.  And, then there was my inner roommate.  Rumi’s poem, This Being Human is a Guest House, made much more sense when it was just me in the middle of nowhere.   I became acutely aware of the roommate that resides within me — separate from me — whose eyes I often unconsciously see through, live through.  I really started to see that this roommate, the thought churner, was not me.  At one point, I literally sunk back into my seat on the porch at this epiphany.  And, at the same time, I felt myself sink back into the seat of myself — looking outward from a different viewpoint.

Instead of losing myself inside the latest episode of “my life,” I could see — no I could feel — that I was not inside the movie, but watching it.  And I was watching more than the movie.  It felt more like I was sitting on the back of a bus and the movie was just part of the landscape, playing on a tiny screen way in the front of the bus, and I was just along for the ride.

My mini episode of cribs unplugged only lasted three days, but it was long enough for me to realize that the backseat of my soul bus has always been there and is always accessible.

Hop on your own mystery tour.

Namaste.

– Charmed Yogi

 

Photo Credit: Joshua David Bau