personal development Archives

December 29, 2020

Work on yourself and cultivate personal enquiry when all is well! Take advantage of these good times and good health to set up routines conducive to well-being, cultivate positive relationships, to start meaningful actions or projects and to advance on your journey. When all is well, the bad patterns or habits we all have within us are usually dormant, “under the radar”, present but weak, invisible. It is then much easier to model them towards more virtuous healthy patterns (Ref. Patanjali Yoga Sutra II.4 & 10).

Understand your basic constitution and potentiel imbalances to improve your quality of life and your health. What are you made off? I had a chance to discover Ayurveda and its fundamental principles for the first time while doing a yoga retreat in Bali through several workshops. Thank you Audrey @yoga_school_bretagne. It has been a true revelation to me. It gave me the keys to better understand myself. To understand my excess of anger, my addictions, my “illnesses” also or physical weaknesses. At the time, I often suffered from allergies and redness on the skin. I also had a lot of pain in my lower back. Everything made sense and finally found a logical explanation: an excess of fire. I was finally able to understand the sources of most of my “discomforts / illnesses”. Most importantly, Yoga and Ayurveda were offering me concrete solutions to deal with them. Subsequently I continued to study Ayurveda while continuing to train myself in Yoga, health through Yoga and Yoga therapy, which has greatly helped my health and my family’s in general! It also allows me today to offer courses and workshops on these themes.

Practice daily. It is wiser to do 15 minutes of conscious breathing every day than a class once a month or an annual retreat! My teacher (Valérie Faneco, @eka_yoga_institute) once gave me this beautiful image from an Indian story: when you walk every day on the grass at the same place, a path is formed and becomes more and more marked . If you only go there every now and then, there won’t be any.

Eka pada: choose your path and stick to it. And thereby choose one or more mentors to guide you and accompany you on this path. It sounds simple and yet it is without a doubt the most difficult essential principle of personal development to maintain today. Especially for people with a vatta tendency. We are constantly bombarded with information, with proposals. It is easy today and very tempting to peck right to left, to try without ever digging, without too much personal involvement, without commitment, against a background of intellectual curiosity. In the past (not so distant yet), we engaged in a “personal development activity” (sports, cultural, associative, creative, etc.) for the year and often much more. We had a lot less options and that could be negative at times of course, but also in a way helped stability, persistence and balance. This is why it seems essential to me to recall this key principle mentioned in sutra I.32 of the Yoga Sutra by Patanjali.

Cultivate “detachment”, “letting go”.
Learning to “do” with conviction while accepting not to have 100% control over the results of our actions. It is also a principle dear to Patanjali. I choose to mention it here because the education received in our Western cultures goes against this fundamental principle of happiness.
In short, to be happier, and to stay in good health, Yoga invites us to “do to do and welcome what comes as a gift” versus “do to obtain a result”. To meditate on a daily basis!

To go further, you can join us for a private yoga therapy session or group class in Lisbon or Singapore