To celebrate the release of my new book, Fall In Love With Life, I have invited a few friends to share their experiences and tips for falling in love with life. Today, I welcome Zoe Foster of www.rawyogauk.com Here’s Zoe’s take on loving life:
I want to dispel a myth about yoga – and meditation in particular. While there are many myths, I’m going to focus on just this one today, and that is that yoga and meditation must be ‘serious’ practices.
Well who said? Huh?
Does it feel good to be serious about your practice? Or do you kind of feel like something is missing and you could do with lightening up a bit?
Ok, it’s great to have gravity – be grounded – so you’re not feeling manic and as if you’re unable to settle to anything. Most of us NEED this grounding to take us out of our million-mile-an-hour lives and, literally, bring us back to earth – and to ourselves.
Equally, though, it’s super-important to feel light, and free. And yes, JOYFUL! It can be so easy to become bogged down in the ‘serious’ work of gratitude, mindfulness, body awareness, self-love, being present and so on that we actually forget to feel joy as part of our practice.
This happened to me, and I wasn’t even aware of it until recently. It seems strange that being so mindful, I didn’t even notice something as fundamental as ‘losing my joy’. Yet it’s easily done. I was going through A LOT of shit. Chronic and debilitating illness, extreme poverty, pregnancy followed by a late miscarriage, inability to socialise, living in a house we hated , and all manner of other very serious stuff.
So actually, meditating on joy would have been supremely beneficial. But because things were so dire, I didn’t even think about it. My meditations were simply about getting me through each and every day, helping me to survive until the next – without losing my mind and everything else with it.
To fall in love with life, you MUST make joy meditation a part of your day. And the great thing is, you can incorporate it pretty much any way you see fit, and that feels right to you. At first you’ll feel cheesy and silly (we tend to feel this by default about all positive things in our overly cynical and serious society). But with practice, it will start to become second nature – and the rewards will be truly awesome.
How does one meditate on joy, then?
“To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver… Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious you make you sick…” – Ketut Lyer in Eat Pray Love.
As Ketut the Balinese healer proclaims, all you have to do is smile. But don’t just turn up the corners of your mouth, nor even the creases around your eyes. Smile from within. Really FEEL that joy start to ignite and build from deep inside you. If it helps, concentrate on something, or someone, that makes you feel genuine, uncomplicated joy. It could be the sun on your face, or watching your tiny tot running around madly in the park (tuning in on others’ joy, especially a child’s, is a great meditation in itself).
Smile in your liver. Feel joy spread through your entire being. Light up from within.
Love your life!
With love, light and endless joy,
Zoë
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Zoë Foster is a yoga teacher and coach, creative entrepreneur, freelance writer and real/raw food advocate. She lives in South Devon on the edge of magical Dartmoor with her patient husband and the combined mayhem of two tinies. Read her blog at www.rawyogauk.com