Try this little experiment. Decide yourself to take a walk in the nature and to be totally present during the whole walk. Just percieve moment for moment through your senses, feel the smell, hear the sounds and see the colors. Just be with it without putting any names or labels to what you experince, no analysis, no associations just sense. I bet, after some minutes you will discover yourself thinking about something else. You are not totally present anymore.
This is like the behaviour of the drunkard. You decide to stop but you cannot. Your mind is mastering you and your are a slave under the mind.
Have a look at Jill Bolte Taylors lecture about "My stroke of insight" where she as brain scientist witness her own stroke in her left hemisphere. After eight years of recovery she informs the world about how it is to percieve only from the right half of the brain, not to be able to grasp time and memory only to be and to be in the now.That film is really touching and utterly unique. Her final question is: -"Why do we overuse the left part of the brain when it cause us so much trouble?"
To do yoga is one way to take control of your mind. You will master the mind and use it when you need it and inbetween you will live your life with total presence.
But there are other ways of living total. You don't need to sit in lotus for meditation.
To chop fire wood is a wonderful way of doing without thinking. You have to be totally present to be able to hit the piece of wood in the centre core otherwise it will not fall apart with ease and you might get problem. And the hours passes without any drifting away into habitual thinking. A sense of joy is filling you. Chopping fire wood is a meditative doing.
Snowboarding is another good one. You go downhill with high speed, you feel like living on the edge and there it is again - a sense of joy and happiness. You often find yourself smiling when you come down and you want up again to do it again, and again. That is to live in the now.
Just now I have discovered that kayaking is another tool to make yourself live in the now, hour after hour. To go silent in the early morning in a wilderness lake you find your self to be a part of the nature. You are that.
Another one is to go out into the sea waves. There you can always choose rough waves that matches your limit and suddelny you are on the edge. Automatically you are totally present. Every single wave is an adventure and soon you find yourself smiling of happiness. With a traditional eskimo kayak it is extremly joyful to play in the waves and with such a one you easily learn to roll. Then you never have to exit the kayak, even if you happen to tip around in the ocean.
Then you are in the same situation as on the snowboard. If you tip around you roll a couple of turnes and the up on your feet again and just going on, without any stopping.
And the very best with the kayaking is that when you build your own kayak, fitting your own body size, you get into the meditative mood again. The very construction procedure is a doing where you loose time and space. You just are the doing and the happiness arises within you. It is a creative process in the being.
This is what I should like to share in this writings. How to realign with your true self through the beingness of doing.
Karma yoga is a way to find your true self through unselfish doing by serving. This is not Karma yoga, it is Kayak Yoga.
Today I have set up the ribs for my second kayak, a Njord, design by Björn Thomasson.
The first one was a Black Pearl
