Mira Rao

Lately I have been reflecting on the pressure we can put on ourselves when we find a path of healing or growth. I’ve noticed a tendency to expect to “progress” substantially…and quickly..
It’s an understandable impulse.

The relief and hope of those first shifts…can be intoxicating. As we notice we feel a little better, a little different…it can make us want to continue growing as intensely and as quickly as possible.
But … it doesn’t work that way.

In my own life last year, the collision of peri-menopause and peri-burnout made me learn this lesson once again, from scratch.

It was deeply humbling.

Having devoted much of my professional and personal life to understanding how my brain and body worked and what they needed, the embodied toolkit I had gathered to navigate life was HUGE.

But my toolkit simply didn’t work any more.

I was meeting myself in a whole new body, and greeting a mind that was reconfiguring itself into something I didn’t recognise.
This new me needed and demanded different things to feel well. Things I didn’t know how to do yet.

For the first time in years, I felt truly awful and I wanted relief. And just as I witnessed in my clients, I wanted fast results.
But as I searched and scoured for answers, for new approaches, I noticed that the more I pushed and pressured things to change, the more lost I became. I felt like I was trying to grow in quicksand, my footing slipping with every step I attempted.

Eventually, I slowed down. I let each small step land. I removed the pressure and remembered that we, as organic systems, are governed by homeostasis.

Our systems will always prioritise familiar stability over unfamiliar improvement. Which means that feeling “better” doesn’t always register as better to our system - at least not at first. When change comes too fast, even when it’s positive, it can feel destabilising rather than relieving.

Adaptation requires time and tolerable change, signals the system can integrate without overwhelm - more like ripples moving through the system than waves crashing us onto the shore of disorientation.

And so part of healing and growing becomes learning to trust slow change - especially when progress doesn’t show up or feel the way we expected it to.

There was a time when the physical discipline of practicing advanced postures was useful. The idea that we use our bodies as grounded metaphors for things like developing discipline, overcoming mental limitations or emotional habits was helpful.

Focussing on developing these skills in the physical did lead to their application in the mental, emotional and spiritual realms.

But in our world today, our bodies have already become slaves to the frenzied activities of our distracted minds. When we push them even further in practice, especially towards specific goals, we risk not liberating our minds but further feeding our delusions of control and domination instead.

We make our bodies a means to an end.

When practice is instead an enquiry into what is real and true and present in these bodies right now, perhaps we might instead put an end to the means – the means of domination and control – perfectionism, striving, numbing, performing and endless producing.

May this be the only goal: that my practice become a present portal of possibility once again – to transform what is mean spirited and mean-hearted in me into something meaningful.

There’s something about sunrise…

She’s back 🥰🫶🏻

https://events.humanitix.com/longing-for-belonging-coming-home-women-s-retreat

Amazing 🤩 book 📖 🙏🔥

I read this phrase today and loved it. It truly is a soft stubborn fight to stay centred in a world that pushes all the time. Sinking into moments of deep rest is vital. If you’re someone who is there for others it’s crucial. Between client sessions I sometimes do this. 10mins eyes closed, breath in breath out. Although nothing changed, I open my eyes to a different world. 🙏🥱🙃

*BEING WITH BRUCE*

My friend, newly sober, told me how he was healing with the help of the little dog in the home he was house sitting at the time. I truly think the dog's name was Bruce (my memory isn’t 100%). That seems to me to be a delightful detail that just can’t be left out. He told me how things with Bruce were pretty uncomplicated and easy. Bruce was really good at what he called just “being with”.

Early sobriety is no emotional spring picnic. My friend was alternately raging, crying and laughing hysterically: furiously rolo-dexing all the emotions. And Bruce, likely with his head cocked to the side and a calm and quizzical look on his doggy face - just stayed next to him. No questions, no discomfort, no trying to fix or avoid. No comment. But kindly. "You do your thing and I’ll just be here" Bruce said with out saying.

At the time I had a different approach. I’d discovered the power of prayer for perhaps the first time in my life and I was hooked. When I encountered difficulties of the emotional kind, I would pray for them to be removed: “God, please take away my fear, my anger, my loneliness”. It worked - sort of. I did get relief.

But I didn’t get everything.

I used meditation in something of the same way - it’s like I sat on the banks of my consciousness to observe the currents running through me without having to dive into them. I felt pretty good much of the time and it was nice. Pain didn’t hurt so much and that was good.

But it wasn’t everything.

And now...that is what I want…to me, it might even be what “enlightenment” is.

It is said over and over by many wise ones, if we shut down part of ourselves we have to numb the whole lot. So today I still wake to a practice that sometimes looks like that - perfect peace and stillness as I sit mountain like and still on my cushion. And other morning’s it’s face down, body prostrate arms spread wide crying my eyes out as I simply lay down to feel. I have learned that even in the heat and hardness, the way through is simply "being with".

