The social dilemma

Twice today I have been told to watch Social Dilemma on Netflix. As I exited all social media in May, I asked one of the people whether it might make me want to go back on the social media again and I was assured that no, the documentary would instead make me feel like saying, “ha ha, I told you so!”.

Now obviously I’m not going to say that to anyone because we all have a choice in how we live our life and it’s not for me to judge anyone for making different decisions and having a social media presence. I made the decision for many reasons and have very much enjoyed having my life back again. In the nicest possible way, I don’t need to know the ins and outs of other people’s lives and I don’t want another reason to be distracted from my children and wasting my time.

I’ll admit that I did have a wobble, when I doubted the decision I made, questioning whether I may have been foolish to let go of Beinspired’s presence on there, not least for the community and sharing side of things but to keep people informed of classes and offerings. 

But I am also very aware that there is always another way, and I’m conscious that I don’t want to encourage people to spend any more time on social media and/or to feed into the marketeers and their obsession with selling and profiteering at the expense of all else.

I do what I love and I love what I do and I have faith and trust in something that I cannot name that will bring those to me who need to find me and take me to those who I need to find and connect. This to me is the other way, and when it happens, when there is synchronicity and coincidence then it is rather magical, like this sacred world going on that others don’t notice with their head in phones.

What clinched it for me recently was practising the yoga posture hanumanasana, the monkey pose, or commonly known as the splits. For years I have practised this pose but always by stretching my hamstring on the front and my hip flexors on the back, to the extent that it has not been without some forcing and the general discomfort of stretching legs apart.

Yet recently, practising with my teacher, she has guided me to experience a different way of accessing and being in this pose that does not in any way resemble the way I used to practice it. This way of being in the pose does not put so much pressure on my hamstrings and does not at all stretch the hip flexors and therefore brings with it much greater freedom to the spine and lightness within this.

It was certainly a process to get there though, a few weeks of practice and me struggling to access it in the way she was teaching me so that I resorted to how I had always practised it, stretching, and yet this triggered something in me, brought up an old pattern around the external and self-worth, which was uncomfortable and outgrown, yet here I was still feeding it because I couldn’t find another way.

I knew though that I couldn’t continue to practise like this as I knew it was unkind to my body and I was also selling out a part of myself, compromising it for the external glory of looking like I was in hanumanasana, but with none of the freedom and lightness that I knew could be found in it.

My mind let this go eventually, not without a struggle, the mind always holds on to the old, because it is known and comfortable, and yet eventually we outgrow it and the comfortable can become uncomfortable and then we are caught, to continue doing what we have been doing because it is safe and known and yet knowing that that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable because we know we need to let go! 

I can’t remember how it happened, I think someone said something that resonated, and I realised what I was doing and the bigger picture and pattern, and I knew then that I might not be able to go so far in the posture as I may have forced myself to do previously, but that there was no option but to practice the gentler way, that things have changed and that I now have a lot more respect for my body than I did previously. I was reminded that there is always another way.

So it is too with social media. There is always another way, and I know that we will try and convince ourselves that there isn’t. That if we are running businesses or have families overseas then this is the only way for people to know that we exist or for us to keep in touch with our families respectively. But this is really just a story that we tell ourselves and because we believe in the stories we tell ourselves then they become our reality – our thoughts create the world we live in and our experience of it.

Thus when I began to doubt whether I should be on social media, I felt disempowered by my thinking and my mind imagined my worst case scenario, that I wouldn’t have any students to share yoga and Reiki with, that no one might find their way to me and I would have to give up the one thing I love doing more than anything else. Because of my negative thinking, I gave out that energy and experienced a momentary loss of faith and lack of trust that ended up making me feel depressed and a little bit anxious for a future which wasn’t real but just imagined in my catastrophising. 

The experience with hanumanasana allowed me to change the script, to see the pattern I had around negative thinking and disempowerment so that I was able let it go simply by becoming aware of it. The fact I was able to experience another way of practising the posture allowed me to embody the fact that there is always another way, one that is more sacred perhaps, and works on a different level to the mundane, of which fear is such a limitation and pushing and pulling becomes the norm. This whole experience strengthened my faith.

I value what I do and the teachings that are passed to me by my teacher, and I have no doubt that those who are meant to find their way to me so I can share what I have learned will do so because the ‘something’ that drew me to my teacher will draw us together too. I have questioned whether this is egotistical of me, but I don’t believe it is, more so that I am extremely grateful for having found this sacred practice and a community of yoga practitioners who are also off grid and who have experienced this other way too – who don’t want to sell out on it. 

I don’t want to sell out on my childen either, they are worth so much more than that and our time together is always so precious, especially now they are back to school/pre-school. It’s all too easy to lose ourselves, get caught up in that which isn’t important in the grand scheme of things, to buy into other people’s dramas and to find ourselves anxious and disempowered by the experience. I really don’t think there is anything social about social media, but heck that is just my experience of it. All I know is that there is another way, one of spending time actually communicating with those who matter, getting outside and having fun.