She wanted to do more yoga, but this judgment kept getting in her way....

I worked with a client who wanted to be stronger in her body, and to do so, she wanted to do more yoga. She starts going to yoga, and she really likes it, but there’s one thing that’s blocking her from level up her commitment to be stronger in her body and to go yoga regularly and with more frequency.

The problem for her is that she didn’t like the way her skin looked when she would wear yoga tank tops. She hated it so much, that she would cringe and feel terrible every time the teacher would put her hands on her in class to assist her in certain poses, or she would find herself just in a general state of self-loathing and self-judgment in the mirror for the entire class. She even shared with me that one time in yoga class, when the teacher encouraged students to set their intention for the class, she said her intention was just to let that inner critic just hate on her for the entirety of the class.

That’s a challenging state to be in if you want to receive any of the benefits of yoga. So how do we work with strong feelings like this? There’s a path forward that starts with working with the charge you are experiencing. When I say charge, I mean the extreme emotion or resistance or judgment that comes up around a certain aspects of your life.

Most of know on a cognitive level, if you want to create a different path in life, it’s important to have different actions and behaviors, yes? And of course, all of that stems from a different mindset or inner belief system. How do we put that into practice? We dissolve the charge. And to do that, we work with polarities.

Let’s take the example of my client above. In her case, there was strong inner judgment about her skin. In her mind, there was such a thing as “bad” skin, and according her, she had it. In a world of dualities, we humans function within a framework of opposites, or “polarities”. So this client has an opinion of bad skin. Which means in this example, the judgment comes up about bad skin only in the context that she has in mind about what “good” skin is.

The polarity here is bad skin/ good skin. Or to use the same example, maybe the judgment is around aging skin, which means there is a polarity with say, youthful skin.

Either way, the gap or incongruence between the two, and her judgments around it, create a high emotional charge within her system that leaves her in a paralyzing place of judgment, or wanting to avoid the situation altogether (like going to yoga class), keeping her from achieving her goal of being stronger in her body.

Helping clients dissolve charge from polarities creates an opening within the mind and body that allows for a different way of thinking and believing, which paves the way for new and different action.

Within the session, she was able to dissolve the polarities that were stagnating her vision of herself, reach an expansive inner state—her true essence. When reaching into the truth of herself, she was able to see the entire situation from a new perspective, which was one of equanimity…..”my skin doesn’t really matter. It just is, there’s no right or wrong about any of it” she told me at the end of the session. With that statement, I also witnessed a changed energy state within her being. That changed energy state is the place where something new can be planted and grow inside of her.

What are some of the polarities that keep you stuck from making real change in your life? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!