My Yoga Journal Day 34: Choose Where To Focus

​Yoga teaches me that I have the ability to intentionally direct my focus.

A wise teacher, Guru Atma Kaur, once said to me that for every force there is an equal and opposite force. She offered me this advice in the context of success. She said that I ought to notice when I’m receiving resistance or negative energy from outside forces as as a sign that I am expanding in a positive direction. “There has to be the equal and opposite force....It’s Physics!” she exclaimed.

I like this reminder from this sweet soul. Sometimes when we make a personal breakthrough in a new relationship, career, or even breaking a cycle, some type of resistance tends to come along that dampens our new advancement.

Then, we have a choice. We can focus on the haterz, hateration, holleration. Or we can intentionally redirect our focus toward all the people, environments, and structures that support our new advancement.

Yoga and meditation have been so helpful to me in this respect. I remember being at a 10-day silent retreat in Kaufman, Texas. As we learned the meditation technique, we were directed to scan our body from head to toe, spending extra time on the parts of our body that lacked sensation.

After a while I felt myself intentionally moving my attention to different areas of the body without losing focus. What I felt at the retreat center was an awareness of thoughts. When my thoughts aren't observed, what I like to call untended to, like an unkempt garden, are sloppy in their focus and move from one thing to the next, building a story about someone or a situation that is far from the truth.

But when thoughts are tended to through yoga and meditation, I can intentionally focus on one thing at a time, in the present moment. ​