How Yoga Teaches You to Accept and Not Judge

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal  – But don’t approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain – Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois

Planet Earth, a peaceful and comforting nest for several hundreds of thousands of living species for the past several million years, is mostly covered by water. Water is seen as a sign of life. The beauty of water lies in its silence; the silence of flow, the silence of dissolution, the silence of erosion, the silence felt in the middle of an ocean. The silence is associated with the virtue of calmness. The word “calm”, in its literal sense, means “without rough motion”. Hence, if we want to put all these bits and pieces into one box, we can safely conclude that the essence of life is tranquility.

Life is not meant to be an event of destruction, nor should the purpose of someone’s life be to act like a shark, feeding on its surroundings to sustain longer. Although it is true that “survival of the fittest” is almost a law that has applied to the world ever since its existence, it should also be realized and understood that survival alone is not sufficient for our well-being. A young king, strong and youthful, living for ten months in a castle with all its royalty, is probably mightier than a an old and feeble man living for ten years in an isolated cave feeding on rotten fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately in today’s world, we have adopted a scavenger mindset, where we take pride in leading in a race where there can only be one winner. And this is exactly where yoga steps in!

Read about: “Love Yourself, Love Yoga”

Yoga teaches us to become one with our true essence, which is tranquility.  When you sit on your yoga mat concentrating on the sound of your breathing like waves in the ocean, you learn to dissociate yourself from the negative forces that run this world. Yoga allows us to understand ourselves at a very basic level, devoid of external influences and appearances. It grows us closer to reality; it eliminates all unnecessary temptations of the world that come to haunt us every single day. Yoga makes us feel lighter, less burdened and freer.

It is in this state of self, that we acquire the ability to accept and not judge. Judging individuals and events around us is one of the most crippling diseases of society. It puts a curtain over our inner selves and instead highlights the short-comings of everything around us. Yoga changes this perspective. Once we begin to comprehend our own selves better, accepting what happens around us becomes a walk in the park. The fluidity of the largest component of our body, that is water, becomes incorporated in our habits due to the effects of yoga.

It is this fluidity that all of us need to apply in our lives in order to make life less artificial and to make our society more tolerant. Tolerance is the key to peace, and peace is the most supreme state of being. It is indeed through yoga that we can achieve this supremacy.

About the Author

Author and Illustrator of Wall Yoga the Art of Centering, Colette Barry is a licensed massage therapist, certified yoga and Pilates instructor. Through Colette’s lifelong work in rehabilitation with her husband and her father, physicians of Chiropractic, she developed two programs “Wall Yoga” and the “Barry Method”. Colette’s programs goes far beyond muscle isolation creating a technique that includes using visual cues to connect the mind and body. These programs results in a harmonious muscle and overall body alignment. Claiming, “perfect alignment produces perfect results!”

Join Colette’s online training programs at Udemy, “The Complete Wall Yoga Strength Program”, “Introduction to Wall Yoga”, “The Whole Body Wall Yoga Makeover” and “Barry Method”. These programs are available to anyone who would like to experience a profound new level of healing. Please visit Colette’s excellent blog at YogaTrends.org.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

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