Trust your gut
As I have been writing this blog it’s been to the backdrop of a host of changes in my life - leaving a long term job, planning a move overseas, navigating my menopause journey and celebrating my 40th birthday. Birthdays are a time for reflection; looking back and assessing, looking forward and anticipating. This is a perfect fit with the sixth chakra - our third eye, ajna chakra, which is where we connect with our inner wisdom.
Our ajna chakra invites us to step back and look at life’s bigger picture. I find that any birthday that ends with a zero or a five has the same impact on me. And so in turning 40 I did take a step back and look at the bigger picture, and for one of the first birthdays in my adult life I did so with a sense of calm and contentedness.
In previous years I’ve often been uncomfortable with celebrating my birthday; keeping it private or being low key. I have a running joke with my family that I’m always turning 25 and there's been a lot of smoke and mirrors to avoid it. Birthdays are a time of celebration but also a reminder of our own mortality, a chance to reflect and see how we’re getting on. With an anxious nature this can sometimes lead to a sense of not doing well enough, not hitting the milestones at the same time as others. Perhaps being further from the goals you had hoped to achieve by now, or realising that a path you set out on hasn’t led to the places you had hoped.
But with age, and with a balanced ajna chakra, comes a sense of wisdom, of acceptance. I’m exactly where I need to be, whatever that may look like and yoga has really helped me to come to this realisation. There is sometimes a misconception that yoga is just the physical practice - the asana - the shapes we make on the mat. But yoga is also a philosophy and an access to spirituality, and it is this side of yoga that I have been finding most fulfilling in this busy time navigating a lot of change.
So instead of worrying that I’m not doing well enough or haven’t achieved what I should have by the time I’m 40, instead, for this birthday I’ve taken the mantle of acceptance and using the ajna chakra as my guide to access my inner wisdom, reflected on what I have done and learned by sharing my life lessons at 40.
Trust your gut
We all have a system that allows us to think intuitively and trust what our gut is telling us and a system that requires us to apply rational thought to our decisions and life is certainly made up of both. I have spent so long second guessing the way I feel about something, dismissing gut reactions as something unreliable. The third eye chakra invites us to see this as our inner compass guiding us. If something feels really wrong in ourselves when faced with a decision then this is a reliable source of data giving us feedback. Learning to trust this gut feeling and allow it to guide me has been something that my regular yoga and meditation practice have helped me to cultivate.
The power of daily habits
About seven years ago I first started bullet journalling and I can honestly say it changed my life. I really loved the focus on what daily steps I needed to take in order to reach my longer term goals. Sometimes the sense of having not met a life goal that I get when reviewing a milestone is because it isn’t anchored in anything. Bullet journalling helped me to look at the big goals I wanted to achieve and then work out what that meant I needed to do on a daily basis to get there. I wrote about bullet journalling in my blog on the manipura chakra. If we celebrate the little everyday habits we are building then the big goals will achieve themselves. James Clear is someone who taught me a lot about this in his book Atomic Habits if habit theory is something you’re interested in learning more about.
Don’t limit yourself
I recently undertook a fantastic exercise with my yoga mentor where we explored my limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that are embedded in me that can limit what decisions I make moving forwards. A limiting belief might be that yoga can’t be a career or that if I’m not working 9-5 then I’m not showing up for work in the right way. These beliefs about work and how threaded it was in my identity came to a head earlier this year when my full time role was put at risk and I was facing redundancy. Previously this might have been something that sent me into a spin - the sense of security being taken away, the person I was at work forming such a strong part of my identity. But I knew instinctively that it was time to move on, trusting my gut that the roles that were being offered as matches for me to apply to weren’t roles that would bring me joy. I knew that in the not too distant future my partner and I would be moving to New Zealand to spend time living over there, and so it felt like the perfect time to step away from this role and accept that it was time to move on. It’s still nerve wracking - I’m entering a world of interim work for a number of months and then moving countries to embark on a new career set up on the other side of the world, but dissociating from the limiting beliefs that without a full time Monday to Friday job I’m somehow lesser has been an incredibly healthy lesson for me.
If you don’t try you’ll never know
When I look back at some of my favourite memories from the past four decades, those that stand out are the chances I took and the risks I entered into when I wasn’t sure of my direction. When I went travelling after university, when I decided to train in yoga teaching, when I took a temp job at a small local charity and it turned into my lifelong career path. If I hadn’t stepped into the unknown and tried these things I wouldn’t be the person I am today. For every success there’s been a chance taken and a failure or lesson that followed. Moving to Hong Kong for a couple of years only lasted ten months. A seemingly dream first London charity role that wasn’t what it seemed when I started the job lasted only three months. For every wrong choice I have made there has been a lesson learned and that is where the real growth starts. Because we’re always growing, always learning.
How yoga and a balanced third eye chakra can help
Yoga invites us to be compassionate; to others and also to ourselves. Trusting our inner wisdom empowers us to move forwards, trusting the path we are taking; even if it leads into the unknown. Without moving forwards we cannot grow. Without sending ourselves compassion we cannot fail and allow it to be a lesson rather than a let down. A meditation technique that can help us to cultivate compassion is the metta meditation - a Buddhist meditation also known as the Loving Kindness meditation. It sends loving kindness to those around us in our lives, but the very first part of the loving kindness meditation is to send loving kindness to ourselves. We can only give compassion to others if we are able to first love ourselves. And this is probably the culmination of my 40 years of learning and growth and the source of the contentment I now have in facing the bigger picture in life. It’s ok to love yourself, trust me - it will help you create compassion for others once you take this first brave step.
This month I’m reading… Menopause: all you need to know in one complete manual, by Dr Louise Newson following my last blog I am continuing to educate myself on this transition part of my life.
This month I’m listening to…the original London cast soundtrack of Les Miserables - after seeing the stage show recently (my 40th birthday present from my partner) I’ve had this on repeat remembering the beauty of the songs.
