Sat Nam,

Winter has arrived and hasn’t it brought a chill with it!

To celebrate the new season, this week I am starting an 8 week series, a Journey through the virtues as follows:

Courage
Patience
Vulnerability
Integrity/Honesty
Loyalty/Commitment
Compassion/kindness
Gratitude
Love/connection

To start the ball rolling, let’s talk about courage.

Maya Angelou says courage is the most important of all virtues because without it we can’t sustain the others and I totally agree. Without courage we live in fear and in a state of fear it’s difficult to sustain compassion, love, gratitude, patience etc.

As I have previously talked about, before I found Kundalini Yoga I suffered greatly from anxiety and panic attacks. It was debilitating and I couldn’t do many everyday things like getting on a bus. The fear that overtook me when I stood at the bus stop was overwhelming and if I did manage to get on the bus I was back off a few stops later covered in a sweat and shaking. Although it took huge amounts of courage just to get on that bus, it wasn’t until I did Teacher Training that I really faced almost unbearable fear with courage. As part of the training we had to hike up to the top of the mountain in Kangeroo Valley. Now I’m petrified of climbing and before we even left I didn’t want to go, but in a flood of tears I mustered up all my courage and went. I was on my hands and knees sobbing at some stages, but with the support of the group and with courage I put one foot (and sometimes knee!) in front of the other and made it up that mountain. We were given a raw potato to cook for dinner when we got up there, so back in the real world when I had to face the daunting prospect of getting on that bus my mantra became, ‘I climbed a mountain with a potato, I can get on a bus!’. Because I faced what was to me insurmountable fear and achieved my goal to complete the trek it made the smaller things I was afraid of less daunting and achievable.

Someone once told me that I wasn’t brave because of my big fears such as getting on a bus. But here’s the thing, even though I have big fears and even if it’s on my knees sobbing, I give it a go and that’s courage. Courage isn’t doing something with no fear, for that we don’t need courage, courage is doing something scary despite our fear.  It’s not just about facing daunting tasks, it’s also about having the courage to be vulnerable and exposed, to love deeply with possibility of getting hurt and as Paulo Coelho says falling down 7 times and getting up 8.

Though it’s not always possible to climb mountains to face fears, through Kriyas we can learn about courage and flex the courage muscle so to speak. The courage to turn up to our practice, to allow ourselves to feel vulnerable and exposed, to keep going when all we want to do is quit, this helps strengthen our resolve to face fears in life.  Maya Angelou also says building courage is a process, not something we learn overnight but by working on it bit by bit everyday.

This week we will work on building courage and challenge ourselves through a Kriya and meditation.

Start thinking about areas in your life that bring fear and how you step up with courage and let’s put our courage into action.

I will now be teaching Tuesday nights and for the moment there won’t be a Monday night class.

Classes this week:

Tuesday 7.00pm – Adette
Friday 7.15am – Bartek

See you on the mat. ❤

Love and light,
Adette