What You Say Is So. By Ari Iso-Rautio

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“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world” – Buddha

Words Have Power

The words we use – spoken and unspoken – have tremendous power. Words can hurt and heal; words can move us to great acts of courage; words can stop us in our tracks. In his book Perfectly Imperfect, Baron Baptiste writes about the default voice in our heads – the immediate and unconscious response that we often think of as “the truth”. The voice uses words and most of the time we let this automatic mechanism run riot. When that happens, it’s robbing us of power to create new possibilities.

You = The Meaning Making Machine

As a human being, you are always already assessing what happens and what it means. You are a meaning making machine. That may sound extreme – aren’t we the evolved species? But consider these examples:

You receive an email from your boss saying “Can we meet?” and before you know it, those words have turned into interpretations about what might or might not happen.

How about falling out of a yoga pose in a busy class or getting cut off in traffic? Again, your mind – without hesitation – makes an interpretation of what it means about you and everyone else. It’s not about what happens, it’s about what you make it mean.

Auto-Pilot Has Problems

The trouble with automatic meaning making is that you tend to have a default inner dialogue that is always the same, and the “machine” reinforces the default messaging about who you are. This comes up in particular when things get hard and the dialogue accesses the familiar tunes of “I’m not good enough” or “It’s someone else’s fault”. Over time – unless observed and investigated – we make these to be the truths about how life is.

Good News Part I

The good news? The conversation in your head is not what actually happens in bare bones physicality. Distinguishing bare bones physicalness is the first step towards authentic new actions. That pose in the yoga class just IS. That email or phone call just IS. Whatever happens has no meaning until you choose to give it meaning.

Good News Part II

The other piece of good news? You have the entire Oxford English Dictionary at your disposal to come up with better words and language than the machine. How about labelling that “disaster” as a “learning” or even “breakthrough”? Or adding the magic word “yet” – “I don’t have the strength for this pose YET”. New actions and new results occur only when the observer within shifts and the words are changed –Baron calls this “language moves”. This is not about discounting life’s inevitable challenges or pretending they don’t exist. This is about recognising that dwelling on the negatives is unlikely to create new possibilities.

Practice on Your Mat

Yoga asana practice is the perfect opportunity to confront the inner voice. If you are willing to stay, breathe, adapt and grow in the face of difficulty, new possibilities open up. In the words of B.K.S. Iyengar: “The pose begins the moment you want to come out of it”. The physical practice enables us to be in the presence of bare bones physicality and find openings to re-write the script, one breath and one pose at a time.

This blog post is inspired by the Chapter “What You Say is So” in Baron Baptiste’s book Perfectly Imperfect.

Ari Iso-Rautio is the co-founder of Lumi Power Yoga