April 14, 2023
We spend a lot of time in our heads, make it a pleasant place to be đź§
I first started teaching yoga publicly in 2019. I was teaching a group of high schoolers, once a week. Most of them had never done yoga or meditated.
I thought about what would have served me in high school. What would I have wanted to know? What had I learned through yoga that could have made adolescence a little more easeful?
I began the class talking about thinking. I talked about focusing on sensation in our body (even though I hadn’t even started to dig into somatics and felt sense and coaching).
I talked about training our mind to our breath. I talked about paying attention to our thoughts.
“We have 60-70 thousand thoughts per day…” I stated, watching the student’s eager faces and observing them.
One boy looked at me with a mix of shock and sheepishness, which surprised me.
“…how did you know?” He asked out loud.
I had to suppress my laughter. That was it. That was the statement and the awareness and the whole thing I was trying to teach.
The thing I wish I’d learned in high school, the thing I wish we learned alongside trigonometry and chemistry and earth sciences.
He was asking me that because he genuinely thought his active thinking mind was a unique experience to him.
That I’d somehow found him out with my simple (and very true) statement.
We are thinking creatures. Thoughts constantly arise, even when we try *really* hard to ignore them. Especially then.
Our job, our goal, our mission is not to repress or suppress those thoughts.
My intention is to teach my clients how to recognize thoughts without attaching *too* deeply, without following negative storylines deep into the abyss.
It’s. A. Practice.
We do this by constantly coming back to being our own best teammate. We do it by training our little monkey brains back to the present moment. We do it by seeking out help and support from professionals and the community around us.
Did you know we have 70k thoughts a day? Want to learn even more? Just ask.
