Spring clean your mental inbox

On Sunday I did some things that we always say we are going to do but very rarely do…

-              I went through my fridge and threw away all the sauce bottles with dregs in it (that most were out of date 🫣)

-              I went through my bathroom cupboard and chucked out all the face creams with little to no cream left in them that had all gone yellow anyway

-              I went through my sock drawer and chucked out all the socks that had not elastic left in them (… most of them)

And each time I kept thinking to myself ‘Why do I hold on to this shit?!’ 

Well, I have no answers on this conundrum, sorry!

But what I do have is a reflection on yoga (because everything comes back to yoga!). 

This collecting that we do of unnecessary things that weigh us down- we do this with thoughts too. They reckon (who is they? No idea!) that 90% of our thoughts are repetitive… NINETY PERCENT! (We are the most underused computer when you think about it). So if our thoughts are repetitive, lets make them valuable ones, not the rubbish that my brain kicks up on the regular (like a memory of a weird yellow outfit that I wore on a ship to Germany in 1986- why do I think about that?!).

Our yoga mat can be a place where we do some mental – spring cleaning- and let me tell you my brain needs it more than my bathroom cupboard and that is saying something!

In the yoga sutras, Patanjali tells us that yoga helps us to still the fluctuations of the mind-

Yogaḥ citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ

We can process energy (emotions), we can sift through our thoughts, we can become the observer. In doing that, we can create a bit of space between us, the stimulus, and the thought- and in that space we get to choose what is staying in the brain-cupboard and what is out of date and no longer useful. 

What we must remember, is that we are not our thoughts. We are the one thinking them! 

The more that we observe our thoughts in this space between stimulus and response, with a sense of non-attachment (aparigraha), the wider this space becomes, and so too does our tolerance. 

It’s a win win when you think about it. 

So if you have a monkey mind with 100 tabs open at once and struggle to process your feels, maybe the answer is to roll out your mat, and slowly over time, become the observer.