Let your practice be your medicine
It can be hard in our pop-a-pill, goal-oriented, immediate-gratification culture for people to accept that true healing from the inside out takes time. Even if they are initially committed to a holistic approach to healing, many people quickly lose heart and give up if they do not experience immediate dramatic results, while others make do with some improvement and return to their old ways.
The uncomfortable but beautiful truth is that there are no shortcuts. True healing that brings a person back in harmony with their own original and truest self takes time, commitment and sacrifice. It seems strange to me to expect otherwise, for we are not trying here to keep a symptom manageably under control with chemical manipulation. This is instead about thoroughly, cell-by-cell changing a living organism that has been created over a lifetime by every breath, every thought, every emotion (and repressed emotion), every word, every action, every interaction, every experience, every mouthful of food that has ever passed through it from the moment of conception.
So, with the history of our lives held in the tissues of our bodies, there is no getting away from the fact that only we hold the key to our own well-being, to being in the best possible health for our own individual genetic predispositions. I do not mean by this to cause a descent into blame or guilt. On the contrary, I hope to nurture a profound sense of self-reverence, of responsibility and of empowerment, opening up the door towards positive change through the recognition that – whatever we have been through in the past – we have a great and ongoing opportunity to re-build ourselves moment by moment by the way we lead our lives.
The journey itself is the healing process. So I invite you to step into that journey through Yoga and Qigong with an attitude of curiosity and an understanding that your practice will, without fail, become your deepest medicine if – and only if – you make a daily appointment with yourself and then open yourself up to (possibly far-reaching) lifestyle and diet changes as your practice makes you increasingly sensitive to your most essential needs.
Daily practice may initially require some self-imposed discipline, so it is in the early months that it is easy to fall by the wayside. But do try to stay with it as this will pass as your practice cultivates in you the awareness that you are worth it, so your commitment starts to flow easily from your heart and from your desire to commune daily with yourself and to nourish yourself towards the most profound and essential well-being.
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