Think differently
Wayne Dyer said: "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change".
So how do we look at things?
According to Hatha Yoga philosophy we can discuss the perception of reality in various ways. Having a clear instrument, meaning, a clear structure of body mind and spirit, we are able to perceive life events with clarity, and have a healthy understanding of things AS THEY ARE. The practices of Yoga develop the skill of being present. Present in the moment with the acceptance of the constantly changing characteristic of things as phenomenas, arising and passing away.
The French Novelist Georges Perec , in his text from 1973 "The infra-ordinary" writes:
"What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines....Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals....The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily...."
He invites us to look at ordinary things:
"What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?...To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?...What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?.....Question your tea spoons."
Perec invites us to wonder, to observe ordinary things and embrace their ordinary nature - acknowledge it.
In the practice of Yoga, we bring awareness to our physical body, we pay attention to our feet, the way they touch and meet the ground, we observe our breath, we practice listening, we scan our body, we notice differences between left and right, front and back, in and out. We practice the ordinary, and if we wish, we can experience it in an extraordinary way.
Taking this practice and merging it in to our daily life will bring present in each action, with this presence - comes freedom, and creativity.