Hope

"Hope is patience with the lamp lit." - Tertullian 

 "May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears." - Nelson Mandela 

Our Tuesday/Thursday Vinyasa classes have monthly focuses. One month might center on backbends, another peak poses, another yoga philosophy. It’s a way to keep us focused and continually learning about our practices and ourselves.

Our focus last month was Spiritual Practices. I told my students when I introduced the theme that what I didn’t mean was belief in a deity, adherence to an ancient text, or belief in an afterlife. I don’t have anything against these beliefs, but I told them that one of my spiritual practices was to consciously choose to reach for higher thoughts or ways of behaving in the world. Throughout the month, we practiced gratitude, acceptance, inner strength, hope, trust, joy, patience, and, like you, have mastered all of them. 😊

For this post, I’d like to focus on hope. Hope is a feeling of expectation and a desire for a positive outcome. It motivates us to persevere. It builds resilience in the face of adversity. It requires patience. My student and permanent sub, Nancy, reminded me after class that it was the only thing left in Pandora’s box after she had released all the evils and miseries of the world.

There’s a lot going on politically that might be making you feel hopeless. You might also be facing personal struggles. I’ve had some significant difficulties the past few months and I find myself again and again reaching for my yoga toolkit to stay hopeful. 

Yoga teaches us how our minds work and gives us agency over our thoughts. We practice distancing ourselves from situations—becoming a witness—so we can pause and observe before reacting. When I notice I’m reacting negatively to a difficult situation, I feel it, acknowledge it, then try to reframe it. Instead of ruminating on “why me” or “this sucks,” I try to think of how I might use the situation to learn, grow, or help others.

I’ve been practicing this on the mat as well while working around a hamstring injury. When I get frustrated, I try to focus on how I can use this setback to better understand and help my students. Other ways to practice hope on the mat might be noticing when we’re negatively comparing ourselves to others, then switching the focus to how we’re becoming more skillful. Or when we feel ourselves becoming bored in a familiar pose, we might focus on how strong we are or how we’re becoming more aware of subtleties (an endless skill in yoga).

Life is a balance of good and bad, joy and suffering. A worthy spiritual practice is to navigate these dualities with acceptance, wisdom, and hope. We can’t control everything that happens to us, but we can control our responses: we can choose to fixate on the negative or to hold fast to hope and from there, move forward.