Five Ways to Dance with Life
What does it mean to dance with life? When we dance with life, we take energy in and give it back to the world in a graceful exchange. We engage with every aspect of life, at every moment, with every breath. Here are five practices to take you deeper into the dance.
1. Celebrate who you are right now. Pause to recognize and appreciate all that is perfect about you, just as you are—your body’s strengths, your mind’s abilities, your past experiences and the ways in which they’ve made you wiser. You have everything you need, right now, to live life fully, riding the waves as they come.
2. Reflect on your path. In every moment, we are cocreating our experience in reaction to the world around us and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We have the opportunity at all times to take responsibility and ownership for where we’re headed. Try pausing a few times throughout your day to observe whether your thoughts, words, and actions are in alignment. Where are you creating suffering and imprisonment in your life? Where are the places in which you find inner freedom? What’s working and what’s not?
3. Put yourself into the experiment. There’s no magic pill that can instantly help us feel more alive and dig us out of the places where we’re stuck. No one else can know exactly what you need to thrive. We find out what we need and what makes our lives better and more authentic by putting ourselves into experiments. With each experiment, we discover how the small or large changes that we make affect our relationships, our sense of purpose, and our overall well-being. If one experiment doesn’t work, try another, and another, and another.
4. Surrender and trust. Allow yourself to soften into the process of ongoing inquiry and experimentation. Trust that you are constantly growing and that there is more going on within you, at all times, than you could possibly imagine. Know that you’ll always have another chance to try again.
5. Repeat—for the rest of your life! The dance of life is not a linear process, and neither are these five steps. There is no destination. It’s a never-ending journey of learning to engage more fully with life and to open to greater fulfillment and joy.
© Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health. All rights reserved.
Coby Kozlowski, MA, E-RYT, is a faculty member for the Kripalu School of Yoga and author of One Degree Revolution: How the Wisdom of Yoga Inspires Small Sifts That Lead to Big Changes.
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