Taking Ownership
What’s the key to deep healing, lasting health, and abundant vitality?
OWNERSHIP. Taking ownership of your health and wellbeing will lead to positive, lasting outcomes. Just watch TV for 30 minutes and you’ll see at least one advertisement for a prescription drug that promises to absolve you from that responsibility - just take this pill and you won’t have to make any other changes. Quick fixes and band-aid approaches don’t last. True healing and lasting health only come by addressing root causes, our behaviors, and habits.
This is one of the main reasons I have been drawn to yoga and āyurveda as my predominant health and wellness modalities. Yoga and āyurveda both require that I take an active role in my wellness journey, no one else can do these practices for me. I have the support of teachers and guides that can point me in the right direction, make suggestions about what I should do, and help me see myself more objectively, but these teachers and guides can’t do the work for me…………that’s all my responsibility. Daily yoga practice and āyurvedic lifestyle have been my primary means of wellness care for several years.
It’s a common belief that life is just passing us by, happening to us. This thinking leads us to believe that our actions don’t really matter that much. Isn’t it the prevailing attitude that common ailments like high blood pressure, heart disease, etc., are just “part of life”? Instead of acting to prevent them, we’ve just accepted them and learned to “live with” them, taking pills and other therapies to mask and control them without ever really addressing causes like diet, sedentary lifestyle, etc. It’s like the saying goes, “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely grateful for modern medicine. It gave us vaccines, like the COVID vaccine, to help protect us from non-preventable viruses, it developed antibiotics to help prevent serious illness and death when we have a bacterial infection, and there’s a number of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and other medications to stabilize our mental health. But that shouldn’t absolve us from the real, and hard work of caring for this physical body and mind that we are so blessed to be in.
Yoga and ayurveda encourage us to wake up to the present moment, take loving action toward ourselves and others, let go of the outcomes and watch life happen for us. In fact, in his yoga sutra, Patañjali explains karma and samskara. He says all actions (karma) leave impressions (samskara) which arise later and cause further actions (karma). In other words, our actions create our experience in the world. Therefore, if the actions I take are toward health and wellbeing (physical, emotional, and spiritual), health and wellbeing will be my outcome. Pills, therapies, etc. can only mask and cover for so long, eventually, personal responsibility is required. My friend, health coach and yoga teacher, Laura DeMent, described this to me as the “layering approach” - pills and therapeutics are necessary for many, but layered with personal responsibility like movement, healthy diet, meditation, and mindfulness, health and wellness outcomes are vastly improved.
Yoga and āyurveda are all about taking personal responsibility. They don’t prescribe one set diet, they don’t promote one set of actions and routines. Instead, they teach us to note our day to day experience and consciously take actions to maintain a state of balance and harmony in our physical, mental, and spiritual realms. With mindful awareness and self-responsibility you can enjoy abundant health and vitality throughout your life.
Here’s to your health,
Carrie
*THIS BLOG POST WAS PREVIOUSLY SHARED AT WWW.CARRIEKLAUS.YOGA