Perceptions: Truth or Fiction

What is a perception? A belief. A thought that something is true. But is a perception the truth or fiction? A recent experience helped me answer this question.

A few summers ago I taught a Mom and Baby class. It was the second class of this type that I had ever taught. I was used to teaching children and was just getting comfortable teaching adults. I loved teaching these women at this very special time of their lives with their babies knowing how much yoga helped me when I was a new mother.

One of the moms who had signed up was a well known yogi in my community. She had studied with John Friend during the time he was creating Anusara yoga, owned her own studio and has an incredible depth of yogic knowledge. I was intimidated by the thought of teaching her. She came to a few of the classes and then disappeared. I was sure that my class wasn’t enough for her, that she found me a novice and didn’t think it was worth her time. Though the other participants continued to come to class, a part of me began to feel like I was not good enough.

We now teach at the same studio, and though she is incredibly sweet and helpful, I have carried this feeling of embarrassment (unworthiness) with me around her though I feel otherwise confident in my teaching abilities. Before her class, we were talking about my kids yoga classes. She then admitted that my Mom and Baby yoga class helped her connect back with her body, that she hadn’t been doing yoga for a while and she was grateful for that class. She had been having nursing difficulties and was sorry to have missed many classes. I was astounded.

My perceptions were absolutely wrong.

Believing thoughts (perceptions) as truths is what creates a lot of the baggage that we carry around with us our entire lives. To learn to distinguish feelings and thoughts for what they are is freeing. This connection between feelings and thoughts and what we say and what we do is tightly wound. Yoga is a great tool to help untangle fact from fiction. Through meditation and asana, we begin to free the mind to feel and think without it effecting our selves or our truth.

What self-perceptions do you carry with you? Can you figure out when you began to believe them? Was there an exact moment when fiction became truth?

It is time to break free from the thoughts that bind and hold us back. Now is the time to shatter the misconceptions that our mind creates and begin to reclaim our awesomeness.