Summer of Love, issue two: Surrender
Explore the balance of effort and ease in love.
Wildest hearts.
In the last issue, we explored what it means to root (grounding down in to our own nervous system regulation processes) to rise in to love (expanding in to connection from a place of stability).
You are responsible for your own nervous system regulation, but that is a lot easier in a connection where you’re not triggered by your partner. Not all people who we love are meant for us to keep, but sometimes working through a trigger challenge can reveal a depth in love we’d miss otherwise.
In this issue, we’ll shift our focus to consider the experience of connection and, in particular, how we can experience a balance of effort and ease while loving another.
The yoga sutras are the collection of ancient teachings by Patanjali that outline the philosophy and practice of yoga to reach inner peace and self-realization.
Yoga sutra 1.2 states yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind. Some translations describe it as the cessation of identification of the fluctuations of the mind. In the present day, we might hear you are not your thoughts.
Yoga sutra 1.12 is the one I’d like to focus on today though. In 1.12, he offers a process for how to calm those fluctuations: abhyasa (persistent effort) and vairagya (non-attachment to the result).
If you can be resolute in your efforts, and equally not attached to the results of those efforts, your consciousness will become less hectic and your typical thought patterns (your vrittis) will settle.
Let’s take this concept off the mat and in to summer love.
We are all in love in some capacity, even if we’re just loved by the universe for how we walk the earth as the juicy little human creatures we are, but also in how strangers offer moments of joyful presence, new friends extend their hearts for the purpose of generating a moment together, old friends remember our birthdays and our scary appointments with specialists and divorce lawyers. We all know and experience and practice love and what I’ll share is meant to support you as you honour those connections.
For the sake of brevity, I refer in this issue to intimate relationships.
What we’ll cover:
surrender is not passive, it is presence
triggering moments are an opportunity to practice, not perfect, how we love
true intimacy involves effort without guarantee
I’ll weave Internal Family Systems theory and narrative therapy into yoga theory, guiding you through how to surrender to love in order to experience the qualities of freedom offered by love. The last issue I wrote made some folks think I was writing about them. Babes, I will never tell your story like that. So, in this issue, I share more from my own experiences in love.