... renunciation is seeing clearly how we hold back, how we pull away, how we shut down, how we close off, and then learning how to open. It’s about saying yes to whatever is put on your plate, whatever knocks on your door, whatever calls you up on your telephone. How we actually do that has to do with coming up against our edge, which is actually the moment when we learn what renunciation means.
Many of us can probably relate to coming up against our edge. It may be the time that we shut down, resorting to the silent treatment, unable to say more, unable to put down the flood gates we’ve put up. Or for some of us, it may be the time that we let emotions overtake us, when we bring up all of our resentment, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the actual situation, when we let anger gush out to throw others off the scent of our fear and our vulnerability.
We may be aware at the time that we’ve come up against our edge. Or we may realize it after the fact. It may take us hitting the same wall again and again, reaching the same edge over and over, before we realize that we’ve come up against our edge. The realization is part of the process, and we get better and better at it if we open our awareness to it.
Whenever you realize you have met your edge - you’re scared and you’re frozen and you’re blocked - you’re able to recognize it because you open enough to see what’s happening. It’s already a sign of your aliveness and the fact that you’ve shed a lot, that you can see so clearly and so vividly. Rather than think you have made a mistake, you can acknowledge the present moment and its teaching, or so we are instructed. You can hear the message, which is simply that you’re saying “No.”
Where we regularly practice this process is in yoga. The yoga practice can be seen as us voluntarily offering ourselves up to the process of coming up against our edge. Each time we step on our mat, we move through the practice almost with the intention to reach our edge in an asana. With Ashtanga Yoga, it’s more formal - we’re instructed to stop when we reach our edge, not to move on to to the next asana until we’ve worked through that current “edge”.
Once we’ve recognized it, the question becomes “how do I move beyond that edge?” We get in that situation, either in that asana or in that personal dynamic outside, and we tighten up, we respond, we resist, we make excuses, we avoid. We can force our way through it, or we can try to work it out mentally, consciously. But it’s much simpler than all that.
The instruction isn’t then to “smash ahead and karate-chop that whole thing”; the instruction is to SOFTEN, to connect with your heart and engender a basic attitude of generosity and compassion toward yourself...
So, you SOFTEN. You don’t run away, you don’t get up and walk out the room, you don’t shut down and avoid. In our yoga practice, we reach that asana, and we already have a solution, we’re already trained - through yoga - how to SOFTEN: we breath deeply. And as we practice this on the mat, we can train ourselves how to respond off the mat when we feel ourselves tighten and our vision constrict to focus on that one hurtful thing someone said or that one painful circumstance we find ourselves in. So, as we practice today, we can be aware of this:
The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is first of all realizing that you’ve come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, SOFTENING.
