Expanded Vision

I've been away from the blog to help my daughter celebrate end of year parties, recitals and concerts and to prepare for a long awaited surgery. Bela was born without functioning muscles in her eyelids. As her eyelids covered a good portion of her eyes, her peripheral vision was limited. Thanks to an amazing surgeon not only do her pretty blue eyes shine out into the world, she'll also be able to take in a broader vision of the world around her.

For right now though, her "eyes" don't understand that they can move in different directions to take different perspectives because they are so used to looking straight ahead. For Bela to look around her, she has had to move her head. As is human nature, she became adept at adjusting, and really didn't even notice being limited. This is her second surgery so through experience I know that it wont take too long for her eyes to begin to wander and work more similarly to our eyes. But, if we hadn't had the surgeries done at any early age, science tells us that her vision could have remained limited. For the most part, healing occurs naturally and in due time, but there are also many times where this natural healing or correcting process needs help or can supported and strengthened through purposeful action. So we'll  play games and I'll challenge her eyes without her even knowing that we are working on improving the function of her eyes.

I think the lesson we can each take from an experience like Bela's is that there will always be things in life that limit us. Simply by being embodied, our spirits are limited in certain capacities. For every choice we make there is something we keep and something we resist or let go of. A treasure of the Anusara Yoga method for me was to begin to understand that being limited is not negative.Every limitation allows us to have a more full experience of something else. Having said that, it is also important that we allow limitations to fall away and move past them when the time is right, so that we may have fresh experiences throughout life and that we never feel confined or stagnant.

This week in my yoga classes, I'll be challenging students to reflect on their perceived limitations. A wonderful question to ask is whether a certain limitation is serving a useful purpose or perhaps maybe it's time to move past an expected limitation. We use a phrase in yoga called, "play your edge." When you play your edge you take yourself into a pose where you feel some tension, you feel a limitation but you don't bust through it. You sit on that edge of tension or challenge, you hold it and you breathe, you slowly shift your thinking so that as if by magic, the edge softens and often you can take yourself even deeper in a pose than you expected in an integrated and safe way. Playing your edge isn't always about going deeper in a pose but it is a great practice to expand your personal boundaries of what you think you can handle in life.

With the skill and precision of someone like an oculo-plastic surgeon, bring yourself to the edge of what is and what else may be, so that you too may begin to dissolve your own personal limitations. The use of breath, expanded self-awareness and purposeful action are tools we can use to pull back the veils that, at times, conceal our expanded inner vision. These practices help us see more clearly the fullness of who we are, which is so much more than a body with a brain. As you encourage your inner vision to expand, you will see more clearly your unique gifts, talents, skills, and heart's desires which are your natural resources that allow your light to shine more fully into the world.