Stronger than the push of the past
Is the pull of the future
Stronger than the pull of the future
Is the flow of the present 🙏🔥🧡🔥🙏
Here I am from last week birthday break in Kephalonia, as the morning sun rises, doing my classic 6-step Warrior flow on the seashore. For many years I taught the static warrior pose, which is the traditional Hatha Yoga method, but feeling the need to make things more interesting and challenging for students who’d been coming for years, we blossomed into flow sequences erupting out of the individual poses. This, of course, is the emphasis of ‘flow yoga’, the dominant theme on Instagram, due to its endless creative variations, which appeal to the Western preference for self-expression, rather than self-control. A yoga flow also expresses outwardly, what happens inwardly, within the yoga and meditation process, when our concentration becomes meditation, and our outer stillness becomes inner flow. There is a famous saying that the pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past. This means that whatever happened to us in the past, which we may be carrying in the present, we are still creating new futures all the time, and the pull of the future, reflected in present actions, will ultimately overcome the push of the past. We literally recreate ourselves every moment, although that isn’t to downplay the importance of facing our inner demons, which may limit our freedom of action to plant new seeds in the present. This future orientation is the focus of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, whilst Person Centred Counselling has tended to focus on facing the past. Focus, in yoga, is also a flow towards an object, which is, in a sense, always in the future. And yet the future is not the most powerful transformational force. When our focus becomes a flow, we feel a heightened engagement in the here and now, which takes us beyond our dreams, into a timeless moment, which is ever surprising and ever new.
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