We are grateful, honored – and very happy – to present the third part of the real-life experiences of one of our students, Lene, while her Yogalife Teacher Training in Bonn, Germany. You can find te original text, in German, here

In case you mist it:

• Part 1: I will become a Yoga Teacher
• Part 2: Silent Observation.
• Part 4: Anatomy & I, Really?

Can I see things through another pair of glasses?

The third weekend of the training. And shall I tell you something? I am confused. There’s a lot of stuff buzzing around in my head. Very interesting stuff though. I learned so much that works in me now. So what got stuck?

Every challenge, really everyone, has their reason and a purpose. None of this just happens to annoy us and just because fate wants to be bad to us. I walk through the world observing from a new perspective. I watch how I react to things, to people who meet me and challenge me.

Why does it make me angry when someone provokes me? Is there anything which I could see through another pair of glasses?

During the training we have gone through “The Work” by Byron Katie and experienced how a truth can turn into the opposite. How funny that is that: You suddenly question yourself and your beliefs and experience a lot of relief.

The “Alien Glasses”

Another task was to walk around and give the things we see new names and look at them as if we did not know them. I really felt like an alien seeing a car, a tree, a house, a wall, and a leaf with a drop of dew on it for the first time and no idea what these things are all good for. All of a sudden it was just a collection of colors, textures, lines, spikes, curves, shapes. I’ve decided to put on these “alien glasses” more often when going for a walk because it’s just fun. You can see and experience something new. You can part from the usual evaluation of things.

And why should you do that? you may ask. I cannot give you a clear answer that can apply to you all. For me it is an immense extension of the horizon, a relief, a liberation and a relativization of my “normal” context. And that exactly helps me to deal with my challenges. Every hurdle, every ass kick, every criticism appears in a different light, if we are honest with ourselves. Because if the problem does not affect us at all, we do not have to suffer and if we do that, there is something behind it that we can work on. So it’s always helpful to look closely.

Finding our haven of peace

Another relief in yoga is finding an explanation for human suffering that works beyond our traditional Western thinking. We do not have to go back to our past, to research the root cause of everything, analyze, optimize. We can easily understand, experience, realize that the clarity and purity of our being is always there and that we all suffer from the same dullness and disturbances of this clarity. But we learn that this clarity is always there, basically everything is always good. We can return to this one point, again and again and find in it our haven of peace. No matter what storm is raging around us.

Escape our cloudy mind

Our ego, our fear, our envy, our craving, and the sense of lack help us to doubt our happiness and not always feel the access to our true being. Yoga is the way to get away from this cloudiness of the mind, an exercise for more real perception and in this sense actually a cure-all. Behind the pain lies the essential element, only if we go through it, we can experience it and only because of it there is this cloudiness. They are our job. And they all have their own purposes. Even if it most often seems that they are meaningless or we would struggle with them for far too long. If we allow ourselves to suffer, if we observe ourselves once being challenged, we can learn incredible things about ourselves.

If you ask me, that is the meaning of life.