What is guru, and more importantly who is guru? The definition of guru is this…. a Sanskrit term for a “mentor, guide, expert, or master” of certain knowledge or field. In Sanskrit, guru means literally dispeller of darkness.
Some people in the yoga world say your guru is your teacher, and that is so, but that implies that the guru is someone else, another person. We all have a guru and that guru is inside of us, it’s our conscious. The inner feeling we should do something; a calling of sorts. When I started yoga I never listened or hardly listened to this knowledge inside of me. I just did. I did life; worked, played, laughed, cried, slept, and repeated everyday.
Inside of your conscious your body knows exactly what you need to heal. And unbeknownst to you, your “guru” brings you to places, and brings people in your life for you to heal from. That annoying co-worker? yep, your guru brought you two together, so you can learn from you being annoyed. The job that sucks the life out of you? The guru got you that job, so you could get so fed up, and find that dream job, where your body and mind “sing”. Every experience, and thought that we think, we can use to heal.
When we first start yoga, your thoughts are NON-STOP. I often get the questions how can I quiet my mind. My answer…..Yoga. At first when you start yoga, your mind is like a drunken monkey stung by a scorpion. Slowly as you practice yoga, your mind starts to have “intervals”, where there is no thought. This is a great step, because it will clue you to know the yoga is working, deep inside of us. As your practice progresses, those intervals become longer, and closer together. The goal of yoga is not to stop these thoughts, but to slow them down, so you can either let them go, or take action about them……
Let me explain. Your thoughts will circle around a pattern, that begins to change over time. For instance, Yet again, you are asked to make a donation to this organization, and a thought of, wow, I don’t want to do that, ie: don’t have enough money comes in. That thought is greed, something we all have in varies degrees. To ease the mind, and rid that thought, we make a definite action of doing more giving. After a while, that thought of greed never enters the mind, because you have killed that thought with many giving actions that choke that thought.
Your thoughts drift all over the place, but with the practice of yoga, you can gain insights into your very being, and become a better person. This is called evolution. Yoga helps us evolve our soul, our spirit, to be one of giving.
Stop, listen to your thoughts….and if, when necessary, take action. Your guru will thank you for that!
See you on the mat,
Paula
