“Bring your hands to heart centre. Close your eyes. Inhale. And let it go”.

I love the juxtaposition of the simplicity of these instructions with the complexity of it’s meaning. There’s something so calming about the simple acts of bringing your hands to heart centre, closing your eyes, inhaling, and letting that breath go. Maybe that’s the point; maybe that’s the key to being able to let things go - centre your heart, centre your mind, focus your attention on what you want to let go, and then let it go.

In life, centreing your heart and your mind are difficult things to do. It’s hard to achieve centre. It’s hard to be achieve alignment. It’s hard to achieve balance. Which is likely why it is so difficult to let things go.

I know I struggle with letting things go. I often find myself forcing myself to let things go. But you can’t force it. If you force yourself to do something before you’re ready to do it, it will be harder to come back into your heart centre. It will be harder to come back into your realignment. It will be harder to achieve your balance. And if you have to force yourself to do something before you’re ready to do it, is that really being kind to yourself? Is that really being gentle to yourself? Is that really caring and loving yourself? I don’t know. I just know for me, that I have to stop trying to force myself to do things I’m not ready to do and be kinder to myself and let myself feel, flow, and figure things out on my own time.

Lately, I’ve been disappointed with myself for not progressing as much as I would have liked in this healing process. I’ve been trying to force myself to stop being sad, to get over it, and to let it go. I’ve been trying to force myself to put myself first, to love myself, and to act in a way where I know what I deserve. But the truth of the matter is, I can’t accomplish any of that by forcing it. And I can’t put myself first, love myself, and seek out what I deserve until I figure out what exactly that all means.

While I can’t accomplish any of my personal goals through force, I can work towards accomplishing them through introspection. And through various forms of self-care (i.e. yoga, meditation, therapy, writing) that help me interrogate what I mean when I say I want to put myself first and what I mean when I say that I deserve better. Moreover, these forms of self-care are going to help me figure out what “putting myself first” and what “deserving better” looks like. I need to do a lot of work on myself and I have a lot of figuring out to do, but if I truly want to be in a place where simple yoga instructions mirror the ease of its emotional meaning, then I need to continue to find my heart centre, my re-alignment, and my balance.