Stepping out of your comfort zone

Motivation Towards Positiveness:

Everyone of us has a comfort zone. We have our routine, habitual patterns and the predictable run-down of what is going to happen in our daily lives.  We feel secure and have absolute control over what we do, what we eat, where we go, what we say, etc.  For some of us, we don’t even have to think too much because we naturally go on auto-pilot, thereby allowing us to feel totally at ease. The sense of comfort and ease with time becomes inertia.

Stepping out of the routine and trying something new seems to be terribly daunting that we start to doubt ourselves – ‘I am not sure it will work’; ‘I don’t think I will be able to do this’; ‘It’s just not me’; ‘I’m too old to try anyway’, ‘it’s too risky’, etc.  For a moment, we become a persuasive antagonist in the debate of do’s and don’ts.  Not only that we give apparently ‘justifiable’ reasons for not reaching out to this wonderland, our fear of the unpredictable and perhaps life changes also grows.

Beyond the physical

Since I have devoted fully into my Ashtanga practice, I notice a number of chances within me. Ever since I began the asana practice, the focus was primarily musculoskeletal in order to perform every pose to perfection.  Being always physically active in my young age from running, tennis playing, swimming, hiking to recent wall climbing, I  never really lack the physical strength to try and perhaps be reasonably good at the activity.  It is the empowering quality that allows myself to feel good about life.  The idea of using muscular power to push the physical body to its limit  is not strange to me as if I were born with it.

With time my body becomes auto-pilot when it comes to using muscles to build up resistance, tension and endurance. Sounds like typical ‘athletic’ syndromes? On the contrary, I am grateful to be flexible while being bodily strong, unlike general athletes who tend to have tight or shortened muscles due to the intense sports.  Here comes the tricky part. All these years I have been practising yoga for its physical benefits and particularly the spiritual guidance, I am still struggling to find the sweet point, as we yogi call it, between strength and flexibility. There seems to be a missing link: the external strength and internal peace which complement to each other in a strong Ashtanga practice.