**ON YA BIKE**

She remembered that day so vividly.

The day she first flew.

Rocketing down the hill on her red banana-seat bike. The one with the glittery handlebars and tassels. She had never felt such freedom before (she was only 5 so she can’t be too hard on herself for that).

She was alone - finally balanced and moving fast, the wind slapping her face joyfully and playfully, beckoning her into a new phase of her life - one where she’d get to roll around the neighbourhood on her own. The freedom and fun in that invitation had held her through the gruelling process of learning. She remembered all the falls and scrapes and bruises of the day and now she loved them all.

Lately she has once again been trying to fly.

This time in business. This year it has been like opportunities have been laid in her path to taunt her - the door cracked open then slammed in her face.

Exciting new Ideas have lifted her up and then led her nowhere.

Confusion has blustered around her, knocking her off balance with a barrage of questions: “What it is that I actually do? What should I choose out of what I love to do? What do I want to do? What do the people I want to help, need me to do? Can all of that match up? Can I make a dignified living from it?”. She's bolstered herself with bravado and said a bold “YES!” to what she believed was her calling and then leaped out into deadening silence. In short, she has wobbled everywhere and face-planted - many times.

It’s even more difficult when she feels herself riding uphill, defying the gravity of those voices - the ones in her head and the ones emerging from the mouths of people she knows and loves.

“What are you doing all this for? Why make things so hard for yourself? I don’t really get it. Just go get a job, some peace, some stability and security.”

Nothing wrong with all that.

But. What if she had thought that way about riding? "What is the need? Why are you doing it - you can just safely, stably put one foot in front of the other and walk yourself around - you can already do that very well."

What if her beloved red roller had been allowed to just sit there and gather dust? She would never have known the joy, the independence of navigating her own way through her days. She would have missed the freedom of flying.

She would have been deprived the triumph of growth, believing and succeeding in what she knew absolutely with every bone in her tiny 5-year-old body - she was born to rumble.

So today as she picks herself up - again - from her latest stumble she reminds herself that when she just seem to be continually falling off, scraping her face against the gravel and not getting it, her time to fly in freedom will come if she can just keep getting back-up on that bike.

Affirmation: "For today, may I listen to that knowing in my bones, kiss my scraped knees and get back on the bike of my dreams and desires".

**THE YEAR I RETURNED HOME TO MY HEART**

When I was a teenager I used to take buses and trains to unfamiliar suburbs in my home town and just wander around, trying to get myself to nowhere. I'd walk down streets I'd never heard named, longing to lose my way. For brief moments I floated in that sweet in-between that travellers know so well. Until I stumbled onto the next major road: another heaving artery pulling me back to the heart of my terrorised suburban life.

Who knew that the biggest adventure of my life would be the one I would take through my own heart, enclosed and comforted in the four walls of my teenage home.

After a twenty-year long escapade through intensity that is.

I had became a master escape artist - a Houdini if you will. No life situation was too tough for me to outwit and unchain. Not a single unplanned, stupid or dangerous getaway was able to unhook me from the rush of escape. Hit me - a new city. And again - a new job. I need more - a new circle of friends.

Latest obsessions would quickly deaden into abandoned passions.

I craved escape more than anything else because I kept imprisoning myself; in corporate jobs that restrained me in straight-hair and pinstripes; in relationships that drained rather than sustained. Under the pressure of other people's imagined (or sometimes real) agendas, I got really, really good at contortion. I was constantly pretending and bending myself into the appropriate, appreciated shape. With all this, escape was easy because I was never really there in the first place - my presence an illusory shadow cast across those new, unfamiliar and ever shifting landscapes.

Until I finally realised no matter how much I bent, twisted and turned, I could never escape myself.

And thus began my long journey home to myself.

That year, I barely left my bedroom and yet I changed more, saw more, understood more about myself and humanity than 100 previous daring flights taken out into the world had ever taught me.

Day after day, I used to lose myself in the very same 100 metre walk through my local gardens. Every plant, every paving stone was familiar and yet every day was a completely new adventure - each morning a different bird song rang out, a new leaf or flower emerged, a ripe plump fruit that adorned the branches the day before, had tumbled to the ground.

During that time I learned that when I am no longer deforming myself into shapes that never fit in the first place, when I stopped running away, life is still an adventure indeed, just one in which I can quietly, calmly, choose my own.

For today, may you know that you are safe and peaceful enough to remove your hand from the escape hatch and gently embrace the ups and downs of life. May you realise that you are free to choose your own adventure.