It’s Tiki the Yoga-Dog here, and I hope you had a very Happy Halloween! This week has been very hectic and exciting for me, as I’m sure it’s been for all of you, too. And I think I’ve experienced every possible extreme of emotion: everything from being really excited about going trick-or-treating (you know how I love my treats!), to feeling stressed out and frazzled about everything I needed to cross off my to-do list. Thankfully, I got to participate in my mommy’s meditation class the other night and learned a little something about equanimity.

The first thing I learned was, what the heck is it? Equanimity is the ability to remain peaceful and joyous, no matter the circumstance. In any given period of time – a day, a week, or a year – we all can experience extremes of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame. It’s perfectly natural for these experiences to arise and then pass away, and no amount of trying to control our experience is going to change that. The challenge for us is to not be slaves to our old patterns of reacting to these experiences, but to be aware of how we feel so that we can consciously choose a response that makes us feel better.

With this in mind, I myself set out into my week and started to notice that even within one day, I was experiencing just about every possible extreme of emotion. I noticed that each time I got a treat, I felt elated; every time I saw a cat on my walk, I felt angry; and when I saw a really big dog, I felt afraid. I felt out of control because my circumstances were determining my mood. Since I’m a yoga-dog who prefers to be happy, I wanted to figure out how to liberate myself from this prison of allowing each situation to determine how I felt.

So I thought back to my mommy’s meditation class and remembered the exercise we had been taught – just to notice in each moment if that moment feels pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And after noticing how each moment feels, trying to experience that moment fully without clinging or grasping if it’s pleasant, without trying to push it away or condemn it if it’s unpleasant, and without spacing out if the moment is neutral. The more I practiced this, the more liberated I felt: I began to understand that experiences are just experiences, and we if live in fear of what we label as unpleasant or bad experiences, our lives are not going to be very fun. But if we remember that even the unpleasant experiences will pass, we can just let them go without judgment and can fully enjoy the pleasant experiences all the more, without the grasping need to hold on to them.

With a little awareness, we can begin to choose our responses rather than being slaves to our old reaction habits and can start to experience emotional freedom. By consciously choosing thoughts and responses that make us feel good, we can live each moment fully and joyously without sleep-walking through our lives and without trying to push away large portions of our life experience. I’m finding it so liberating to realize that change is just the nature of life, and that true liberation comes when we don’t just cope with these changes, but we revel in them because they’re what make life so fun and interesting! I hope you all have a great week and enjoy all your experiences!

Namaste,
Tiki