Shifting Slowly

Yamas (Sanskrit: यम), and their complement, Niyamas, represent a series of “right living” or ethical rules within Hinduism and Yoga. It means “reining in” or “control”. These are restraints for Proper Conduct as given in the Holy Veda. They are a form of moral imperatives, commandments, rules or goals.

Aparigraha- the final Yama about letting go & non-attachment. It means letting go even of the hurts & pains in your life.  Once you do, you are free.  Easier said than done.

It was when I let go of the pain of leaving my religion & the way it hurt me; the shunning, the guilt, the fear of living life with the only God I ever knew. And that God is a God that would not be happy about me leaving.

Letting go of the names I was called. The judgments made in my life. Ultimately letting go of every attachment I had to that religion, even attaching my life story at all with it, was my ultimate freedom.
We believe if we hold on to the hurt that we’re somehow staking a claim. But we are playing the victim when we don’t have to any longer. Sometimes decisions are made for us & we are too young to know the difference. Too ignorant, too involved, born into it, too accepting. It is not until we choose to begin to evolve into our true selves that we begin to make our own decisions and acquire our own beliefs that we ultimately are able to detach ourselves from the story’s so that we can let go.
Letting go is freedom. It leaves us free & light & without past burdens to bear.
We feel as if holding the pain we have some sort of control over it.

How does one ‘let go’.  It is about forgiveness first. We must first forgive those that were doing the best they could for us at the time.  Realizing they were working with the only things they were given and taught.  In my case, I forgave my mother a long time ago.  I understood many years later that she was making decisions on my life, like any parent would, to the best of her knowledge.  It was then up to me, when I became of age, to decide for myself. To ask myself if this is what I really wanted. I could have played the victim for a long time and stayed on to make her happy.  And so many of us don’t let go of stories and people and past mistakes because we are trying to not change the “flow” of our lives when in actuality there is no flow, there is just comfort.

We get comfortable in our roles, even though we don’t feel happy or a sense of contentment but we get into these patterns of making those around us happy. I was brought up to believe if those around me are happy, I’d eventually get to my happiness.  That by making those around me comfortable and happy it was going to make me happy. Instead, it never allowed me to see what truly made me happy. I never took the time to get to know me and to research the things I was being taught. I took others’ words for it and believed that this religion was my saving grace.  Even though every time I did something for myself, apart from what I was being taught, and felt good about it, I had to then be made to feel guilty and ashamed about it.

So I lived on this middle path of making those around me happy while I tried to suppress my own happiness. And I lived it for years.  Until eventually everything that is false comes undone and all that’s left to do is give up or pick up the pieces and try to piece parts of your self back together. It’s hard though to distinguish truth from false when you’ve lived a lie for so long. But with patience, prayer, practice on self-awareness and self-love, I learned the truth of myself. I learned that it’s ok to be me. That being me was better than I had ever imagined. I learned to love myself.  Something I had been taught was egotistical and wrong and not what God had intended for us at all. I learned that without loving yourself first, you can’t possibly love anyone else.

This was the greatest lesson for me and the one that brought out my creative, funky, funny and vulnerable side. Loving myself allowed me to not care what others thought about me any longer. It opened up the door for me to let so many people into parts of me I had kept at a surface level and be vulnerable with them and show them that vulnerability is something to be cherished. It is sacred. It brings unity & deep love. It’s humanity on its deepest and greatest level.

Through self-love and vulnerability, I learned to forgive myself and ultimately forgive others and finally-let go.

**Aparigraha**