In my life with my adult children and my aging mother I am challenged to find a balance between offering my help and guiding, and letting go and trusting their path and that they will find their own unique way, their own solutions, their own svadharma (path).This ongoing challenge requires enquiry and reflection, to make the choices, situation by situation, day by day. Our practice (yoga, meditation, whatever brings you home to yourself) is a wonderful way to develop and embody this skill of finding the middle ground between too much striving and too much withdrawal … too much rajasic effort and too much tamasic inertia. Though our asana practice we can find a sense of the center. Bow poses, in many different forms, are a beautiful expression of balancing or effort and letting go … if a bow is strung too tight or too loose, the arrow will not fly. The bow is a beautiful metaphor … may we release the arrow of ‘right’ action in our lives.
“Will and surrender are paddles that steer the canoe we call the soul. The proper use of will is when we drift out of the current we stroke a little to the left or to the right to get back into the centre of the current that will take us … The current is larger than any one thing … The purpose of will is not to conquer the stream or bend it or carve out river banks but to help us find the current and in the moments we are in it it doesn’t make sense to ask under what power are we swimming because it is all one. The purpose of will is to return to alignment with everything greater than us, with the whole.” Mark Nepo
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